'Domestic Spying' is political baloney from the left

[fossten]

Reprinted from NewsMax.com

My Express Consent for Wiretapping

David Limbaugh
Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006

I hereby expressly consent to the NSA eavesdropping on any telephone conversation, Internet communication or any other electronic forms of communications I may have - whether I initiate it or am on the receiving end of the communication - with any person or persons the government has reasonable basis to conclude is a member of al-Qaida, affiliated with al-Qaida or a member of an organization affiliated with al-Qaida.

I aver that I have no expectation of privacy with respect to any communications I might have with suspected or known al-Qaida members or persons linked to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations. Indeed, I'd like to meet the person who would pretend to be victimized by an interception of a call with al-Qaida.

As is usual with the Democratic leadership, it's difficult to tell for sure whether its motivation in attempting to scandalize the president's wartime electronic surveillance of the enemy is purely political, based on legitimate civil-liberties concerns or a combination of both.

Given its overt misrepresentation of the president's program and its disregard for the historical practice of warrantless electronic surveillance of the enemy by the presidents of both parties, my bet is that their motivation is partisan.

If Democratic leaders were truly concerned about potential infringements of privacy rights, would they repeatedly mischaracterize the program as "domestic" spying?

Would they have pretended that the president conducted this program completely clandestinely when he briefed key members of Congress from both parties more than a dozen times?

Would they all repeat the same hollow mantra, "We are in favor of spying on al-Qaida"?

Isn't that what's going on here?

Sorry, boys and girls, you can't have it both ways. Explain to us how you would protect the nation by always requiring warrants in this fast-moving, high-tech world, with ever-shifting phone numbers and disposable cell phones - a world the drafters of FISA couldn't possibly have envisioned. Let's be clear what we're talking about here.

The NSA surveillance program involves intelligence of a foreign enemy during war. None of the interceptions of communications is for the purpose of criminal law enforcement but instead for the detection and prevention of terrorist attacks against the United States.

The program clearly does not apply to purely domestic communications, where all parties to the communications are located in the United States.

The Justice Department has specified that the president "has authorized the NSA to intercept international (emphasis mine) communications into and out of the United States of persons linked to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations." (For the record, it wouldn't bother me if the program included purely domestic communications as long as one or more parties to the conversation were reasonably believed to have ties to al-Qaida.)

In light of the Democratic leadership's exaggerated displays of concern, one might infer it suspects the president of having assimilated a list of political enemies and authorized warrantless wiretaps of their calls. But it's difficult to imagine how anyone could think this president, who considers Ted Kennedy a friend and Bill Clinton a brother, even believes he has political enemies.

It's not as if President Bush has hired the Clintons' favorite private eye, Anthony Pellicano, to dig up dirt on Howard Dean.

If Democrats were not engaged in partisan shenanigans here, why did they wait for The New York Times to leak news of this program to raise objections to it when important members of their party had been briefed well ahead of the publication of the story?

Would they be attempting to criminalize the president's surveillance program or suggest that it constitutes an impeachable offense instead of civilly debating him over his constitutional authority?

Perhaps we should call for members of Congress to be impeached every time they arguably exceed their constitutional authority, which happens to be almost daily.

The Democratic leadership insists it is as vigilant on national security matters as the president. If that's the case, why does it always rush to err on the side of civil liberties, even when there are no known victims of any NSA surveillance abuses - or of the Patriot Act, for that matter?

Based on the evidence before us, it appears once again that the Democratic leadership is willing to politicize anything, including our national security.

Its cacophony over the Fourth Amendment is just a lot of hot air designed to singe the president, who is manifestly engaged in a good-faith effort to honor his constitutional duty as commander in chief to protect the nation from enemy attack.

 

[bufordtpisser]

Well Stated

:i :i :i :i :i :i :i :i :i :i :i :i

 

[barry2952]

We'll know soon. Just a couple more Republicans to see the errors of his ways and we'll have an impeachment. Can't wait for GWB's answers to Congress' questions. Should be amusing.

 

[fossten]

We'll know soon. Just a couple more Republicans to see the errors of his ways and we'll have an impeachment. Can't wait for GWB's answers to Congress' questions. Should be amusing.

Politics over national security, eh, barry? You'd obviously rather we lost the war on terror as long as your lib buddies get to be in charge. That's a very dangerous mindset, and indicates a lack of patriotism.


Reprinted from NewsMax.com

War History Repeats Itself
Philip V. Brennan
Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006

At the outset of the Civil War Congress got very antsy over the fact that the on-to-Richmond campaign somehow was getting stalled somewhere in the neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

That's not how it was supposed to be. According to their scenario Federal forces were to drive 100 miles or so south, brush aside the allegedly hapless rebels, capture the Confederate capital, and the rebellion would be over in a jiffy.

Instead there was a quagmire, and the Union was deeply mired in it.

As historian Bruce Tap has written, Secretary of State William H. Seward once commented that "there would be no serious fighting after all; the South would collapse and everything serenely adjusted" - one battle and it would all be over.

Zachariah Chandler, Michigan's Republican senator, predicted that the Confederates under the elegantly named General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard would "run like cowards" at the sight of Union forces.

It didn't exactly work out that way. In Virginia, during the first conflict of the war, the Battle of Ball's Bluff, the Union forces got their ears pinned back.

In Congress' eyes, President Lincoln was in over his head; the federal army was ill-equipped and ill-generaled and it was up to the men on Capitol hill to step in and take charge. The result: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

The legislators who made up this weird conglomeration were for the most part dedicated foes of the military.

Enamored of the rather peculiar notion that wars should not be fought by people who had even the vaguest idea of what they were doing, Congress was determined to gut the professional military, including abolishing West Point where, to their disgust, men were taught how to fight battles and win wars.

This absurd mindset was not, by the way, shared by President Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or the rest of the Confederacy's top officers, all of whom learned their trade, and learned it well, at West Point.

The idea that Lincoln and those West Pointers who stuck with the Union should be allowed to prosecute the war without the wisdom and guidance of the people who made up the Committee on the Conduct of the War surely helped impede the Union's conduct of the war, elongate it, and cost a hell of a lot more lives on both sides of that tragic conflict.

With a membership from the House and Senate, none of whom had ever worn a uniform, and to a man suspicious of the military sticking their noses into the business of prosecuting a war, the ability of the Commander in Chief and the military's top leadership to do their job had to be and was seriously obstructed.

Moreover, public opinion about the war, for and against, was influenced to a great degree by the activities of this ill-begotten committee which continuously implied that dark forces were behind the failure to end the war and bring to troops home.

In his monumental study "Amateurs at War: Abraham Lincoln and the Committee on the Conduct of the War," Bruce Tap wrote " Back in the early days of the rebellion, President Lincoln had assumed broad powers in dealing with the crisis, and Congress approved most of his actions during a special session in July.

"In early December, however, the attitude of Congress was markedly different. Dissatisfied with the state of the war, less confident in Lincoln, and convinced that treason lurked within the innermost circles of the North's military establishment" Congress established the Committee to straighten things out.

To the delight of the Confederate military, the committee's open discussions about the Union's strategy and tactics were providing them with information their intelligence forces were unable to discover on their own.

Moreover, the growing anti-war sentiment in the North as the war continued to go badly gave hope to the South that the North would cut and run if they held out long enough. And so the war went on much longer than it would have had the Confederates not believed the people of the North would eventually cave in.

If all this sounds familiar you have only to consider the behavior of many of the members of today's Congress towards the conduct of the war against militant Islam.

Take for example the disgusting spectacle of the Monday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where many of the members sought to portray the Attorney General, and his boss, President Bush as liars and criminals for daring to spy on al-Qaida operatives overseas and their assets here in the United States.

The attitude of the Civil War committee revolved around the idea of presidential incompetence, including accusations of treason by the army's top generals rings a bell when considering the attitude of congressional Democrats and a few disaffected Republicans who accuse the president of incompetence in the prosecution of the war and of outright dishonesty to the point of criminality.

That laughter you hear in the background is coming from Osama bin Laden and his fellow thugs who are surely delighted to count among their unconscious allies the anti-war forces in the United States Congress just as the Confederacy's leadership must have been over the antics of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

Today's burning issue - that monitoring communications between terrorist forces abroad and their allies in the United States is somehow violating my civil rights and yours is simply ludicrous.

As the president has asked, if our enemies overseas are chatting with some people in the United States, don't we want to know what they're talking about?

The whole problem here is twofold. First, the issue is seen as a political opportunity for the Democrats to score points and maybe win back control of Congress, and second, because these people do not have the vaguest notion of what this war is all about. They fail to see it for what it is, a rebirth of Islam's ancient desire to subjugate the West.

If anybody doubts the accuracy of this fact, one has only to consider the present world-wide conflagration over a handful of cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper and reprinted elsewhere in Europe. It is obvious that this firestorm could not be, and is not, spontaneous - it is being directed from above.

The anti-war crowd may not recognize this as genuine evidence that we are engaged in a new and different kind of world war and their refusal to admit it is giving our enemies a signal victory. If you won't admit that somebody out there wants to kill you, the chances are that they will enlist you in the effort to dig your grave.

Instead of concentrating on fighting and winning this war, congressional Democrats are engaged in fighting a political war against the president and his party, and the armed forces of the United States are caught in the crossfire.

The fact that all of our history shows that in a time of war the president has the constitutional authority to do what must be done to safeguard the American people and win the war is ignored. Politics triumphs over the safety of the American people who have been protected against another 9/11 by such tactics as the monitoring of enemy communications.

Observing that "Terrorists and terrorist governments are giving us almost daily evidence of their fanatical hatred and violent sadism, as the clock ticks away toward their gaining possession of nuclear weapons," the magnificent Tom Sowell writes that "They not only hold a harmless young woman hostage in Iraq, they parade her in tears on television, just as they have paraded not only the terrorizing, but even the beheading, of others on television."

Moreover, he notes "there is a large and gleeful audience in the Arab world for these gross brutalities, just as there was glee and cheering among the Palestinians when the televised destruction of the World Trade center was broadcast in the Middle East. "

Sowell asks "Yet what are we preoccupied with or outraged about? Whether the American government should intercept the phone calls of these cutthroats to people in the United States."

It is said that history repeats itself. One wonders how long it will be before Chappaquiddick Teddy, Senator Patrick Leahy the leaker, and the rest of that crowd get around to demanding the creation of a joint committee on the conduct of the war on Islamofascism.

But then again, they don't really need to - they're doing enough to damage the president's efforts to protect the American people and win the war without one.

 

[barry2952]

Screw you David. You're talking out you ass again.

I do have a problem with, IMHO, a stupid man having unlimited powers.

 

[MonsterMark]

I do have a problem with, IMHO, a stupid man having unlimited powers.

Oh boy. Here we go again.

 

[fossten]

Screw you David. You're talking out you ass again.

I do have a problem with, IMHO, a stupid man having unlimited powers.

There's no reasoning with you, barry. Your anger and hatred of Bush trumps your judgment, which is a good indicator of why it is so important that your Weenie leaders are not permitted to gain control of this country. Nothing could be more dangerous for our personal freedoms and safety than for people like you to have political power again.

BTW, you have never answered the paradox of how a 'stupid' man could FOOL so many members of Congress like you claim.

Ludicrous, just like your phony attempts to make nice with me in PMs while attacking me in public. You're not to be trusted.

 

[MonsterMark]

so important that your Weenie leaders are not permitted to gain control of this country. Nothing could be more dangerous for our personal freedoms and safety than for people like you to have political power again.

If somebody like Feingold or Clinton gets elected, it will be open season on the United States.

We cannot afford to allow the Democrats to ever have control over our foreign policy decisions again. They are too weak, and weakness invites confrontation. Feingold is the one who scares me the most from the Dem side. I can actually see that guy wanting to surrender to terrorists demands if we ever get smacked in the mouth again.

 

[pbslmo]

The gullibility that led us into the last war could yet bring us a new conflict

The gullibility that led us into the last war could yet bring us a new conflict

Our leaders were never trustworthy, yet many people were only too willing to believe them - and they may do so again

Gary Younge
Monday February 6, 2006
The Guardian
The day after Colin Powell did his show-and-tell before the United Nations security council in an attempt to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in February 2003, the late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote a column entitled "I'm persuaded". Describing how Vietnam "came close to making me [a pacifist]", McGrory conceded that "nobody I know was for the war". But something about Powell's performance made her reconsider: "I don't know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell's 'J'accuse' speech against Saddam Hussein. I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince."
Article continues

Two and a half years later Powell referred to the episode as "a painful blot" on his record - a pack of lies and half truths that has led to an ever-increasing mound of corpses.

The power of both illusion and delusion should never be underestimated. The compulsion to believe in something we need and want to be true, rather than see reality for what it is, can at times be astounding.

Remember those eyewitness accounts of the Brazilian student Jean Charles de Menezes before he was shot dead on the underground? Not all of them were made up by the police, although they did nothing to deny them. Mark Whitby, a plumber from Brixton, thought he saw a Pakistani terrorist being chased and gunned down by plain-clothes policemen. Less than a month later Mr Whitby told the Daily Telegraph "he now believes that what he actually saw was the surveillance officer being thrown out of the way" as Mr Menezes was being killed.

Anthony Larkin, who was on the train, said he saw "this guy who appeared to have a bomb belt and wires coming out". The Pakistani in the puffa jacket who vaulted the barriers, it transpired, was a Brazilian in a light denim jacket who picked up a free paper and used his Oyster card.

I am not talking here about lying. The potency of downright fabrication is self-evident. What is truly insidious is the propensity of people to arrange an array of possibles, probables, maybes and might-bes, and construct from them a reality that is both definite and wrong.

The power of suggestion, assumption and presumption is everything. The day before Menezes was shot, London saw an attempt to launch a second terrorist attack in two weeks. What Whitby and Larkin saw had been refracted through a prism of fear and stereotypes, and emerged completely distorted. The price was right; the market was ripe; people bought into it.

The war in Iraq has revealed just how truly bullish and persistent this market in bad ideas based on flawed preconceptions can be. Bad ideas helped take us into the war; and unless we examine what they were and why some managed to believe them, they will prevent us from getting out.

In such a market there will always be sellers aplenty. Someone, somewhere, will forever be peddling war, bigotry, conspiracy, profiling, persecution and plunder. It is only when the buyers come forward in large numbers that we really have to worry. For at critical moments people do not just consume these bad ideas; they invest heavily in them too. So when reality refuses to match up to the idea, they do not change their ideas; they change reality.

There were of course lies; huge whoppers served up on both sides of the Atlantic. On February 23 2003 Tony Blair told the Commons that the government was giving Saddam "one further final chance to disarm voluntarily" through the United Nations. Three weeks earlier President George Bush told him the war was going ahead regardless of what the UN decided. Blair replied that he was "solidly" behind him.

This is of course disgraceful, not least because those who lied have never accepted responsibility for their actions. But it was not a surprise. The case was always flimsy and those who made it were never trustworthy. What is shocking is the number of people who not only bought it but wore it and are still trying to sell it on.

Last October the former Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry said: "I regret that we were not given the truth; as I said more than a year ago, knowing what we know now, I would not have gone to war in Iraq. And knowing now the full measure of the Bush administration's duplicity and incompetence, I doubt there are many members of Congress who would give them the authority they have abused so badly. I know I would not."
If Kerry did not have the full measure of Bush's duplicitous and incompetent nature by that stage then he is a poor judge of character. The overwhelming majority of people in the rest of the world - who had far less access to information than he did - managed to see the war for what it was. But then they weren't going to run for president.

In November the former Powell aide Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson told the Today programme: "You begin to speculate, you begin to wonder ... was this intelligence spun? Was it politicised? Was it cherry-picked? Did, in fact, the American people get fooled? I'm beginning to have my concerns." Go figure. Shouldn't the speculation begin before the bombs drop rather than after?
Everybody has the right to change their mind and make mistakes. The growing number of people on both sides of the Atlantic who believe it was wrong to go to war is heartening. But since the war has already been going for almost three years these regrets are only of any use, beyond personal expiation, if they help to correct the consequences of the original sin.

These particular turnarounds fail on two fronts. First, they expose the anti-war case to the charge of opportunism. People such as Kerry backed the war not on principle but because it was expedient to do so. They oppose it today for the same reason.

Second, there is little point in claiming you were tricked unless you address what made you so gullible in the first place. The basic idea that the US has a historic duty to bring progress, democracy and enlightenment at the barrel of a gun seems about as firmly ingrained in the American mindset as its record of doing the opposite in Central and South America and south-east Asia is in American history. Nothing that has happened in Iraq seems to have shifted that perception in the US. A significant minority were against the war from the start. For the rest, the trouble with the war is not that they invaded a sovereign country on a false pretext and killed hundreds of thousands. It's that they're not winning.

"We can't leave Iraq. We simply can't," says Colonel Wilkerson. "We're there, we've done it, and we cannot leave." Kerry's position is similar. A Pew research survey in December showed that 48% of Americans believe that invading Iraq was wrong. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll last week revealed that 57% of Americans support military intervention if Iran builds itself a nuclear capability.

With each exposé of torture, subjugation, blunder and plunder you keep hearing that Americans have lost their innocence. Somehow they always find it again just in time to buy into the next bad idea.

 

[Calabrio]

I do recognize the executive branches legal ability to perform these wire taps. There was nothing illegal and hopefully it is generating good intelligence.

My only concern is the following:
If the U.S. decides to prosecute any of these terrorist in the civil courts again, especially now because the issue has been so politicized, I worry that defense attorney's will be able attempt to have all the evidence related to these searches dismissed because of they didn't go through the article three or FISA proceedures.

If they stop an attack, it's worth it. But I'm a little worried about the effect it'll have during a prosecution.

 

[barry2952]

Answer one question honestly.

Would you vote to give Hillary Clinton the same power under the same circumstances?

 

[MonsterMark]

To answer Barry's question: I would and that is coming from a guy that totally dislikes Hillary, big time.

I fwe ever get hit again in a major US city with any kind of WMD, forget about health care, forget about jobs, forget about buying gas for $2.50.

The game will be over.

 

[fossten]

Answer one question honestly.

Would you vote to give Hillary Clinton the same power under the same circumstances?

You Fib Weenies think that Conservatives like me are just as partisanly blind as you are, but the fact is that I am intellectually honest about the rule of law regardless of which party has power in the Oval Office. The fact is that my view of the Constitution remains the same regardless of how repugnant the thought of Hillary Clinton being in charge may be to me personally.

See, this shows how uninformed you are about Constitutional Law and the provisions for the Commander in Chief. The President's powers during wartime aren't "voted" to him by some national referendum as you imply, NOR are they given to him by some benevolent Congress. Neither are they, for that matter, conveyed to him by some Supreme Court decision. The President's powers to protect our country during wartime are laid out SPECIFICALLY by the Constitution, which would make any law, FISA included, UNCONSTITUTIONAL wherever that law conflicted with those powers INHERENT in the Constitution. Therefore: The President didn't break the law, instead, the law was found to be unconstitutional.

The fact is that Hillary Clinton as President would have those powers inherently granted to her by the Constitution just like any other President HAS ALREADY HAD.

Good luck getting impeachment proceedings. That tactic is NOTHING but sour grapes due to the fact that you Weenies can't live with the fact that you lost a national election and are grasping at straws. Regardless of your attempts to aid the terrorists in winning the war, the Constitution STILL trumps anything you've said so far.

 

[StankinLincoln]

my thoughts

do people honestly think that before domestic spying was announced that it never went on before. our nation has been spying on ourselves since we were first established. that is what any smart country does is monitor the thoughts and expressions of its people. i just cant believe that alot of people are flipping out about him announcing domestic spying. i honestly dont believe that domestic spying is just now starting. if anything we should thank him for making those actions public and known instead of in secret as our nation has done in the past.

 

[barry2952]

You are slightly misinformed. BuSh never brough this program to anyone's attention. Thank him?

 

[fossten]

"Domestic Spying" is a pejorative term anyway, with inaccurate and negative connotations.

I have a question for you, barry:

If an Imam in Iran with known ties to Al Qaeda terrorists calls some guy named, say, Ahmad Muhammad in some mosque in the United States, WOULD YOU WANT OUR INTEL PEOPLE TO BE ABLE TO MONITOR THE CALL, OR NOT???

Yes or no.

 

[barry2952]

Yes, but only with a warrant. Or, change the law. Until then it is a violation. Are Spector and other Republicans wrong?

Please post the specific text that gives the President super powers. That's all they're asking too. I gather from your posts that you think the CIC is above the law. Most do not agree.

 

[pbslmo]

To answer Barry's question: I would and that is coming from a guy that totally dislikes Hillary, big time.

I fwe ever get hit again in a major US city with any kind of WMD, forget about health care, forget about jobs, forget about buying gas for $2.50.

The game will be over.

Thanks for the vote of confidence for Hillary Perhaps because of the way the "War on Terror" was presented, Other's who totally disliked BuSh voted for him.

As it stands now, because of funding millions of dollars into the war, "forget the jobs" (going overseas, plants closing anyway), "forget healthcare" (too expensive and over rated anyway) and forget buying gas at $2.50. (will be going up anyway)

With BuSh, the WMD are Word of Mass Deception..

 

[fossten]

Yes, but only with a warrant. Or, change the law. Until then it is a violation. Are Spector and other Republicans wrong?

Please post the specific text that gives the President super powers. That's all they're asking too. I gather from your posts that you think the CIC is above the law. Most do not agree.

YOU'RE NOT LISTENING. The Constitution TRUMPS ANY LAW WRITTEN. PERIOD.


Vital Presidential Power

By William Kristol and Gary Schmitt
Tuesday, December 20, 2005; A31

A U.S. president has just received word that American counterterrorist operatives have captured a senior al Qaeda operative in Pakistan. Among his possessions are a couple of cell phones -- phones that contain several American phone numbers. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, what's a president to do?

If the president were taking the advice offered by some politicians and pundits in recent days, he would order the attorney general to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The attorney general would ask that panel of federal judges for a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to begin eavesdropping on those telephone numbers, to determine whether any individual associated with those numbers was involved in terrorist activities.

But the attorney general might have to tell the president he might well not be able to get that warrant. FISA requires the attorney general to convince the panel that there is "probable cause to believe" that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist. Yet where is the evidence to support such a finding? Who knows why the person seized in Pakistan was calling these people? Even terrorists make innocent calls and have relationships with folks who are not themselves terrorists.

The difficulty with FISA is the standard it imposes for obtaining a warrant aimed at a "U.S. person" -- a U.S. citizen or a legal alien: The standard suggests that, for all practical purposes, the Justice Department must already have in hand evidence that someone is a problem before they seek a warrant.

Consider the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan who came to the FBI's attention before Sept. 11 because he had asked a Minnesota flight school for lessons on how to steer an airliner, but not on how to take off or land. Even with this report, and with information from French intelligence that Moussaoui had been associating with Chechen rebels, the Justice Department decided there was not sufficient evidence to get a FISA warrant to allow the inspection of his computer files. Had they opened his laptop, investigators might have begun to unwrap the Sept. 11 plot. But strange behavior and merely associating with dubious characters don't rise to the level of probable cause under FISA.

This is presumably one reason why President Bush decided that national security required that he not simply follow the strictures of the 1978 foreign intelligence act, and, indeed, it reveals why the issue of executive power and the law in our constitutional order is more complicated than the current debate would suggest. It is not easy to answer the question whether the president, acting in this gray area, is "breaking the law." It is not easy because the Founders intended the executive to have -- believed the executive needed to have -- some powers in the national security area that were extralegal but constitutional.

Following that logic, the Supreme Court has never ruled that the president does not ultimately have the authority to collect foreign intelligence -- here and abroad -- as he sees fit. Even as federal courts have sought to balance Fourth Amendment rights with security imperatives, they have upheld a president's "inherent authority" under the Constitution to acquire necessary intelligence for national security purposes. (Using such information for criminal investigations is different, since a citizen's life and liberty are potentially at stake.) So Bush seems to have behaved as one would expect and want a president to behave. A key reason the Articles of Confederation were dumped in favor of the Constitution in 1787 was because the new Constitution -- our Constitution -- created a unitary chief executive. That chief executive could, in times of war or emergency, act with the decisiveness, dispatch and, yes, secrecy, needed to protect the country and its citizens.

That is why the president uniquely swears an oath -- prescribed in the Constitution -- to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Implicit in that oath is the Founders' recognition that, no matter how much we might wish it to be case, Congress cannot legislate for every contingency, and judges cannot supervise many national security decisions. This will be especially true in times of war.

This is not an argument for an unfettered executive prerogative. Under our system of separated powers, Congress has the right and the ability to judge whether President Bush has in fact used his executive discretion soundly, and to hold him responsible if he hasn't. But to engage in demagogic rhetoric about "imperial" presidents and "monarchic" pretensions, with no evidence that the president has abused his discretion, is foolish and irresponsible.

 

[MonsterMark]

Thanks for the vote of confidence for Hillary

Trust me. There will never be a vote of confidence coming from me regarding her.

Perhaps because of the way the "War on Terror" was presented, Other's who totally disliked BuSh voted for him.

O, if you say so.

As it stands now, because of funding millions of dollars into the war, ..

We are safer and haven't been attacked again. Soon as the Rats get back in, Katey bar the doors.

"forget the jobs" (going overseas, plants closing anyway),..

government regulation, poor quality, over-priced due to higher manufacturing costs (pensions, unions, etc.) are the reason. Not Bush.

"forget healthcare" (too expensive and over rated anyway)..

Until you have a surgery or other catastrophic occurrence.

and forget buying gas at $2.50. (will be going up anyway)..

Tell your Congressman and Senator you want to start increasing the amount of drilling on American property #1, and you want a couple more refineries #2 and tell the Chinese and Indians to stop growing their economies and having so many kids #3.

With BuSh, the WMD are Word of Mass Deception..

Cute. Keep repeating the liberal mantra...Bush lied.

 

[pbslmo]

Trust me. There will never be a vote of confidence coming from me regarding her.

O, if you say so.

We are safer and haven't been attacked again. Soon as the Rats get back in, Katey bar the doors.:shifty:

government regulation, poor quality, over-priced due to higher manufacturing costs (pensions, unions, etc.) are the reason. Not Bush.

Until you have a surgery or other catastropic occurence.

Tell your Congressman and Senator you want to start increase drilling on American property #1, and you want a couple more refineries #2 and tell the Chinese and Indians to stop growing their economies and having so many kids #3.

Cute. Keep repeating the liberal mantra...Bush lied.

Can you smell the scarcasim?

 

[fossten]

Can you smell the scarcasim?

Hey, look who's figured out how to paste smilies! Do you want a big pat on the back?

Way to go! You fit right in with the liberal left on this forum - all symbolism, no substance.

 

[fossten]

Bozell Column: The Media's Partisan 'Domestic Spying' Fight

Posted by Brent Bozell on February 8, 2006 - 11:43.

The debate over the propriety of intelligence-gathering by the Bush administration is complicated, and the programs themselves can lose their secrecy (and effectiveness) the more they are debated. The media aren’t monitoring the debate. They started the fight by blowing the lid off the NSA activity in the New York Times, and they’re pushing the fight day and night, clearly coming down against Bush, that arrogantly unconstitutional rogue.

When given a choice between more information about our intelligence-gathering methods and less safety, or less information about our intelligence-gathering and more safety, which do the public choose? The public tends to prefer more safety. The media prefer more information. And the media would prefer the public believe it agrees with them, even if it has to cook a few surveys to establish that canard.

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll brilliantly illlustrated how the public shifts sides on this question depending on how the question is framed. First question: “In order to reduce the threat of terrorism, would you be willing or not willing to allow government agencies to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of ordinary Americans on a regular basis?”

“Ordinary Americans”?!? The only Americans being tapped would be those suspected of helping wage war on America – hardly “ordinary Americans.” Who could support secret government surveillance of ordinary Americans? It’s not surprising that this idea was rejected: 70 percent say they’re not willing to allow that, and only 28 percent say yes.

Then the CBS/Times pollsters changed the wording to be much more precise in who is being monitored: "In order to reduce the threat of terrorism, would you be willing or not willing to allow government agencies to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of Americans that the government is suspicious of?" When the targets are suspected terrorists or sympathizers, the poll numbers completely flipped: 68 percent support monitoring them, and only 29 percent say no.

Now consider that according to the CBS/New York Times pollsters, President Bush has a 42 percent job approval rating, and a 52 percent approval rating in fighting terrorism. It’s shocking to see that almost 70 percent – including a big chunk of people who aren’t wild about Bush -- support keeping electronic tabs on our enemies.

It’s also somewhat shocking that our supposed accuracy-lauding media have preferred the first, more inaccurate phrasing – spying on “ordinary Americans” – over the second phrasing about terrorist suspects. In an eye-opening study of the 69 stories on the last seven weeks of ABC, CBS, and NBC evening-news coverage, Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found that the TV reporters described who was being monitored.

Most correspondents in those stories portrayed the NSA as casting a wide net, targeting “Americans” or “U.S. citizens” (53, or 40 percent), or used terms such as “domestic” or “communications inside the U.S.” (60, or 45 percent). ABC's Dan Harris even began on December 24 by hyping “the spying was much more widespread, with millions of calls and e-mails tracked — perhaps even yours.”

Perhaps – if you’ve got al-Qaeda on your cell-phone’s speed-dial.

By contrast, only about a sixth of these descriptions (21, or 16 percent) stated that the government was focused on persons contacting suspected terrorists (12) or the suspected terrorists themselves (nine). For example, NBC's Pete Williams described monitoring of “suspected al-Qaeda members” on December 29.

There are more findings. Fully 83 percent of network stories suggested the NSA program was illegal, or legally questionable. Reporters framed the story as the government violating “civil liberties” in 42 percent of stories, but the NSA program’s role in the war on terror surfaced in only seven stories (ten percent). The supposed nonpartisan legal experts quoted on the ethics or legality of the NSA program were a slanted cast: 30 (or 56 percent) condemned the program, while only four (seven percent) found the program justifiable, an eight-to-one disparity.

One aspect of the story was almost completely ignored by TV reporters: the leak of classified information to the New York Times. Only five network stories focused on the leak probe, and those five mostly painted it as an act of retribution from an enraged Bush administration. And you certainly couldn’t expect a New York Times poll on the propriety of the New York Times.

In April of 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton called for more agents to investigate domestic terror suspects, and more power to infiltrate terrorist plots and examine suspects’ “phone, hotel, and credit card records,” as CBS explained at the time. CBS didn’t shriek about “domestic spying” or commission a poll then questioning Clinton’s commitment to civil liberties. They noted Clinton’s handling of Oklahoma City “sent his approval ratings soaring.”

This story is extremely politicized. Americans can’t trust a liberal media, so partisan in this debate, to tell it to them straight.

http://newsbusters.org/node/3949

 

[JohnnyBz00LS]

We are safer and haven't been attacked again.

True we haven't been attacked again, but you are DEAD WRONG that we are safer. Or was the recent video-taped warning from Osama Bin Ladin, the mastermind of 9/11, still on the loose after 5+ years of BuSh's FAILURE to aprehend or assisinate him, just a figment of my imagination??

My take on this "domestic spying" / "terrorist surveilence" program, if this is ALL just a big misunderstanding, WHY is the BuSh administration so reluctant to propose changes to the letter of the law to clarify this situation once and for all? I'm ALL FOR survillence of terrorists (not just within, but most importantly outside our boarders), as long as the power to do that cannot be abused, like it has by a prior republican president.

 

[MonsterMark]

True we haven't been attacked again, but you are DEAD WRONG that we are safer.

Let's just say the DemocRats are doing their best to make us less safe than we are now and will continue to do so in the near future unless they get it thru their thick skulls that people care about the safety of their family and America. To say that we are not safer than before 9/11 is simply a ludicrous statement.

as long as the power to do that cannot be abused, like it has by a prior republican president.

So DemocRats spy on political enemies within our borders and that is OK. Bush is 'listening' in on conversations taking place between KNOWN terrorists or acquaintances outside the US and people within our borders and you have a fit? Please. This is nothing more than politics. Everybody can see this and the 'FEAR FACTOR' card will once again trump you guys at the polls because you Libs have given the Conservatives the cannon fodder they need in sound bite after sound bite to cook your goose in the upcoming elections.

p.s. Who is the prior Republican president you speak of?