Dictators begin as sincere and mediocre minds full of high purpose: to protect us from ourselves. Letters:

Thomas Powers writes that the man nominated to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, "created and helped to hide from scrutiny a large-scale N.S.A. eavesdropping program aimed at Americans."

Actually, the program is aimed at protecting Americans from foreign terrorists who want to kill us and our families.

The program does not threaten our civil liberties. It enhances them, by increasing our chances of traveling on a train or plane without being blown up or flown into an office building.

Lewis Regenstein
Atlanta, May 10, 2006
The writer was an intelligence officer for the C.I.A. from 1966 to 1971.

Freedom is dangerous, but we choose it. It would be much sImpler if in the service of one or another form of instrumental reason we organized ourselves politically -as corporations do- in semblance of a machine. Certainly that dumb-fuck Posner would prefer it this way. But the point of democracy is that we have chosen not to decide or to define what we value.