Security in a free country requires respecting our fundamental liberties, not discarding them before outsiders even try to take them away. The Patriot Act is, in large part, a distraction in the effort to reduce terror. Al-Qaida is no more likely to be stopped in the libraries and Web searches of the University of Utah than it is on the   battlefields and among the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
   Free societies win because freedom and justice are stronger than their opposites. Even if we eliminate our own freedoms at home and fight brutally abroad, we will still be only a third-rate oppressor. We can never out-torture or out-spy or out-suppress al-Qaida or the dictatorships of the world.