Osama bin Laden laughs in Hell

Speaking of of old friends today, Radley Balko is an old pal I lost touch with when I moved out drug policy reform blogging. I picked this link up on Twitter a couple of days ago and now some of the big bloggers are linking, so he won't notice I've linked in. But if you missed this post, it's worth reading for the list of what we've lost in the last ten years and this is still worthy of quote of the day:

Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn’t something a special ops team can fix.

As I said before, with bin Laden dead we've served vengeance and that is a victory we probably needed. But Osama left us living in our own, self-created, hell on earth. Justice will never be served unless and until we restore our lost civil liberties and regain our sense of reality on the limits of protecting ourselves against terrorism.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]