Posted on 06/15/2013 10:15:34 AM PDT by kristinn
The jihad rages on, but the War on Terror is over.
There is no longer a national-security consensus — no longer the political support for wartime defense measures, much less offensive combat operations. While the enemy continues to fight, our will to break the enemy’s will has vanished. After a contentious week, that much is clear. The controversy swirling around shadowy intelligence programs hasn’t gotten to the bottom of those programs, but it tells us everything we need to know about . . . us.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog that did not bark is a metaphor worn out by journalists. This week, though, the lack of a bark was loud and clear: The bark of the national-security Right defending the wartime powers of the presidency. For a variety of reasons, many of the protagonists have developed amnesia about how we came to have the programs now provoking all the cavil: the debates over the PATRIOT Act and FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).
After a series of attacks through the Nineties, the 9/11 atrocities destroyed the World Trade Center, struck the Pentagon, and killed nearly 3,000 Americans. In the savage clarity, our nation finally realized that what I’ve called “kinetic Islam” — a combination of militant jihadists and their sharia-supremacist enablers — was at war with the United States. The PATRIOT Act was a product of our vigorous and persuasive contention, on the national-security right, that the challenge was an enemy force, not a criminal-justice problem. That challenge demanded a national war-footing, not judicial due process.
It was precisely this contention, moreover, that beat back the Left’s effort to intrude the judiciary into the collection of foreign intelligence — constitutionally, a paradigm executive function — when FISA was overhauled in 2008.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
So you agree with Obama that the war is over when he says it is over. The enemy apparently not getting a vote on the issue.
Do you therefore propose that Islamic terrorism is not war but rather criminal activity?
There is no confidence that the administration uses its power and intelligence data against our enemies instead of us.
Obama has shown more hate and disdain for working class and middle class American citizens than he has shown toward Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Taliban
It'd also shown that whole crowd that it wasn't just the Russians who knew how to deal with their kind.
I like McCarthy and respect his view.
The problem is I really don’t know if he understands we have other enemies than foreign ...we are fighting enemies domestic as well.
I don’t trust my government to protect our people or our interests.
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No, I don't agree with that. I also don't agree that the surveillance that is going on is proper in America.
Do you therefore propose that Islamic terrorism is not war but rather criminal activity?
No, I do not propose such a thing. I'm simply asserting that a Nazi-esque police state is not what's necessary or proper to fight terrorism. Surveillance should be based on reasonable suspicion and probable cause.
As a matter of fact, this extreme proliferation of surveillance data might well serve to prevent investigators from narrowing their focus to those who really do need to be watched.
>> So where do we go for constitutional defense
Vote for it.
It’s the Senate/Congress that is legislating and funding natsec policy — a fact that’s not resonating very well.
The purpose of gathering intelligence is to locate the threats, which are then placed under surveillance to gather evidence. "Surveillance ... based on reasonable suspicion and probable cause" means that we have already identified the threat and it is in general not really a threat anymore.
The purpose of intelligence gathering is to identify unknown threats. None of the 9/11 hijackers could have been under surveillance based on reasonable suspicion and probable cause, for the simple reason that they had not been identified as threats.
Whether the NSA activities under discussion here are reasonable and appropriate is very debatable. But I do know that limiting surveillance to being "based on reasonable suspicion and probable cause" will result in us primarily gathering evidence after an attack succeeds. It will do very little to prevent new attacks by unknown threats.
The gulf arabs will stop funding al queda when the price of oil falls due to rising US oil production.
Any intelligence gathered, therefore, should be subject to the exclusionary rule, meaning that it could never be used as evidence in a criminal prosecution of a non-terrorist act. Somehow, I doubt that safeguard has been considered.
The American system is not based on casting an all-encompassing net over every citizen. Not even when we are at War. We have already seen how this information can potentially be misused by those in power to persecute their political opponents. The Founders' vision of America precludes ever granting government such absolute power, even in time of (perpetual) War.
Using your argument, why draw the line at just meta-data, since even MORE terrorism could be thwarted by actually archiving the content of every American's conversation, text, email, etc. What you appear to be advocating is a totalitarian police state.
That is simply too much power to grant government, and results in a situation far less desirable than even having a terrorist attack occur once in a while.
Barring "Total Information Awareness" there will always be the possibility that a terrorist attack might succeed. We already routinely tolerate such a situation with respect to criminal behavior, and criminal behavior causes far more loss of life and property in our country than all terrorist acts combined.
It's the price of living in a Free society. You advocate destroying our open society, all in the name of fighting terrorism. A society where every conversation is recorded and processed by an all-powerful state is far worse than a society which experiences the occasional terrorist attack. A police state is a police state.
Nobody who truly believes in minimal government could ever embrace such a totalitarian view of modern society. If they did, the same arguments would apply with respect to everyday crime.
If the alternative to such tyranny is the necessity of wiping out all those who espouse terror, then so be it. Better for that to happen and our free society continue, than to turn America into something which has no resemblance to a free society. You have apparently forgotten that, if America is turned into a police state due to the War on Terror, then the terrorists have already won.
The Constitution still governs, and the Fourth Amendment is still the Fourth Amendment, and those who find it a nuisance should go ahead and be honest and advocate its repeal, claiming that it's been outdated, rather than trying to pretend they value any right to privacy at all.
A simple equation: The enemy are over there, not here.
So national security should focus on the enemy over there, not here. Leave here for the police and FBI, with the normal tools they used for the last 100 years. They don’t have to have dossiers and wiretaps on every American.
Other than that, stop having really stupid policies, that go out of their way from offending Muslims. There is no easy way to tell bad Muslims from good Muslims, so ALL Muslims should get extra scrutiny. Scrutiny that everyone else DOES NOT get, because everyone else are not at war with us.
America persecuted some Germans during World War I, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t give them extra scrutiny during World War II. Americans were unfair to blacks a long time ago. This doesn’t mean we should not give Muslims of all colors extra scrutiny today.
There is NOTHING, ZERO, wrong with profiling, if you are at war with the people you are profiling. And their families and friends. Nothing.
Treating the enemy the same as everyone else during wartime is just stupid.
The even average intelligence security people know that Muslims are the ones creating all the fuss. Making them pretend that’s not the case just forces them to figure out a way around the system, so they can give extra scrutiny to Muslims.
So not only is the system wasteful and inefficient, it forces the authorities to cheat to do their job. So get rid of it.
I am advocating nothing. I am merely pointing out that there is a huge difference between gathering intelligence to detect future threats and gathering evidence for prosecution of known threats.
By definition, gathering intelligence involves acquiring information about huge numbers of people and sifting through it to try to find that tiny percentage who are genuinely dangerous. If we only ever gather data on those for whom we have sufficient evidence to get warrants, I can guarantee you we will NOT detect future threats in time to head them off.
The problem here, I think, is we’re stuck in a false dichotomy. Our present conflict is EITHER war, in which case the rules of war and of military intelligence apply. OR it is peacetime, and the laws of civil and criminal justice apply.
Seems to me we’re faced with a situation that is neither fish nor fowl. Trying to force one or the other of the paradigms to fit only ensure that bad things will happen.
What I would like to see is a re-examination of what is needed to strike a balance between gathering intelligence on those who wish to kill us, and protecting the civil rights of Americans. Those who are dead because our enemies blew them up have also had their civil rights infringed.
I fully recognize that these operations are highly susceptible to misuse. And I am agnostic on where exactly the line should be drawn. I do know, as we saw after the Boston bomb, that many of those who object to the gathering of intelligence are among the first to criticize a failure of intelligence. Fairly obviously, putting greater restrictions on those gathering intelligence will not increase their efficiency.
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