Government spying

[Mulhollanddose]

Originally posted by fastpat
So, you know that the president...has killed over 30,000 Iraqi civilians with more dying everyday

What sort of immoral monster are you?

Interesting number that you throw about, as freely as the far left, that "Bush has killed 30,000"...Would you know, my dear friend, how many of those were innocents?...What makes you think that it was American forces most responsible for those deaths?...It is more than obvious that the greatest number of civilian casualties are taken out by the Islamofascists, or as you would offer, "the freedom fighting insurgents." (not to put words in your mouth, but you implied it)....That said, there is no doubt that this is the most surgical and humanitarian war in the history of mankind. This limp-wristed warfare, like in Vietnam, is what is dragging the operation out and resulting in amplified American casualties.

FYI, the American military believes in the operation, so it is less than meaningful that you swing their dead bodies over your head and use Bush for target practice.

[speeder]

For God's sake son, tap out!! He's kicking the living schit out of you! Pretend that you need to go off-line and tune the Mitsubishi or something. Or just say uncle, before he rips your head off.

[lendaddy]

It's easy to argue from Pats POV, as it's all absolutes. I'm not saying he's wrong, just that Libertarians have NO gray areas. Depending on your bent this can be good, this can be bad. Either way it's an easy side to argue

[speeder]

That's funny, my impression of him, (Pat), is more of a nuanced thinker than any of the Karl Rove soldier/RNC/Fox News/etc. people on this board.

I would love to see anyone here argue with him point by point w/o straying into talking about Clinton or AQ, they will get their ass handed to them. At least one of the righties here is so dense that he would not even know that he is losing, but not Fint, Mulholland or you, Len.

[RoninLB]

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." [TR:1910]

[fastpat]

Originally posted by RoninLB
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." [TR:1910]

Like TR, here's some more:

"No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it."

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

[Mulhollanddose]

Originally posted by speeder
For God's sake son, tap out!! He's kicking the living schit out of you! Pretend that you need to go off-line and tune the Mitsubishi or something. Or just say uncle, before he rips your head off.

It is refreshing to have someone to toy with. He will be deconstructed in short order, in fact his implosion has begun spontaneously.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by Mulhollanddose
It is refreshing to have someone to toy with. He will be deconstructed in short order, in fact his implosion has begun spontaneously.

There's a great line from "The Good, the bad and the ugly" When you have to shoot.... shoot, don't talk.

Best you think about it.

[snowman]

What a bunch of total crap!!! Nice totally meaningless quotes, all out of context. Someone think for themselves, not on this forum. How about discussing the actual issues? Forget stoking your pitiful egos with meaningless quotes that are ment to make you look significant when you can't think your way out of a paper bag!!

What about discussing the issue at hand?

[Mulhollanddose]

Originally posted by fastpat
There's a great line from "The Good, the bad and the ugly" When you have to shoot.... shoot, don't talk.

Best you think about it.

Patsy, you ever see that daffy duck cartoon when the duck gets shot, but is so dense that he doesn't notice?...he drinks a cup of water and leaks like a sieve? Your all wet my losertarian friend.

[RoninLB]

The Paranoid Style In American Liberalism
by William Kristol
01/02/2006, Volume 011, Issue 16

No reasonable American, no decent human being, wants to send up a white flag in the war on terror. But leading spokesmen for American liberalism-hostile beyond reason to the Bush administration, and ready to believe the worst about American public servants-seem to have concluded that the terror threat is mostly imaginary. It is the threat to civil liberties from George W. Bush that is the real danger. These liberals recoil unthinkingly from the obvious fact that our national security requires policies that are a step (but only a careful step) removed from ACLU dogma.

On Monday, December 19, General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and now deputy director of national intelligence, briefed journalists. The back--and--forth included this exchange:

Reporter: Have you identified armed enemy combatants, through this program, in the United States?

Gen. Hayden: This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

Reporter: General Hayden, I know you're not going to talk about specifics about that, and you say it's been successful. But would it have been as successful-can you unequivocally say that something has been stopped or there was an imminent attack or you got information through this that you could not have gotten through going to the court?

Gen. Hayden: I can say unequivocally, all right, that we have got information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.

Now, General Hayden is by all accounts a serious, experienced, nonpolitical military officer. You would think that a statement like this, by a man in his position, would at least slow down the glib assertions of politicians, op--ed writers, and journalists that there was no conceivable reason for President Bush to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. As Gary Schmitt and David Tell explain elsewhere in this issue, FISA was broken well before 9/11. Was the president to ignore the evident fact that FISA's procedures and strictures were simply incompatible with dealing with the al Qaeda threat in an expeditious manner? Was the president to ignore the obvious incapacity of any court, operating under any intelligible legal standard, to judge surveillance decisions involving the sweeping of massive numbers of cell phones and emails by high--speed computers in order even to know where to focus resources? Was the president, in the wake of 9/11, and with the threat of imminent new attacks, really supposed to sit on his hands and gamble that Congress might figure out a way to fix FISA, if it could even be fixed? The questions answer themselves.

But the spokesmen for contemporary liberalism didn't pause to even ask these questions. The day after Gen. Hayden's press briefing, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee blathered on about "the Constitution in crisis" and "impeachable conduct." Barbara Boxer, a Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted there was "no excuse" for the president's actions. The ranking Democrat on that committee, Joseph Biden, confidently stated that the president's claims were "bizarre" and that "aggrandizement of power" was probably the primary reason for the president's actions, since "there was no need to do any of this."...........

............ What is one to say about these media--Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.

[cool_chick]

All I want to know is, what does the government have to hide by not procuring the warrants? If they're right about what they say they are, why not just uphold the law and procure the warrants?

[cool_chick]

Was the president, in the wake of 9/11, and with the threat of imminent new attacks, really supposed to sit on his hands and gamble that Congress might figure out a way to fix FISA?

Um, it's been over 4 years now....... They got a judge to move the Schiavo case into the federal courts over a weekend, and you're telling me that they can't address the system and abide by the law in 4 over years? IMO, the prez doesn't WANT to. And the question this author should be asking is, WHY?

[RoninLB]

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

[cool_chick]

He gets a retroactive warrant as per the law. That's what he does. If his claim is valid, FISA has no problem with that!

[cool_chick]

I've heard so many excuses in my lifetime for justifying breaking the law.....from people who "take" things because they "deserved" it....say because "that person did something to me before" or whatever...., to why it's ok to break the law regarding things like drugs, etc. And not one has been valid. Breaking the law is breaking the law.

What kind of example does this set for our children? If it's broken, FIX IT. Don't break the law!

[ed martin]

Yes children, play by the rules! Fair is fair! Just what the elected Commander in Chief needs in a time of crisis is defer judgement to some appointed official. Yes children, more bureaucracy! More pretty red tape!

[speeder]

Originally posted by Mulhollanddose
It is refreshing to have someone to toy with. He will be deconstructed in short order, in fact his implosion has begun spontaneously.

Instead of toying with him, which I presume to mean your usual mocking and posting of cartoons and videos of Bill Clinton laughing after a funeral, why not treat him w/ the respect he deserves as a military veteran who has done far more for this country than you or I ever will. You notice that he completely ignores your childishness and refuses to be baited, ("Patsy/losertarian/et al..."), while also not veering from the subject being discussed.

Why don't you try fighting head-up around here for once, instead of swinging a broken bottle. That way, even if you lose, people will not think of you as a troll or a punk.

So..........., are you sticking with the argument that treaties do not exist w/ foreign powers?

[Mulhollanddose]

Originally posted by speeder
You notice that he completely ignores your childishness and refuses to be baited, ("Patsy/losertarian/et al..."), while also not veering from the subject being discussed.

Scroll back to our earliest interaction (pg. 8) and you will find the exact opposite true...You will also notice that he offers answers to questions that answer absolutely no question. He impotently offers no credible citations for his indictments and leans heavily on tired leftist rhetoric that hasn't an element of credibility or truth...He goes from defending the Constitution to saying it should be destroyed in 3.6 seconds. He goes from defending the UN to saying a "wrecking ball" should be taken to it in 3.2 seconds. He offers the crimes of GW Bush, but can't support them (nor can any serious political analyst). Then, when I spank him on Article VI, he goes from total denial of my assertions to agreement in 2 paragraphs flat.

[Mulhollanddose]

Originally posted by speeder
So..........., are you sticking with the argument that treaties do not exist w/ foreign powers?

They do not exercise supremacy over our Constitution or our national security.

"A treaty cannot be made which alters the Constitution of the country, or which infringes any express exceptions to the power of the Constitution..." -- Alexander Hamilton

"I do not conceive that power is given to the President and the Senate to dismember the empire, or to alienate any great, essential right. I do not think the whole legislative authority to have this power." -- James Madison

"I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson