Lithwick's civil-liberties blinkers

Dahlia Lithwick compiles a list of the ten worst civil liberties outrages of the past year, which turns out to consist entirely, with not a single exception, of Bush Administration policies relating to the War on Terror. #10 on the list, for example, is federal prosecutors' decision to seek the death penalty for enthusiastic Al Qaeda plot participant Zacharias Moussaoui. That counts as a more serious menace to civil liberties, in Lithwick's view, than any prosecutions of the innocent on terrorism-unrelated grounds in the past year, or any existent or proposed curbs on mainstream political speech, or any steps afoot to regulate the Internet. How comforting to know that state governments or courts deciding liability cases or drug warriors or for that matter non-state actors never appear in the top rank of threats to our civil liberties. Radley Balko has drawn up a list of 2006 outrages that does a better job of conveying the range and diversity of government threats to liberty. RightRainbow is not particularly charitable toward Lithwick, describing her as "appallingly obtuse".