People too often get the impression that the only people who use the nation's civil liberties protections are lawbreakers who were not quite guilty of the exact felony they were charged with. Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Oregon, was held for two weeks, even though the only other connections between him and terrorism were things like the fact, as the FBI pointed out, that his law firm advertised in a "Muslim yellow page directory" whose publisher had once had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden's former personal secretary. So is this what you call a Non-Obvious Relationship? This nation was organized under a rule of law, not a dictatorship of the virtuous. The founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights specifically because they did not believe that honorable men always do the right thing. |