Kuvas,To disagree and dissent with national policy does not infer that you are disloyal or love our system of govenment any less than those who agree with the policies. Few policies are ever likely to garner universal assent, and minorities play an important role in policy making by arguing their points and trying to persuade the majority to change or compromise. The two party system has done an admirable job of keeping dissent alive.
Good, we agree.
But more at issue, no one is arguing that this sort of intel is unnecessary. What is at issue is that it has been done illegally, and there is no apparent reason for it to be done illegally.
Washington, and even Jefferson, feared the divisiveness of party politics. Both the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans held extreme views and belived that their "party" alone should hold office in perpetuity. It didn't work out that way, and that was a very good thing. The country needs minority views, it needs dissent and for every sitting administration to be criticized. Conservatives don't want to stifle the Liberal wing, but that doesn't change the fact that our enemies use our open political system to their advantage
.
First, perhaps you don't listen to right wing talk radio where the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Rielly, Savage, and Coulter call Liberals "traitors" who should be placed in internment camps or killed . Thankfully you don't, so, just what is the problem? We accept that the Constitution is not a suicide pact and simultaneously accept the burden of living in a free society means that we have to put up with things that drive us crazy by our political adversaries. I accept the freedoms granted to my political opponents not simply because I am a nice guy, but for my own freedom's sake
To the radical Islamic terrorists all opposition to the policies that are focused against them is not only welcome, but provides their best hope of victory. They don't cherish dissent as the foundations of an open society, but see it as a weakness to be exploited.
Yes, they do not accept pluralism and like the aforementioned conservative uber-patriots, no dissent is acceptable. We have our own sort of Taliban who evoke the same attitude towards dissent. But the strength that the enemies of America fear is that of an open pluralistic society. Tto allow more than one viewpoint is anathema to them and just drives them crazy. So pulling back from that level of pluralistic freedom and erecting a monolith drives us to be like them.
They play upon that weakness with their propaganda and with their public displays of terrorism. Americans, they think, have become dissapated, soft and unwilling to accept the blood-costs of fighting for an ideal.
What the enemy thinks is not anywhere nearly as important as what we Americans think. So, how can you believe that Americans are dissipated and soft, when we have rotated over 500,000 military in the Iraq/Afghanistan battlefield, all of who volunteered to join the US military? Jjust because the islamo-fascists say something does not make it true.
Islamic terrorists are proud to die for their cause, and believe that makes them stronger than Americans who become upset at the loss of every life. Like the the Communists before them, this bunch will gladly use our open institutions and humanistic values against us. They haven't the human or material resources to defeat the West, so they believe God will give them victory by the exploitation of the "sins" of Western culture.
Fine, let them die and be martyrs, we should live and be proud to be heroes.
And here I want you to know I have no problem killing our enemies before they can get a chance to kill us. But if history shows us anything, it is that the ends rarely justify the means.
*************
The sky is not falling, and no one should expect to wake tomorrow morning to an American Police State.
Tomorrows have a way of becoming history and we have had recent assaults on personal privacy rights that would have astounded the founders of this nation. Those men set up a government with severe restrictions on the power of government over individuals precisely because they feared its excesses..
It is true that during times of crisis there are restrictions and some limitations on civil rights. The Founders recognized that effective response to threats, especially on a military nature, require strong central leadership. The lack of a strong central govenment and an executive authorized to set and pursue policies in a timely way, was one of the central faults of the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution gives the Executive the powers needed to set national policies and pursue them, even with military force.
No way. The Legislative branch declares war, not the Executive branch and the founders wrote that into the Constitution because they had just overthrown a monarchy who held those war powers in the hands of a single man.
The Constitution provides for the suspension of Habeas Corpus, and it has been suspended in the past.
Yes, in two primary cases; of civil war and of war declared by the elected representatives of the people, but not solely by fiat of the Executive branch that finds current law cumbersome. That is Lincoln's Sin and for all the other good things he did he has been excoriated for it. But we are not engaged in a great civil war, testing whether our nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We were not attacked by Lee's Army of Northern Virginia or the Japanese Imperial Navy. We were attacked by eighteen men with box cutters who hijacked three airplanes.
Bush could have gone to Congress and said. "I need these powers to fight the GWOT." That is what our form of government is set up for; just that situation, but Bush did not seek legal methods, he just bypassed the protocols that had been used for over two centuries in such situations. There is no excuse for that.
and Very rigorous govewnmental censorship has been imposed during virtually every American conflict.
By "conflict," you mean war, declared by Congress.
In each instance, the opposition party screams that we will soon be living in a dictataorship, and that the administration pursuing the National good is a conspiracy of ego maniacs who are mad for power. Its not easy being President during times of crisis when everyone is looking over your shoulder,
the problem is that no one is looking over Bush's shoulder, and unlike other conflicts we have been told that the GWOT may last for decades with no real discernable qualification for victory
What is the definition of victory in the GWOT? Is it two years without a terrorist bombing on US soil, Five years? What is the definition of victory so we can return to normalcy?
giving advice and complaining that THEY would do things differently. During past times of crisis, administrations DID make mistakes and some innocent people were unjustly deprived of the full civil rights we cherish during times of relative peace.
Yeah, my own family had adult male members interned during WWII for being of Italian descent even though other male members of the family were in American military uniform who died in Europe fighting Nazis.
Actually, no one should have been surprised to learn that NSA has at its fingertips the capability of monitoring virtually every electronic signal generated on the face of the earth.
I am not surprised by that, since earier I posted a link to Echelon from 1998 that made clear then some of the capabilities of the NSA, and it is beyond credulity that terrorist organizations are not aware of those capabilities
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,15295,00.html
That's what they were created to do, and they have performed their collection mission admirably. It is an inherent problem that critical data is hidden in the trillions of signals generated every day. NSA's capabilities are unsurpassed in collection of data, and its programs to identify and focus collection on only those parties most likely to generate useful intelligence are far better than almost anyone supposes. The terrorists have learned to their sorrow that it is dangerous to send messages using electronic means.
Any cipher can be broken, sometimes it requires really vast computational power and time ... but in the end no encrypted message is really safe. Short encyptioins with random complex keys are much safer than lengthy messages with a simple substitution key. Codes are much harder to break, but they are more unwieldy and more prone to decrytion error. As the enemy becomes more sophisticated it becomes more difficult to trap complete plans being talked about between high level managers. Inference and small clues taken from a wide collection of sources become the raw material for our analysts. Occasionally, we capture a courier with messages to operational personnel, or we come into possession of computers that can be stripped of information. The focus of all of NSAs collection has to be focused on a relatively small number of people/organizations that are regarded with good reason as being part of the terrorist networks we are fighting.
We have already made it almost impossible for our intelligency services to do their jobs.
How can you say that? You just posted US intel capabilities in the previous paragraph that can snatch out of the ether anything that is carried on sound wave or EM wave.
By restricting our ability to gather HUMINT, we tied one hand behind our backs and paid for that by not having the best intelligence available prior to our last involvement in Iraq. Intelligence is not effectively conducted by observing all the jots and tittles of normal behavior.
We have not been very able to infiltrate terrorist cells because we do not have the agents versed in these cultures. Yet.
Btw: You do admit that human intelligence includes using analysts and translators. So how come if the US intel community is so skinny the US Armed Forces drummed out of the service scores of homosexual men and women who were skilled in those areas? You cannot complain about the dearth of human intel capabilities and say that the risks are so great that we must infringe on our rights yet fire highly skilled people for being gay.