Jackbooted Liberalism - The New

Jackbooted Liberalism - The New York Times' Nick Kristoff is all for the First Amendment...

...for reporters. It's the rest of us he worries about.

His op-ed today is about the various samizdat "cookbooks" for exotic weapons that are all over the Internet (and have always been a part of fringe society, going back to "The Anarchist Cookbook" of the seventies).

I'm a journalist, steeped in First Amendment absolutism, and book-burning grates on my soul. But then again, so does war. As we prepare to go to battle to reduce our vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction, it seems appropriate for us in addition to consider other distasteful steps that can also make us safer.

We have a window now, while terrorists still have difficulty obtaining reliable recipes for bio- and chemical weapons. If we continue to allow these cookbooks to improve, buttressed by helpful articles in professional journals, then over the next 10 years we may empower terrorists to kill us on an unimaginable scale.

Yup. He's pretty steeped in that First Amendment.

Blogger Steven Green says:

Ah! Civil rights, war – they’re all just a matter of taste, of how much they might “grate” on your soul. So if we’ve got to have a little war grating on us, we might as well lose some civil liberties, too.

Look, I’m no fan of how-to guides for chemical weapons or backyard nukes. But the genie is out of the bottle, the barn door is unlocked, and the horse has drunk the water. Too late to do anything about it now.

Posted by Mitch at September 17, 2002 10:17 AM