I try not to pay too much attention to national politics these days, but this is shitty news. So, the Senate Intelligence Committee finds that it’s legal for the President of the United States to spy on American citizens with no link to terrorism because the president says it’s legal to do so. Awesome. Where’s the outrage over this? Wasn’t Nixon impeached for less? At least Nixon was spying on political opponents. Bush is spying on citizens who read books.
The next logical step is for Congress to determine it’s legal for the president to eat Jewish babies because the president says it’s legal for him to eat Jewish babies.
For reference, the members of our U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee are:
Pat Roberts, Kansas - R
John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia - D
Orrin G. Hatch, Utah - R
Carl Levin, Michigan - D
Mike Dewine, Ohio - R
Dianne Feinstein, California - D
Christopher S. Bond, Missouri - R
Ron Wyden, Oregon - D
Trent Lott, Mississippi - R
Evan Bayh, Indiana - D
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine - R
Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland - D
Chuck Hagel, Nebraska - R
Russell D. Feingold, Wisconsin - D
Saxby Chambliss, Georgia - R
If you count, you’ll see the Rs outnumber the Ds by one.
(Yep, I’m lookin’ you, Saxby …)
On the radio this week, I heard some Republican hack defending Japanese-American internments & implying that we need something similar now to detain “terrorists” without having to have charges applied to them (or due process or anything else). It’s very depressing.
How about this, the Islamic Fundamentalists quit blowing up embassies, crashing planes into buildings, setting fire to cars, killing innocent journalists, killing innocent women and children, gassing their own people, squelching human rights, rioting over the publishing of cartoons and enlisting warlike tactics to spread terror and there will be no need for any of this.
Put the blame where it belongs on the enemy.
Now, let the fun begin.
Jeffrey,
Give me one good reason that the President of the United States should be able to listen to my phone calls. And quit pretending to be a conservative.
The president won’t and shouldn’t listen on your phone calls… UNLESS… you are talking “outside the country to a person suspected of being an Al Qaeda member”.
Rusty, I have loads of respect for you and you know that, and I know that you are not talking to Al Qaeda and so does the president I am sure.
Look, let’s not take things overboard here. The idea of listening into “enemy” phone calls has been used by Presidents before Bush in times of war. This is a war, and people have been complaining for months that the President hasn’t treated it as such.
Now he is treating like a war and these same people are complaining that he is.
You are an intelligent person and I know you are aware that he is not just listening into every phone conversation, so let’s not paint with such a broad brush here.
Yes, there is a slippery slope issue here, but some how we kept it from going to far in the past.
Now before you bring up internment during WWII again, remember that this is far from internment and just like making the “ridiculous claim” that marijuana is a gateway drug. So is the claim that tapping “foreign calls from suspected members of Al Qaeda to people in the United States” is going to lead to internment of all Muslims.
You know this won’t happen so do I. All I am saying is that it is more specific then spelled out above. Let’s call it what it is.
And I am a conservative; I am conservative of what I feel the country I live in was founded on. I am sorry if that to you is an act or if you don’t agree with that, but I will say this when I voted in my first election, I have many of the same feelings many people on this blog have. I just realize now that I don’t feel that way any more. I am not saying that what I believe is right or wrong, just what I believe.
Speaking of which, and I am blockquoting a CNN Story on the front page of CNN.com, because I do read more than Fox news.
Eleven people were killed and an Italian consulate burned in Libya on Friday during protests to denounce the publication of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed, sources in Libya said. Some Libyan protesters said they were angry because an Italian minister wore a T-shirt displaying one of the cartoons on Italian TV this week. Demonstrations have occurred across the Muslim world in recent weeks over 12 cartoons of Mohammed that first appeared in a Danish newspaper.
How many more innocent people will have to die. I am sorry but this is getting out of hand. I am Catholic and on any given day of the week there are numerous cartoons published that make fun of “the Pope” and I am a born again Christian and I can’t count the number of times I see things degrading “Christ” some sponsered by the government like the wonderful Maplethorpe exhibit. But I don’t go burning down embassies and marching on the people that wrote them to “seek revenge”.
I might bitch and complain but I have that right as do any of us. Just don’t kill over it, terrorists do kill over it. That is wrong, in anyway and it needs to be stopped.
Journalists talk to al Queda members to form their stories. Do you think the president should be able to listen into their conversations? Does that not undermine the concept of a free press?
Besides that, several intelligence officials told the New York Times that many people who’d never spoken with al Queda had their phone tapped. Further, they said the few leads the program did generate had already been found through other (legal) sources.
Re:
Nobody really knows who he does or doesn’t spy on because he doesn’t get warrants and he illegally refuses to cede oversight of the program to Congress.
He’s breaking the law and should be impeached for it.
And I think the Muslims killing people over cartoons are stupid and should be exterminated, but that has zero bearing on whether the president should get to listen to my phone calls.
I am sorry Rusty but I disagree and calling for impeachment is as ridiculous as the Republicans calling for Clinton’s impeachment.
The fact is that Abraham Lincoln threw aside the Constitution in a time of war, FDR did the same, as did Woodrow Wilson in WWI. This is a war, and the rules that apply to civilian law do not apply to the Commander in Cheif of the Armed Forces during a time of war.
And from that same article above comes the following quote:
“Intelligence officials disagree with any characterization of the program’s results as modest, said Judith A. Emmel, a spokeswoman for the director of national intelligence’s office. Ms. Emmel cited a statement at a briefing last month by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the country’s second-ranking intelligence official and the director of the N.S.A. when the eavesdropping program was started.
“I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program that would not otherwise have been available,” General Hayden said.
The fact is that this is a program like any other the government has. If it is working correctly the only information we will get will be the ones that were failures. Because the ones that were a success were probibly matters of National Security and that is not always reported.
Like I said I understand people being hesitant, but let’s not take it overboard.
Rusty once again I disagree. People who are willing to kill people over a cartoon are not going to be found through conventional ways. These are people willing to throw their very life away on a whim.
You will not find them with a search warrant sitting eating pizza. They look perfectly normal one minute and have a bomb strapped to their chest the next, and most times the one thing that does happen between the one minute and the next is a “phone call”. So I think that it has a bearing.
No, it’s not. This isn’t fibbing about nookie. This is wiping his ass with the Constitution.
All three of them should have been impeached for it too.
The thing is, the FISA warrants are retroactive, so there is not a single reason that Bush couldn’t have gone back to get them other than he just plain didn’t want the courts and congress to know who he was spying on.
There’s nothing he can acomplish without the warrants that he can’t accomplish with them.
Once again, getting a FISA warrant or not getting a FISA warrant would make no difference in the effectiveness of the searches.
Well, Rusty, I am sorry but you do not impeach what many people agree are at least 2 of the greatest Presidents this country ever had (referring to Lincoln and FDR).
The fact is that Abraham Lincoln threw aside the Constitution in a time of war, FDR did the same, as did Woodrow Wilson in WWI.
All three of them should have been impeached for it too.
Also, from that same article you quoted above, there is more interesting information about the warrants. It is on Page 3:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a warrant for the use of so-called “pen register” equipment that records American phone numbers, even if the contents of the calls are not intercepted. But officials with knowledge of the program said no warrants were sought to collect the numbers, and it is unclear whether the secret executive order signed by President Bush in 2002 to authorize eavesdropping without warrants also covered the collection of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
So let’s say that the pen register that requires a warrant, is something that the NSA did and that was not “expressly called for by Bush”. Then it would be the NSA at fault.
Once again, impeachment carries with it a high level of proof. There is not enough here, and there was not enough in the three cases for Wilson, Lincoln and FDR. There wasn’t even enough for Clinton. So once again, an extreme is not needed here. Nor is it called for.
Should congress make him go get the warrants “maybe”, but that is a call for congress and if they say no, then that is what they say.
We are never going to agree on this, but I do appreciate you making me research it “even more than I already had”. I like the challenge, but I disagree with you and I will on this point no matter what.
This is war, nothing more nothing less, and I leave war up to those who I elected to do so. Once again we all get to vote soon and I will vote and so will you. At that point we will once again get to make choices that will affect this country. That is what is great about America. That is why I love living here and why I believe the way I do.
Lincoln suspending habeas corpus isn’t enough proof? Geez, what does he need to do, eat a Jewish baby?
Ha!! Quote of the day.
Just a quick comment from my hotel room in Our Nation’s Capital®, where my every move is surely being monitored… Jeffrey, it sure is sweet that the Timothy McVeighs of the world still get a ‘get out of jail free’ card according to your plan for combating terrorism. I bet it would work like a charm. I mean, we all remember how locking up the Japs during WWII stopped that war dead in its tracks.
Well, Amber hasn’t read everything I wrote. So I will mover on to Rusty’s last comment, eating a Jewish baby at the time of Lincoln wouldn’t have been enough proof either… lol
Yes, mover right on, Jeffrey… mover on…
I love how responding to a half-hearted snark after ignoring (or movering on or whatever) a genuine rebuttal is considered to be a legitimate debate tactic in some circles.
I think that the whole nation needs to reconsider its verbiage considering the concept of “war.”
Are we at war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Insomuch as American service people are deployed in a field of combat and risking their lives, absolutely. Is that war, or for that matter, Vietnam, Korea, Panama ‘89, Gulf War I and the myriad of other military actions our country has taken in the last three generations, commensurate with World War II or The Civil War, certainly not. Our sovereignty is not at stake. The scale of the conflict does not reach into our homes or transform our national industries. Before we can have a meaningful discussion on a President’s wartime powers we must first define what is meant by wartime as there is no comparison between the full scale, nation destroying, continent wide wars of years past and any military engagement in the last five decades.
If one defines war as being the state in which peoples inside or outside the country are planning harm of some form against a nation or its interests then virtually every country on Earth is in a state of perpetual war and would, via the current administration’s logic, give a President carte blanche to trample on the civil rights of all Americans. This, moreso than any martial threat on the part of a foreign power or organization would end American life as we understand it. Moreover, the greatest present threat to our nation comes not from terrorists abroad but from wartime powers being used to erode of the very principles on which the USA was founded.
Wow, Thomas, an impressive breakdown, and by far one of the more intelligent things I have read on this blog.
The definition of “war” has changed, and I think one of the reasons why is unlike in the past, war has a detachment with it that it has never had before.
In the past during the major wars of WWI and WWII as well as the Civil War, people needed to be invloved battlefields were defined by where the infantry fought gun to gun and person to person.
Now, war can be waged from a ship thousands of miles away with missles and bombs that can hit a pin head by satellite. However, I would argue that it is no less a war than before.
Much like the wars of the past, it is ideologies from different standpoints coming into conflict. I do not think that we are indanger of obliterating our rights but I do think that for the first time in years we are evaluating the “responsibilities” that come with the “rights” we are granted.
Some people here would disagree with me, and I would venture to say more disagree than agree, but I feel that the American public in the middle and late ninties forgot that there were numerous responsibilities that came with the rights they were granted and abused those rights.
Now we have to reevaluate, reestablish and for sake of a better word retake the responsibilites so we can have our rights back in the unfettered way we did in the eighties and early ninties.
Who said anything about a genuine debate tactic? Surely you are not speaking of my one-liner. Anyone who thinks that was a “geniune debate tactic” should be smacked around with their own passive aggressive tendencies.
The only thing really relevant in this entire thread to what the original argument was what Rusty said about how easy it is to get these warrants. The only plausible reason that Bush would not get one was because he did not want the appropriate members of government to know who he was spying on. This is highly suspicious but I don’t think impeachable. However he should have to divulge the entire list of who was wire tapped immediately…then we’ll see if there were some reason he didn’t want us to know. That would clear this whole mess up in a week (unless he was pulling a Nixon and listening to opposing political groups…wouldn’t that be funny).
I mentioned journalists because there was conjecture a month or so ago that CNN’s Christiane Amanpour was one of the people being spied on by the program. Amanpour is married to a former Clinton Administration official, so there was potentially both spying on journalists and on political adversaries.
To my knowledge, that was never proven (we all would have heard about it if it had been). But it can’t exactly be refuted either without someone gaining access to the lists and saying so. So I don’t automatically assume that’s true, but I’m not discounting it either.
The impeachable offense is in spying on American citizens without warrants, which is illegal. The only legal defense Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has offered for the program is “it’s legal because the prsident says it’s legal” and “the Congress granted him this power after 9-11.” Both explanations are bullshit. The president was granted the power to use any force he deems necessary (which is waaaaaay too broad as it is), but was never granted the right to eavesdrop on anybody without a warrant.
Who said anything about a genuine debate tactic? Surely you are not speaking of my one-liner. Anyone who thinks that was a “geniune debate tactic†should be smacked around with their own passive aggressive tendencies.
I was talking about his initial response to you. Congratulations on that whole thinking the world is out to get you thing, emo girl.
Whatever, it was right after my comment, fool.
Hey, it’s not my fault that you not inferring contextually got you owned.
While I totally agree with you Rusty that what I think he’s doing is illegal I don’t think its impeachable for the same fact that you mentioned…that congress granted him powers way beyond broad after 9/11. Hell if I was given the virtual blank check he was given(figuratively and literally) I’d be doing whatever I wanted to too. So while many fingers need to be pointed at him many also need to be pointed at Congress and the media for being his toadies for 2 years after 9/11. They should have been screaming about this stuff 3 years ago.
Jeffery, you’re the worst kind of boot-licking, authoritarian cultist, the kind that can justify anything because of your fear.
You are willing to give up your freedom for the illusion of security, and you deserve neither.
Speaking of, why haven’t you enlisted to fight the war aganist Eurasia yet? Too many warts on your ass?
What does it say that the United States and its allies routinely subvert democratically-elected governments for tyrannies that are more friendly to their corporate interests, what does it say the the US routinely bombs populated areas and murders dozens or hundreds of civilians without even tracking how many, what does it say that the US observes and follows many of these tactics that you described above and these Islamic Fundamentalists are simply responding in kind?
Your understanding of this conflict is so simplistic that it defies belief, do you think that the Islamic Fundamentalists just appearred out of no where? Do you think that they just attacked us without context?
The problem here is that this surveillence was done without any attempt to document the process. Warrants, which could have been granted without anything more than a request (and retroactively, even) were not asked for, as if there was something to hide. Oversight is the most important part of a government such as ours that seeks to separate powers. That you are so keen to look past discretions like this in the interest of assuaging your fears only confirms what I said in my last post.