I guess you have nothing to wory about since you agree with GWB. Those that do not can be considered terrorist as per Dubyas own words: If you are not with me then you are with them. In this case over 63% of the americans could be considered to side with terrorist ...you can yell liberal , act like an austrich and put your head in the sand, that until it comes and bite you yourself. Then it will be to late. Have you ever heard of McArthy?
Fear destroys what bin Laden could not ROBERT STEINBACK rsteinback@MiamiHerald.com One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help. If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled. Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat -- and expect America to be pleased by this -- I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated. If I had been informed that our nation's leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas -- and call such procedures necessary for the nation's security -- I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them. If someone had predicted the president's staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy -- and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy -- I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy. That's no America I know, I would have argued. We're too strong, and we've been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path. What is there to say now? All of these things have happened. And yet a large portion of this country appears more concerned that saying ''Happy Holidays'' could be a disguised attack on Christianity. I evidently have a lot poorer insight regarding America's character than I once believed, because I would have expected such actions to provoke -- speaking metaphorically now -- mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. I would have expected proud defiance of anyone who would suggest that a mere terrorist threat could send this country into spasms of despair and fright so profound that we'd follow a leader who considers the law a nuisance and perfidy a privilege. Never would I have expected this nation -- which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty -- would cower behind anyone just for promising to ``protect us.'' President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he'll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president -- or is that king? -- has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people. Is that America's highest goal -- preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, ``What's wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?'' Bush would have us excuse his administration's excesses in deference to the ''war on terror'' -- a war, it should be pointed out, that can never end. Terrorism is a tactic, an eventuality, not an opposition army or rogue nation. If we caught every person guilty of a terrorist act, we still wouldn't know where tomorrow's first-time terrorist will strike. Fighting terrorism is a bit like fighting infection -- even when it's beaten, you must continue the fight or it will strike again. Are we agreeing, then, to give the king unfettered privilege to defy the law forever? It's time for every member of Congress to weigh in: Do they believe the president is above the law, or bound by it? Bush stokes our fears, implying that the only alternative to doing things his extralegal way is to sit by fitfully waiting for terrorists to harm us. We are neither weak nor helpless. A proud, confident republic can hunt down its enemies without trampling legitimate human and constitutional rights. Ultimately, our best defense against attack -- any attack, of any sort -- is holding fast and fearlessly to the ideals upon which this nation was built. Bush clearly doesn't understand or respect that. Do we? email this print this
Ad hominem. What does any of that have to do with the stated NSA mission and foreign intelligence gathering?
All the news that's fit to ignore Dec 26, 2005 by Michael Barone The New York Times' Christmas gift -- sorry, holiday gift -- to the nation's political dialogue was its Dec. 16 story reporting that the National Security Agency has been intercepting telephone conversations between terrorism suspects abroad and U.S. citizens or legal residents in the United States. What the Times didn't bother telling its readers is that this practice is far from new and is entirely legal. Instead, the unspoken subtext of the story was that this was likely an illegal and certainly a very scary invasion of Americans' rights. Let's put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America's enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say that the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America's enemies but not to wiretap -- or, more likely these days, electronically intercept -- their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century. To be sure, federal courts have ruled that the Fourth Amendment's bar of "unreasonable" searches and seizures limits the president's power to intercept communications without obtaining a warrant. But that doesn't apply to foreign intercepts, as the Supreme Court made clear in a 1972 case, writing, "The instant case requires no judgment on the scope of the president's surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country." The federal courts of appeals for the 5th, 3rd, 9th and 4th Circuits, in cases decided in 1970, 1974, 1977 and 1980, took the same view. In 2002, the special federal court superintending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wrote, "The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power." Warrantless intercepts of the communications of foreign powers were undertaken as long ago as 1979, by the Carter administration. In 1994, Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, testified to Congress, "The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes." In the Dec. 15 Chicago Tribune, John Schmidt, associate attorney general in the Clinton administration, laid it out cold: "President Bush's post-Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents." "News stories" in the Times and other newspapers and many national newscasts have largely ignored this legal record. Instead, they are tinged with a note of hysteria and the suggestion that fundamental freedoms have been violated by the NSA intercepts. Earlier this month, a Newsweek cover story depicted George W. Bush as living inside a bubble, isolated from knowledge of the real world. Many of the news stories about the NSA intercepts show that it is mainstream media that are living inside a bubble, carefully insulating themselves and their readers and viewers from knowledge of applicable law and recent historical precedent, determined to pursue an agenda of undermining the Bush administration regardless of any damage to national security. And damage there almost certainly would be were the program to be ended, as many Democrats and many in the mainstream media would like. Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of NSA and now deputy national intelligence director, has come forward to say, "This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States." The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, should not be interpreted in a way that makes it "a suicide pact." The notion that terrorists' privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact. The Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in the United States should not be stretched into a ban on interceptions of communications from America's enemies abroad. The mainstream media, inside their left-wing bubble, evidently thinks that there is not much in the way of danger. They should take a trip to Ground Zero, to the Sept. 11 memorial at the Pentagon, to Shanksville, Pa., where the heroes of United flight 93 prevented the terrorists from hitting their target in Washington.
Go through a court that is all I am asking. When only one person can decide without checks and balances it sound much like any dictatorship in the world.
Our Constitution and our Congress have given the President certain authority to act following 9/11. If you don't like it, take advantage of the rights you enjoy as a free American citizen and do your utmost to change the Constitution or your representatives in Congress.
Bush's counsel on spying now under close scrutiny By Peter S. Canellos, Boston Globe Columnist | December 27, 2005 WASHINGTON -- When President Bush sought to reassure the country that his authorization of spying on Americans without warrants was a reasonable exercise of his power, he emphasized that his orders were always reviewed by the attorney general and the White House counsel. ''Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland," Bush said in his Dec. 17 radio address. ''The review includes approval by our nation's top legal officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the president." The current occupants of those jobs are Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and White House counsel Harriet E. Miers. Prior to 2005, Gonzales was White House counsel and John Ashcroft was attorney general. The current dispute over whether the president had the authority to order domestic spying without warrants, despite a law against it, has put new focus on the legal officials who have guided Bush. And the qualifications of Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Miers could become a focus of the upcoming Senate hearings on the spying decision. Legal advice given to the president in national security matters can hardly be of greater importance. Telling Bush that he lacks the authority to make a particular move could leave the country vulnerable to attack; assuring him that he has the power to override civil liberties could consign innocent suspects to imprisonment, abuse, or disappearance to secret holding areas in other countries. Since Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's legal advisers have cleared the way for him to hold enemy combatants without trials; eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls and e-mails; place ever-greater numbers of government documents under a veil of secrecy; imprison a US citizen indefinitely on the suspicion of terrorist links; and, according to The Washington Post, operate a secret CIA prison in an Eastern European country. In each case, the legal official responsible for assessing the extent of Bush's powers was Ashcroft, Gonzales, or Miers. Defining the president's powers -- when he can act alone, when he's constrained by treaties, when he must seek congressional authorization -- is extremely difficult. If there's one area of the law where the framers of the Constitution relied on the good faith of the men and women in government, it's in adhering to a system of divided powers. Nonetheless, presidents and members of Congress have often disagreed on their respective powers, and the Supreme Court has approached such cases warily, fearful of upsetting the constitutional balance of power. The determinations of Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Miers have had great weight because they effectively cut Congress out of the decision-making, at least until the Supreme Court could weigh in. But in spying cases especially, the targets weren't aware that they were being monitored, and thus could not challenge Bush in court. By the standards of past attorneys general, Ashcroft and Gonzales were well qualified for the job. Still, neither of them had much occasion to consider the legal limits of presidential power before they took office. Ashcroft taught business law and later became attorney general of Missouri. He then spent 14 years as a governor and senator before becoming Bush's first-term AG. Gonzales was a partner at a corporate law firm before Bush became governor of Texas. He served as a legal adviser to the governor, and was briefly Texas secretary of state and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court. By the standards of past White House counsels, both Gonzales and Miers were lightly qualified, since neither of them had Washington experience before guiding the president. By contrast, two of President Clinton's White House counsels, Lloyd Cutler and Abner Mikva, were eminent attorneys with decades of experience in assessing the limits of federal power. During her ill-fated Supreme Court nomination, Miers was castigated by conservatives for her lack of qualifications. But her years as a partner in a corporate firm would have been more useful on the Supreme Court, which hears dozens of business cases a year, than in her current job reviewing the legality of Bush's actions. To be sure, Gonzales and Miers -- like Ashcroft before them -- have many excellent lawyers working beneath them. But as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. can attest from their own days in the Justice Department, junior lawyers are usually restricted to coming up with justifications for the decisions made by their bosses. And in these cases, the boss's decisions have literally been matters of life and death. Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.
2/26/2005 12:52:00 PM -0500 NewsTrack Bush was denied wiretaps, bypassed them WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate. A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Heart newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined. The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.
December 27, 2005 Trust the (Iraqi) People? From The Washington Post: BAGHDAD, Dec. 26 -- Unexpectedly low support from overseas voters has left Ahmed Chalabi--the returned Iraqi exile once backed by the United States to lead Iraq--facing a shutout from power in this month's vote for the country's first full-term parliament since the 2003 invasion.... With 95 percent of a preliminary tally from the Dec. 15 vote now completed, Chalabi remained almost 8,000 votes short of the 40,000 minimum needed for him or his bloc to win a single seat in the 275-seat National Assembly, according to election officials. Without a seat in the assembly, Chalabi would presumably be unable to obtain a post in the resulting government. Remember the good ol'days when neocons maintained that Chalabi, with the snap of a finger, could set up a secular, pro-US, pro-Israel government in Iraq? (That would come after the cakewalk of a war.) I guess most Iraqis have other plans. And it seems the Iraqi people possess better instincts when it comes to judging Chalabi than the Bush administration, which was too willing to accept the fraudulent WMD claims put forward by Iraqis "found" and guided to US intelligence by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Of course, Chalabi's party is now saying that election irregularities transpired. (Chalabi should know about flimflam.) This does leave Chalabi's friends in Washington in a pickle. They want to hail the elections their man on the ground says were irregular. Oh well. Chalabi's smack-down rejection was followed by bad news in the Post story: Rebounding violence, which included bombings, assassination attempts and other attacks, claimed at least 19 lives in Iraq on Monday, including that of an American soldier. Eight members of a single Iraqi SWAT team were wiped out in what Iraqi authorities described as an hour-long shootout with better-armed insurgents. The paper also reported: With no party receiving an outright majority of seats in the new National Assembly, winning control of the next government will require forming a coalition that can command such a majority. The deal-making has led to meetings among rivals at opposite extremes of Iraqi politics to feel out any possible alliance. On Saturday, the effort brought Saleh Mutlak--a Sunni politician previously derided by Shiites as a front for insurgents--together with Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite religious party whose militia Sunnis accuse of running anti-Sunni death squads. Both sides confirmed the meeting Monday. If insurgents and Shiites can meet and cut deals, perhaps there's not as much need for US troops in Iraq as Bush says. After all, the various forces in Iraq have been fighting with each other far before Bush could find Iraq on a map....Now discuss among yourselves.