Posted on 12/21/2005 6:56:19 AM PST by kellynla
The media and the Democratic congressional leadership, including Senator Harry Reid and Representative Nancy Pelosi, joined by some other members of Congress, have denounced President Bush for, as The New York Times noted, secretly authorizing the National Security Agency “to intercept the communications of Americans and terrorist suspects inside the Untied States without first obtaining warrants from a secret court that oversees intelligence matters…” According to The Times, “sometime in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order scrapping a painfully reached, 25-year-old national consensus: spying on Americans by their government should generally be prohibited, and when it is allowed, it should be regulated and supervised by the courts. The laws and executive orders governing electronic eavesdropping by the intelligence agency were specifically devised to uphold the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.”
The Times continues, ““But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant -- just as he had earlier decided to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army regulations when it came to handling prisoners in the war on terror."
I wish The Times and members of Congress were not so eager to demean the President of the U.S. and his advisers, holding them up to scathing denunciation when we are at war. They should realize that the President feels very strongly his obligation to protect us from terrorists overseas and their supporters in this country -- in World War II, such supporters were called Quislings. The critics have short memories. In the 1993 and 9/11 (2001) attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. suffered nearly 3,000 deaths and more than 1,000 injured.
The Times has every right to disagree with the President’s action in dispensing with the court set up for this purpose. But it harms the country when it treats the President unfairly with the language and contemptuous tone it now regularly employs.
The President is not a dictator which, in effect, Congressman Charles Rangel called him when comparing him with disgraced Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. Nor is he a criminal intentionally violating the U.S. Constitution and the civil liberties of our citizens, subjecting himself to impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The President no doubt arrived at his position after being advised by career government lawyers that he is acting within the law. We are at war with millions of adherents of a fundamentalist Islamic creed who believe they have a duty to kill us -- Christians, Jews, Hindus and others -- who do not accept the supremacy of Islam over their own religions.
I agree with those who believe that the President was and is obligated to seek orders from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing the invasions of privacy. If time were of the essence, we are told by the experts that the warrants could have been secured by telephone authorization from that Court. The FISA legislation allows in emergencies for the government to tap phones for 72 hours without a warrant from the court and then seek one retroactively. If the court processes are inadequate, then the President should over the last several years have sought legislation to improve them or give him greater direct authority with the Congress to make that decision.
For several years Republican and Democratic leaders have been briefed on what the President was doing and declined to protest or bring the disputed procedures to the attention of the House and Senate. They could have done so using closed sessions so as not to alert the enemy. Instead, they allowed the President to continue the surveillance.
Now the press and some of those members of Congress by their public revelations have alerted the enemy to the surveillance program. And the media and some members of Congress have forgotten or don’t care that we are at war and their disclosures may have prevented the administration from obtaining information otherwise available that would help military and law enforcement authorities to deter acts of terrorism here and abroad.
I agree with the Times editorial when it points out, “This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose.”
President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in their defense have said nothing that justifies the President’s failure to apply to the FISA court.
We are at war. There is a balance to be struck between protecting the security of the country and the personal privacy of individuals. During World War Two all kinds of restrictions were placed on American civil liberties. Most horrendously, Japanese Americans, and some Italian-Americans and German-Americans, were sent to detention camps with the approval of the Supreme Court. But when the war ended, the restrictions ended, and the Congress acknowledged we had gone too far. We returned to our core values.
The lesson is this: the survival of our country is paramount, but that survival must be achieved without destroying our core values as a society. Our Founding Fathers started a revolution in order to achieve “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These are not just words. They are our fundamental beliefs and must be protected. To see on the other hand the President as the enemy -- which the savage and unfair attacks upon him convey to the world-- is harmful to the security of our country and, therefore, injures us all."
I'm no software geek, but if you are chasing emails bouncing off possibly uninvolved mail handlers, I'm not so sure this is fast enough.
The FISA legislation allows in emergencies for the government to tap phones for 72 hours without a warrant from the court and then seek one retroactively. If the court processes are inadequate, then the President should over the last several years have sought legislation to improve them or give him greater direct authority with the Congress to make that decision.
This is the correct approach in principle for which there would normally be little excuse to ignore. However, the likelihood that the volume may be so high as to effectively preclude it. When one is chasing messages over the web the number of locations needing monitoring could be in the millions. That is both a terrible difficulty and a capability that is a real threat of intrusion.
Imagine the number of people using web phones who could be subject to such monitoring. It's a tough problem not to be taken lightly, much less subjected to political demagoguery.
It's really frustrating that I can do no more than refuse to buy the NY Times. I wish I could buy a subscription to a fund that pays people to quit buying the Times. I can afford to save several people this way, and as it would be charitable giving, the govt would credit it on my taxes, no? I mean, it wouldn't be a political contribution because we all know the Times is apolitical and objective, right?
What a clever, catchy phrase. So appropriate now.
What's liberty, without life?
Well...if you all are going to be accused of it, maybe you ought to have a squad of marines go get all the American hating people at the NYT and spirit them off to, say, Gitmo?...hold them there until the war is over with no contact with anybody.
While you are at it, you might round up Pelosi, Biden, dingy harry, Kennedy, Murtha, Durbin, Boxer, et al, and take them away also. If any judge tries to interfere, they go too.
We are at war. Who-could-stop-you? Nobody and I mean n-o-b-o-d-y wants to die via a mohammadian lunitic car bomber at your local mall or resturant.
Everything the NYT and the usual suspects do only brings the danger to Americans closer.....remove them NOW before they do irrepairable damage to the United States. Continue the argument after the war. If laws were broken, throw GWB in jail after islam is gone and the threat of murder and terrorism is removed from us.
Note to Freepers who may take issue with this post:
You might say that if Bush can do this, maybe someday when 'rats win, they can do the same thing. This is true...but, 'rats are cowards, the military hates them, and would not support such an action by a bunch of socalist/communists. Bush is not spying on Americans in America...it is being done on those who are actively engaged in trying to destroy America...the usual suspects are included in this group IMO.
We are at war...Islam has promised to kill us all...the NYT et. al. have decided to help them. Peace time rules cannot apply....
Given the number of Americans who DIED to protect that liberty, you are in the wrong country if you have to ask that question.
The President Is Not the Enemy
Depends on whether you hate conservative Christians more than deranged terrorists.
Waco.
I agree with those who believe that the President was and is obligated to seek orders from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing the invasions of privacy.
ANSWER: That's not what the courts have said. You might check Tuesday's editorial in the Wall Street Journal -- and the case of U.S. vs. Troung. You might also read Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jaime Gorelick's July 14, 1994 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
I know for a fact that much intelligence has a very short shelf-life and is sometimes relegated to hours or even minutes of usefulness. The "do it for 72 hours and seek a court order retroactively" may sound good on the surface, but it is possible that many of these intercepts only lasted a very short time. Would they have the Prez monitor a line for 12 hours, then seek permission for having done so? In the military, we have a saying that says "Act now and ask forgiveness later". In other words, do what is expedient and right instead of getting caught up in the bureaucracy, then let the red-tape folks take their shots at you. Without knowing the full situation, one can only guess, and I'd rather have them guessing than to know for sure. I wouldn't put it past many of the leakers to find a way to divulge critical intelligence at the worst possible time.
My point precisely.
In other words, do what is expedient and right instead of getting caught up in the bureaucracy, then let the red-tape folks take their shots at you.
As long as they are morally guided by the principles of the Constitution, this isn't a problem. Unfortunately, I have my doubts how well versed many in our military might be.
Without knowing the full situation, one can only guess, and I'd rather have them guessing than to know for sure.
Yup. That's where we are too. It's not good for self government.
I wouldn't put it past many of the leakers to find a way to divulge critical intelligence at the worst possible time.
No argument there.
yep, I posted the WSJ op-ed piece yesterday and the Journal was spot on!
Taking a page from Lieberman. Old Ed will soon be stricken from the Manhattan invitation list.
Yes. Me too.
And I wish they could be trusted to be truthful.
And I wish they did not serve as a fifth column.
I wish they did not serve as the enablers of the enemies of the United States.
And I wish the Democrat Party had not degenerated from its once exalted status to its present depth of depravity, decadence, dishonor, dishonesty, and disgrace.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
"Doubtless Ann Coulter will set the record straight later today."
Is AC on today?
Forgot that. But that means they are distracted! GOOOOD
Obviously the unworkability of the warrant requirement is that the NSA needs to see patterns in large amounts of data to spot suspects, and specific individual warrants do not allow the raw data to be gathered in the first place. Once a suspect is IDed, of course they can go to warrants etc.
There is also deliberate misinformation from the left about what this applies to. They are listening to communications into and out of the country, not within it. It is sort of blatantly obvious, if you want to spot foreign terrorist networks reaching into the United States, you have to monitor traffic across the national boundary. As is sort of mathematically necessary, traffic across a national boundary has one end inside that boundary. The left needs to grow the heck up.
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