This week, there will undoubtedly be many, many activities to commemorate the lives lost on September 11 a year ago. There will be religious ceremonies and candle-lighting ceremonies and speeches and accolades. But one of the best remembrances would be to avoid rolling back on the freedoms that make this country great.

In the past year, there have been some troubling developments that have been tagged as necessary because of the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
Free speech is no longer as sacred. Skepticism is too easily labeled unpatriotic. Attorney-client privilege is not as protected as it once was. New laws have made it easier for the government to monitor your Internet activity, your phone conversations and even the library books you check out. All in the name of protecting you from some unknown Bogeyman.
There are even attempts to force members of the U.S. Senate to submit to lie detector tests because the Attorney General claims he needs to find out who has been leaking sensitive information to the media.

The Attorney General is also exercising broad powers that allow so-called suspects to be held in undisclosed locations with no due process. And, he questions our right to want to know who they are and why they are being held.

A great deal of new age repression is being exercised in the name of freedom, in the name of protection. Some people say they don’t mind.
But before we go too far, let us ask if the American men and women who were killed September 11 would want to see their country go backward to a place few of us will recognize as America, land of the free.

The effort to diminish our freedoms also diminishes the sacrifices of those men and women who died solely because they were American.