Yes, I agree Z. I think there is such as thing as 'collateral damage' which occurs in 'legitimate wars' which is tragic, but not war crime. But I would distinguish that from US tactics in Serbia and the first Iraq war especially where the bombing of civilian targets in major cities was a stated US policy so as to provoke civilians to overthrow or pressure their governments into change. This tactic seems to be clearly a war crime as defined by the Geneva Covention.
Hey ZZZZzzzz, you call me a liar, that I never worked for a printing company because I dont use apostrophes to your liking. YOu call me a liar, that I don't live in this country because you and only you think I type in broken English. You attempt to embarrass me w/ your "spell check". Here's the attachment for you again. Enjoy. Are you going to complain and have my posts removed? Is that what you do whenever you are proven wrong in the other threads as well?
How can ZZZzzzz have my posts removed? He falsely accused and personally attacked me for pages. I prove him wrong by providing a picture, yet this isnt allowed? I posted it again. This is ridiculous.
Z, did not have your posts removed. I deleted what became an off topic personal battle. Keep the discussion topical, not personal. thanks
OK, thanks for clarifying. I found it odd that he could get away with falsely accusing me of lying about my place of residence/ workplace/ etc. for pages on end. He also tried on several occasions to embarrass me with his use of spellcheck. This went on for pages, yet the posts remained without question. As soon as I provide proof by way of a picture (simply defending myself) all posts were deleted protecting ZZZzzzz's credibility.
I thought for sure ZZZzzzz would at least offer an apology to me for falsely accusing me of lying after my posted proof. This gentleman who would respond within seconds (after using spell check) has now eerily disappeared. Game. Set. Match.
The anti-anti-terrorists Jan 4, 2006 by Linda Chavez The current hysteria over the president's authorization of some domestic intercepts by the National Security Agency reminds me of similar reaction by liberals to the Cold War. Instead of recognizing communism as a clear and present danger to freedom and liberty here and abroad, many liberals decided the real threat to those values came from anti-communism itself. Anti-anti-communism became the defining characteristic of American liberals, who have never fully recovered their credibility with the American people when it comes to protecting the nation. The inheritors of that liberal tradition might today be defined as anti-anti-terrorists. Whatever the government does to try to protect us from the threat of Islamic terrorists is immediately suspect. Instead of focusing on the real threat posed by an actual enemy, liberals today are more worried about imagined threats to civil liberties posed by the efforts to counteract terrorism. Granted, we don't yet know the full extent of the NSA program -- and shouldn't since it is among the most highly sensitive classified programs run by the government. According to the original news stories reporting on the program and the administration's response, however, the NSA has intercepted communications from known terrorists overseas to persons in the United States without seeking a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Critics claim this is illegal, citing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which sets up a procedure for U.S. intelligence services normally prohibited from monitoring U.S. citizens and permanent residents to seek a warrant to do so from the FISA court. The president claims -- and is supported by legal scholars and officials from previous administrations, including the Clinton Justice Department -- that he has the authority to bypass the FISA procedure so long as he is responding to a foreign threat and acting in his role as commander in chief during wartime. Every president since FISA was enacted in 1978, from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton, has asserted similar authority, suggesting Bush is no radical in his assumptions. But this is an issue to be resolved in the courts, not in the halls of Congress, which cannot trump the Constitution by statute, much less the opinion pages of the newspaper. My point here has more to do with the motives of those who've jumped on the NSA story than resolving the legal issues surrounding it. What is it about the liberal elite that automatically assumes the worst about our own government but is willing to assume only innocent intentions when it comes to those accused of wanting to do harm to America? Like liberal anti-anti-communists of the Cold War era, today's anti-anti-terrorists assume nefarious intentions of the U.S. government, while clamoring to protect the rights of enemy agents operating in our country. Cold War liberals vigorously defended Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of giving the Soviet Union nuclear secrets, and State Department official Alger Hiss, one of several high-ranking Roosevelt administration appointees who spied for the Soviet Union. Even after the release of Soviet archival records and the Venona files, the secret communications between the Soviets and their U.S. agents decrypted by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, many liberals refused to admit the guilt of these individuals. Similarly, today's anti-anti-terrorists refuse to acknowledge the threat of al-Qaeda agents and sympathizers in the United States, worrying instead that the real threat is from the American government, intent on spying on its own citizens. We won the Cold War in spite of a "fifth column" operating in the United States and those who denied its presence. But it took trillions of dollars and the commitment of America's leaders and the majority of our citizens to do so, a process that was undeniably made more lengthy and difficult by the anti-anti-communists. No doubt we will win the war on terrorism as well, but the anti-anti-terrorists may prolong the war and endanger American lives with their paranoid resistance to fighting the terrorists. Pogo was wrong: We have met the enemy, and he is not us.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006 THE PRESIDENCY UNBOUND: You can say this for the president. The powers he seized after 9/11 have indeed apparently helped neuter al Qaeda as we once knew it. That's a big deal and a big achievement. We haven't been attacked since: another big deal, in my book. But the flip-side of unchecked executive power is also the chance of self-reinforcing error (WMD intelligence) and abuse of power (authorizing torture against domestic and international law). Here's a nugget from the Risen book, as reported by Time, that gives a concrete example: Risen devotes a chapter to Sawsan Alhaddad, an Iraqi American recruited by the CIA as part of a "Hail Mary" prewar effort to gain intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons program by tapping the relatives of Iraqi scientists. Alhaddad was one of at least 30 Iraqi expatriates who risked their lives to travel to Iraq to ask their relatives about Saddam's arsenal. According to Risen, all of them reported that Iraq had abandoned its WMD program - but the CIA never informed the White House. The founders divided government for a good reason. It may be time to tame the prince. REMEMBER TIA? That was John Poindexter's much-ridiculed 2002 proposal for "Total Information Awareness" - a domestic spying program that was hooted down as way over the line in the balance between security and liberty. Turns out, in the super-secret and illegal NSA program, we got something much more invasive than even Poindexter envisioned: Adm. John Poindexter, TIA's creator, believed in the potential intelligence benefits of data-mining broadband communications, but he was also well aware of the potential for excess. "We need a much more systematic approach" to data-mining and privacy protection, Poindexter said at a 2002 conference in Anaheim, Calif., sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Poindexter envisioned a "privacy appliance," a device that would strip any identifiers from the information â such as names or addresses â so that government miners could see only patterns. Then if there was reason to believe that the information belonged to a group that was planning an attack, the government could seek a warrant and disable the privacy control for that specific data. TIA funded research on a privacy appliance at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox Corp. "The idea is that this device, cryptographically protected to prevent tampering, would ensure that no one could abuse private information without an immutable digital record of their misdeeds," according to a 2003 government report to Congress about TIA. "The details of the operation of the appliance would be available to the public." No such protection exists for the NSA snooping program. Bush just decided that as a law-free commander-in-chief, he could spy on any American he wanted to. And no one laughed. REPUBLICAN WIRE-TAPPING: More common than you'd think. Here's a PDF report on deployment of domestic wiretapping in anti-trust enforcement by the Justice Department. The law authorizing such domestic taps was passed last year. Under the Republicans, government doesn't just get bigger and bigger; it gets progressively more invasive. Yep: under the Republicans. http://www.andrewsullivan.com/
President Bush's domestic spying policy is nothing new for our government 2006-01-03 By Earl Ofari Hutchinson Pacific News Service LOS ANGELES -- The big puzzle is why anyone is shocked that President Bush eavesdropped on Americans. The National Security Agency for decades has routinely monitored the phone calls and telegrams of thousands of Americans. The rationale has always been the same, and Bush said it again in defending his spying, that it was done to protect Americans from foreign threat or attack. The named targets in the past were Muslim extremists, Communists, peace activists, black radicals, civil-rights leaders and drug peddlers. Even before President Harry Truman established the NSA in a Cold War era directive in 1952, government cryptologists jumped into the domestic spy hunt with Operation Shamrock. That was a super-secret operation that forced private telegraphic companies to turn over the telegraphic correspondence of Americans to the government. The NSA kicked its spy campaign into high gear in the 1960s. The FBI demanded that the NSA monitor anti-war activists, civil-rights leaders, and drug dealers. The Senate Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying in 1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of NSA spying. But the agency slammed the window shut fast when it refused to cough up documents to the committee that would tell more about its surveillance of Americans. The few feeble Congressional attempts over the years to probe NSA domestic spying have gone nowhere. There was a huge warning sign in 2002 that government agencies would jump deeper into the domestic spy business. President Bush scrapped the old 1970s guidelines that banned FBI spying on domestic organizations. His directive gave the FBI carte blanche authority to spy on and plant agents in churches, mosques and political groups, and ransack the Internet to hunt for potential subversives, without the need or requirement to show probable cause of criminal wrongdoing. The revised Bush administration spy guidelines, along with the anti-terrorist provisions of the Patriot Act, also gave local agents even wider discretion to determine what groups or individuals they can investigate and what tactics they can use to investigate them. The FBI wasted little time in flexing its newfound intelligence muscle, mounting a secret campaign to monitor and harass Iraq war protesters in Washington D.C. and San Francisco in October 2003. Another sign that government domestic spying was back in full swing came during Condoleezza Rice's finger pointing at the FBI in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004. Rice blamed the FBI for allegedly failing to follow up on its investigation of Qaeda operatives in the United States prior to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. That increased the clamor for an independent domestic spy agency. FBI Director Robert Mueller made an impassioned plea against a separate agency, and the reason was simple. Domestic spying was an established fact that the FBI and the NSA had long been engaged in. The Sept. 11 terror attacks and the heat the Bush administration took for its towering intelligence lapses, gave Bush the excuse to plunge even deeper into domestic spying. But Bush also recognized that if word got out about NSA domestic snooping, it would ignite a firestorm of protest. Fortunately it did. Despite Bush's weak and self-serving excuse that it thwarted potential terrorist attacks, none of which is verifiable, the Supreme Court, the NSA's own mandate and past executive orders explicitly bar domestic spying without court authorization. The exception is if there is a grave and imminent terror threat. That's the shaky legal dodge that Bush used to justify domestic spying. Bush and his defenders discount the monumental threat and damage that spying on Americans poses to civil liberties. But it can't and shouldn't be shrugged off. During the debate over the creation of a domestic spy agency in 2002, even proponents recognized the potential threat of such an agency to civil liberties. As a safeguard, they recommended that the agency not have expanded wiretap and surveillance powers or law enforcement authority and that the Senate and House intelligence committees have strict oversight over its activities. These supposed fail-safe measures were hardly ironclad safeguards against abuses, but they understood that domestic spying is a civil-liberties minefield that has blown up and wreaked havoc on Americans' lives in the past. The FBI is the prime example. During the 1950s and 1960s, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover kicked FBI domestic spying into high gear. FBI agents compiled secret dossiers, illegally wiretapped, used undercover plants and agent provocateurs, sent poison pen letters, and staged black-bag jobs against black activists and anti-war groups. Bush's claim that domestic spying poses no risk to civil liberties is laughable. Congress should demand that Bush and the NSA come clean on domestic spying, and then promptly end it. http://www.athensnews.com/issue/article.php3?story_id=22997