Sam, I'm sure you're intention is not to paint all Muslims as extremists. Maybe you'd care to correct your statement for specificity. Maybe.
The judge's decision won't affect anything other than information-gathering. Here's info on the facts that are already known: US DOJ - A Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence Information Prior to the September 11 Attacks If you don't want to read the entire report, skip to the conclusion at the end. No where in the entire report does it consider information-gathering to be a hindrance, but that getting the information into the right hands was the problem. Publicly however, both the CIA and FBI were pointing their fingers at each other saying "we provided you with info, you didn't do anything with it and messed up". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONCLUSION - "Our review also found that the CIA did not provide information to the FBI about Hazmi and Mihdhar when it should have and we believe the CIA shares significant responsibility for the breakdown in the Hazmi and Mihdhar case. However, the FBI also failed to fully exploit the information that was made available to them. In addition, the FBI did not assign sufficient priority to the investigation when it learned in August 2001 that Hazmi and Mihdhar were in the in the United States. While we do not know what would have happened had the FBI learned sooner or pursued its investigation more aggressively, the FBI lost several important opportunities to find Hazmi and Mihdhar before the September 11 attacks." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ UPI (5/30/2002) - " FBI agent: I was stymied in terror probe By Nicholas M. Horrock UPI Chief White House Correspondent From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk Published 5/30/2002 7:04 PM View printer-friendly version WASHINGTON, May 30 (UPI) -- A Chicago FBI agent charged Thursday that colleagues stymied his efforts to investigate the funding of Middle East terrorists in 1994 and 1995 to keep cushy surveillance assignments going and protect their jobs. Special Agent Robert Wright said these activities "allowed foreign-born terrorist operatives, such as the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, to engage in illegal activities in the United States." He also disclosed that a Muslim FBI agent had accused him of religious discrimination during the investigation and he made public a sworn statement he had given on the charges. Wright, who is attached to the Chicago Field Office of the FBI, held a Washington news conference sponsored by Judicial Watch -- a private, conservative watch dog group -- at which he read from and released a copy of a lawsuit he has launched against the FBI, and an exchange of letters about a book he is seeking to publish. He declined to answer questions. In the lawsuit -- against the FBI and "unknown officials" of the FBI -- filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, Wright said that agents attached to the FBI's International Terrorism Unit in 1994 and 1995 did not want terror suspects prosecuted and stymied his efforts prepare cases of their involvement in "well organized criminal activities." ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Knight Ridder Newspapers - "NSA didn't share key pre-Sept. 11 information, sources say By JONATHAN S. LANDAY Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON â A secretive U.S. eavesdropping agency monitored telephone conversations before Sept. 11 between the suspected commander of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the alleged chief hijacker, but did not share the information with other intelligence agencies, U.S. officials said Thursday. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the conversations between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Mohammed Atta were intercepted by the National Security Agency, or NSA, an intelligence agency that monitors and decodes foreign communications. The NSA failed to share the intercepts with the CIA or other U.S. intelligence agencies, the officials told Knight Ridder. It also failed to promptly translate some intercepted Arabic language conversations, a senior intelligence official said..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ WABC Wednesday, May 29, 2002 12:15 a.m. EDT - "Condoleezza Rice Warned Sept. 6 About Imminent Terror Attack Five days before Sept. 11, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was warned that a terrorist attack inside the United States was imminent, a former U.S. senator who headed up a blue-ribbon commission on terrorism revealed late Tuesday. "I've known the national security advisor, Professor Rice, for about 20 some years," former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart told WABC Radio's John Batchelor and Paul Alexander. "She was a supporter of mine in my first presidential campaign as a graduate student in Denver." After giving a speech on the terrorist threat in Montreal on Sept. 5, Hart said he requested an urgent meeting with Dr. Rice in Washington. "I said to her, 'You must move more quickly on homeland security. An attack is going to happen.' "That was Sept. 6, 2001," Hart told WABC, without characterizing Dr. Rice's reaction. The night before, Hart said, he issued the same warning to an air transportation group in Canada. Three years ago Hart and former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman co-chaired the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, which warned specifically of a domestic terrorist attack. In a Sept. 15, 1999 report, the Hart-Rudman Commission concluded, "America will be attacked by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction and Americans will lose their lives on American soil, possibly in large numbers." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ABCnews (June7) - "A Big Warning - Security Agency Intercepted Arabic Conversation that Spoke of the Sept. 11 Attacks, But Failed to Translate It in Time June 7 â The National Security Agency intercepted and secretly recorded at least one conversation in Arabic before the Sept. 11 attacks in which the participants spoke about something big that was going to happen on that day, ABCNEWS has learned. However, the information was not translated until after the attacks because agency officials were too swamped and overwhelmed with data, sources told ABCNEWS. This is the first reported intelligence information that referred specifically to Sept. 11 as a time for the attack. Part of the problem, sources said, is that the agency, which coordinates, directs, and engages in specialized activities to protect U.S. information systems and produce foreign intelligence information, gets millions of pieces of information, and does not have enough analysts to search through it all and interpret it. Unfortunately, the Sept. 11 attacks illustrated that problem. " ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Again, the problem isn't getting information, they already have too much to deal with. The problem was sifting through all the info. Using illegal wiretaps to obtain even more raw data will just bog down the entire system even more.
Iâm not painting all Muslims as extremists, just as I wouldnât paint all Communists as extremists.
I won't walk into a loaded question, so just go ahead and give me your answer so I can file a response.
If you want to have a reasonable argument, then you need to stay away from the extreme. The right to listen is the farthest thing from a liberal legal interpretation of freedom of speech. I don't, off hand, have the legal citation that confirms this interpretation, but I'm sure that it's sufficiently ancient in our law to be considered a precedent that no Supreme Court Justice on either side of the interpretive canyon would ever consider messing with. The issue is whether or not the President has overstepped his authority. I don't necessarily say that he has. It's really up to the Supreme Court and the Congress to decide. But, half the people here are hammering on Judge Taylor as if her ruling were bizarre and twisted, when in fact, the ruling is quite sane. It may be overturned on appeal, or it may not -- but it's a thoughtful ruling. If you want to live in a world where everyone agrees with your point of view, and no ACLU exists, I will not join you there, any more than I would want to join you in a world where no Federalist society exists. It is only in the continuous battle for power between ideas that our freedom is maintained. If the three branches of government every really reach a consensus on most issues, that will be the signal that our nation is truly doomed.
John Dough you ask people to stay away from the extreme, but you equate our elected leaders to Hitler. My advice is buy a morror and spend the weekend in front of it.
You are misrepresenting my comment so as to make it easy for you to suggest that I am hypocritical. Nowhere above did I equate our leaders to Hitler. I said that if you want to live in a nation governed by a totalitarian, then "don't require any judicial or legislative scrutiny over the President, and eventually, the model which was known as the Third Reich is exactly what you will get here in this nation." I assume from your complaining about me, that you find the current administration's actions completely acceptable, thus there is no need for either judicial or legislative scrutiny of the President's actions. The difference between you and me is that you apparently are willing to trust your leader to do the right thing, while I want someone with a little more skepticism about the ability of a leader to resist the Siren's call of ultimate power, to be sitting on his shoulder. Fundamentally, the question is reasonably asked: Why does Mr. Bush refuse any judicial oversight, even though the Congress created the FISA to deal with the circumstances we now face? The Administration claims that the technological requirements make getting a warrant impossible/impracticable, etc. Actually, the Administration has never really nailed down exactly why this is so or even that it is so. Instead it just dances on the head of a pin, and taunts the courts and the people and the Congress to try and stop them from doing it their own way. It may be that the Adminstration is completely right and that their way is the only way to get the job done. But, still We the People are Constitutionally entitled to have something more than a mere statement of: "trust me," before we sign off on the entire Bill of Rights, don't we? I'm going to anticipate your response: if the Pres were doing it wrong, we would have been attacked again by now. The problem with this rebuttal is that it is unverifiable for the exact same reason that we can't verify whether the Pres deserves our trust: because he permits no oversight. The only person who is entitled to no oversight is God. Hitler set himself up as God. If Bush doesn't want to be equated with Hitler by his detractors (and, I am not either equating or detracting, here so don't start waving your magic mirror around), then Mr. Bush should say, "OK, let's have a judge sit in the NSA office and monitor what's going on." It would be that friggin' simple. But, the Pres' ego just won't allow it. Which to me, demonstrates that the Pres is not to be trusted. If he were, then we would have the oversight and the entire argument would be rendered moot.
What's your definition of "hate America"? My definition is people like you who put the interests of Israel before those of America defintely hate America. Why don't you people move to Israel permanently?
^^^ MORON alert Let me guess, another paper-trader-want-to-be who was allowed to vote for Bush multiple times on the same Diebold machine.