Generals are frequently accused of fighting the previous campaign. Is it possible in this current crisis, unleashed by the terrible attacks. of Sept. 11, that civil libertarians are guilty of the same error?

During the first and second world wars, Americans of German and Japanese descent as well as naturalized citizens and legal immigrants, were indiscriminately accused of espionage and deprived of many of their freedoms. With hindsight, we learned that these people were rarely spies, that the spies within our midst were rarely capable of doing damage and that the nation was probably harmed more by our wholesale disregard for human and civil rights than it was helped by internments and deportations,

But the Sept.11 attacks were not perpetrated by people living outside the United States. The hijackers were living in the United States, attending schools in the United States, freely using our ATMs, talking on our telephones and buying airline tickets by computer with credit cards. The anthrax-laden letters were not postmarked Kabul, Afghanistan or Baghdad, Iraq, but rather Trenton, N.J.

The enemy is living in our midst, even if his major financing and support come from abroad. The enemy is taking full and intelligent advantage of our freedoms to sow terror.

I am a card-carrying member of the much-maligned American Civil Liberties Union. But we must protect ourselves and our nation. We must not let the idea of civil liberties be raised as an unthinking banner to protect the lives and activities of the terrorist murderers who would like to destroy the nation that makes our civil liberties possible. (Ruth Barolsky, Letter to The Daily Progress, November 8, 2001)