NSA Whistleblower To Expose More Unlawful Activity: âPeopleâ¦Are Going To Be Shockedâ CongressDaily reports that former NSA staffer Russell Tice will testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee next week that not only do employees at the agency believe the activities they are being asked to perform are unlawful, but that what has been disclosed so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Tice will tell Congress that former NSA head Gen. Michael Hayden, Bushâs nominee to be the next CIA director, oversaw more illegal activity that has yet to be disclosed: A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. ⦠[Tice] said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden. ⦠âI think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. Itâs pretty hard to believe,â Tice said. âI hope that theyâll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesnât exist right now.â ⦠Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. âItâs an angle that you havenât heard about yet,â he said. ⦠He would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he âwill not confirm or denyâ if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites. Tice has a history for blowing the whistle on serious misconduct. He was one of the sources that revealed the administrationâs warrantless domestic spying program to the New York Times.
Gotta love that "economic and other extremely important services"... That's fairly ALL-ENCOMPASSING isn't it? Perhaps that includes taking over the oil industry from the rich-evil-fat oil companies. Nationalizing oil production would certainly make it more efficient, if not, well at least nobody would be profitting! Perhaps that means authoring a 40,000 page manual for the complete overhaul of the entire healthcare system, FORCING tens of millions of INDIVIDUALS into the government employment overnight. Liberals FIRST look to government... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1162267/posts It's funny I hear all the leftists accusing conservatives of following mindlessly with the government... and then insist the goverment take a greater and greater role in managing our lives... It often is truly amusing to witness ...
That's complete ignorant garbage, Universal healthcare (single payer system) would "nationalize" distribution of health services only, in essense we'd have one non-profit insurance company run by the government and covering everyone equally. The status of all other health service providers will not change. Drug companies, hostpitals, ambulances, pharmacies, doctors, nurses will not become government employees, they will remain private for-profit competing businesses. And if you doubt that the government can handle the task I've got news for you, the government that handles the best military in the world can certainly handle distrubution of health services. Governments of most civilized, developed countries have no problem with this - not just France and Canada but Ireland, Israel, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and lots of others. PS Do you know that Medicare's overhead is about 2% while insurance companies' overhead is about 30% and the number probably does not even include their huge profits. Yep, ignorance is a bliss and you look very stupid indeed when you comment on a plan you completely misunderstand.
May 14, 2006 Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping By SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON, May 12 â In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials. But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any warrantless eavesdropping, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001. The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. Details have not emerged publicly of how the director of the agency at the time, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits. Whatever the internal deliberations, General Hayden was the program's overseer and has become its chief salesman. He is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing next week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Criticism of the surveillance program flared again this week with the disclosure that N.S.A. had collected the phone records of millions of Americans in an effort to track terror suspects. By several accounts, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency in April last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks. On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress. On the other side was the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans. As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for suspected terrorists, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, the two intelligence officials said. If people suspected of links to Al Qaeda made calls inside the United States, the vice president and Mr. Addington thought eavesdropping without warrants "could be done and should be done," one of them said. He added: "That's not what the N.S.A. lawyers think." The other official said there was "a very healthy debate" over the issue. The vice president's staff was "pushing and pushing, and it was up to the N.S.A. lawyers to draw a line and say absolutely not." Both officials said they were speaking publicly about the internal discussion because of the importance of the national security and civil liberty issues involved and because the interplay between Mr. Cheney's office and the intelligence agencies is usually hidden from public view. Both spoke favorably of General Hayden; one expressed no view on his nomination for the C.I.A. job, and the other was interviewed by The New York Times weeks before President Bush selected him. Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program. "As the administration, including the vice president, has said, this is terrorist surveillance, not domestic surveillance," Ms. McBride said. "The vice president has explained this wartime measure is limited in scope and conducted in a lawful way that safeguards our civil liberties." Spokespeople for the N.S.A. and for General Hayden declined to comment. Even with the N.S.A. lawyers' reported success in narrowing the program, critics say that it is nonetheless illegal and that it should have never been created. For the first time since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978, the N.S.A. was targeting Americans and others inside the country for eavesdropping without warrants. The spying that would become such a divisive issue for the White House and for General Hayden grew out of a meeting days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush gathered his senior intelligence aides to brainstorm about ways to head off another attack. "Is there anything more we could be doing, given the current laws?" the president later recalled asking. General Hayden stepped forward. "There is," he said, according to Mr. Bush's recounting of the conversation in March during a town-hall-style meeting in Cleveland. By all accounts, General Hayden was the principal designer of the plan. He saw the opportunity to use the N.S.A.'s enormous technological capabilities by loosening restrictions on the agency's operations inside the United States. For his part, Mr. Cheney helped justify the program with an expansive theory of presidential power, which he explained to traveling reporters a few days after The Times first reported on the program in December. Mr. Cheney traced his views to his service as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford in the 1970's, when post-Watergate reforms, which included the FISA law, "served to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in a national security area." Senior intelligence officials outside the N.S.A. who discussed the matter in late 2001 with General Hayden said he accepted the White House and Justice Department argument that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to approve such eavesdropping. "Hayden was no cowboy on this," said another former intelligence official who was granted anonymity because the program remains classified. "He was a stickler for staying within the framework laid out and making sure it was legal, and I think he believed that it was." The official said General Hayden appeared particularly concerned about ensuring that one end of each conversation was outside the United States. But critics of the program say the law does not allow spying on a caller in the United States without a warrant, period â no matter whether the call is domestic or international. "Both would violate FISA," said Nancy Libin, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group. Ms. Libin said limiting the warrantless intercepts to international calls "may have been a political calculation, because it sounds more reassuring." Despite the legal technicalities, for employees of the N.S.A., whose mission is foreign intelligence, avoiding purely domestic appears to have been crucial. One indication that the restriction to international communications was dictated by more than legal considerations came at a House hearing last month. Asked whether the president had the authority to order eavesdropping without a warrant on purely domestic communications, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales replied, "I'm not going to rule it out."
This is one the reasons I nearly never speak to liberals anymore. They're just to fricking stupid. Basically, you're suggesting the entire insurance industry be replaced by a brand new tax system, YET you cliam "...don't favor higher taxes ..." god, the madness of these people.
would have been better off putting that 5% into the s&p until retirement. one the first results in Google, no doubt there are millions more just like it: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/23/politics/main608201.shtml "We don't favor higer taxes!" It's funny this thread was originally about evil conservatives encroaching on our rights, and no doubt you agree with the premise. And on this thread you basically endorse a government take over off 14% of the economy, and forcing millions into government employment... Ask any doctor, if he'd rather answer to the government of an HMO. Frankly, I don't knwo the answer, but it would be interesting to hear the results.
You got that right genius, your mama's employer pays $10,000-$15,000 a year to an insurance company to buy your mama, your daddy and you a pretty lousy health insurance. With Universal Healthcare the employer would be saving all that money and instead paying a few thousand dollars in taxes. Everyone in the country will have full 100% coverage, exactly the way it is practiced in the entire civilized world. You'll get a better coverage, your daddy will never again in his lifetime need to worry whether he can afford a treatment he needs even if your mama loses her job, your mama's employer will save money and headache of managing healthcare cost and various plans, your mama may actually get a raise or a bonus out of it. Everyone wins. Universal Health Plan is Endorsed Thousands of doctors back proposal in JAMA While the four physicians who wrote the plan -- three of whom are affiliated with Harvard Medical School -- are members of a nonprofit organization that has long pushed for universal health coverage, the new proposal is important for two reasons: It was published today in one of the country's most prestigious and its most widely circulated medical journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and because of the large number of doctors -- nearly 8,000, including two former surgeons general -- who endorsed it. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0813-03.htm Try again Einstein.
Clearly we're getting off topic here but two points. Of course MD's favor socialized medicine. Why? For one, once the government is on the hook as "insurer" for malpractice, it'll be impossible to sue and collect. Secondly with the government as super-insurer, people will be using health services LIKE NO FUCKING TOMORROW. Without threat of hiked rates, or having to meet a deductible, the industry will be EXPLOITED with over use. Got a hangnail? Go to the doctor. Woke up with a stiff neck? Go to the doctor. Bored and would like someone to fawn all over you? Go to the doctor. I've been to a doctor perhaps five times in the last 25 years. If it were free in an unbridled sense, I'd go a few times a YEAR. Multiply that shit by 250,000,000.
(This is a bit off topic, but the thread was started to frighten people of the evil conservative warlords, but the fact remains those who advocate on behalf of the government furthering its reach into our everyday lives, is a much greater threat to my personal freedoms. ) Wow, that sounds great.... sign me up. Couple questions, would people be allowed to opt out of such a system? Or would we all be FORCED into such such arrangment with the government. Is this "$3000" a flat fee or do you envision it as a percentage of income? Would this percetange scale up with income brackets? Would this mean "raising taxes". Without ANY price competition, how do you envision costs going down? How about these 12-30 illegal immigrants, when they are granted amnesty are they included? At $5/hr are the waived this "$3000" fee? As the extremely poignant bumber sticker declares.. "You think medicine cost alot now, wait until its free!" The anwser to health-care costs raising is simple, GIVE THE CONSUMERS POWER TO DEFINE PRICES. "My mamma's health insurance ..." Good one, I have catastophic insurance, $3000 deductible. I thought I broke my arm a year ago, so I called around to see how much it would cost for an xray. NOBODY HAD A FR*CKING CLUE!!!! I asked at the desk again, and they looked at me like I had two heads. Simple question, "How much is this going to cost me?" "Well, i have no idea ....."