Collateral scamage: let's not surrender basic principles to a war on terror. (margin notes).

THE WAR ON TERROR PROMISED FROM THE GET-GO to take Americans to some odd places--both geographically and ideologically--and we've already covered significant ground.

Watching Washington policymakers and the media punditocracy discuss plans to kill large numbers of people and/or the extrajudicial termination of specific individuals with a casualness one could expect from the most hardboiled of terrorists inspires a certain queasiness. The suspicion that noting that queasiness to a barful of other Americans would inspire a suddenly realigned proboscis only adds to a sense that we are entering a post-September 11 twilight zone. Impressed with how well responding to mindless, human terror with better-planned, mechanized terror has worked for the Israelis, Washington has decided it's worth a try in our global campaign.

Political loose-talkers now suggest that ensuing phases of the war on terror may take American forces as far afield as Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Colombia. It's unclear if most Americans are prepared to engage in such a bloody geography lesson. It wasn't too long ago the same talking heads complained that the U.S. was becoming the "world's policeman" when the vulnerable and violated in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo cried out for humanitarian intervention.

An infuriating parade of global thugs have lined up since 9-11 to lay the terrorist label on a gamut of homegrown irritants, culminating in the absurd spectacle of Zimbabwe's Klepto-in-Chief Robert Mugabe charging his long-brutalized political opponents with "terrorism." Meanwhile the United States appears ready to ignore or forgive anything in the name of its global alliance against terror. Can't anyone in the White House find Chechnya and Tibet on the map anymore?

The advent of the Homeland Security Office has left some feeling, well, insecure as they wonder exactly how the office will define security and what measures it contemplates to create it. This new office, a recent executive order calling for the secret military tribunals, the high-handed and secretive efforts of the attorney general's office, and many components of the "Patriot Act" have civil libertarians thumbing through well-worn copies of the Constitution.

Other civic and environmental organizations are alarmed at the disappearance of what had been freely available information from government Web sites and public and academic libraries. Government and industry say the elimination of such resources is aimed at preventing terrorist attacks, but much of this information had been used previously to track down industrial polluters or other corporate miscreants.

Perhaps the twilightiest of zones the war on terror is taking us to are those legislative spaces where large corporations and America's wealthiest get to make their patriotic sacrifice by feathering their nests with tax breaks or dodging industrial controls through regulatory givebacks. The "stimulus package"--larded with subsidies and corporate tax rebates--is only the most egregious example. Platoons of lobbyists have similarly joined the war effort by pushing self-serving legislation while the nation is distracted by events in Afghanistan.

Faced by the September 11 attacks and the likelihood of new terror assaults in the future, our government has the right to make judicious and appropriate restraints on information flows and even some civil liberties. But let's underline those two words judicious and appropriate, and let's not allow a small gang of self-proclaimed patriots to hijack this era of selflessness to assure their personal enrichment or relief from long established and well-founded regulatory controls.

Patriotic responses to this crisis don't necessarily include drilling for oil in Alaska, pushing through fast-track trade negotiations, or depriving citizens of the resources they need to prosecute polluters. Parking the SUV and making a donation to end world hunger would likely prove better deterrents to terrorism than more handouts to large corporations.

If we begin this war on terror by tossing away all those qualities of a free and just society that have helped to make America great--including our compassion and mercy--we may win the war and still lose to the terrorists.

KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.