No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

I'm sure it was vetted at some point. Clearly they had some discussions at a high level last year, presumably with the president, the AG, the VP, the Counsel, the nat'l security advisor, and so forth, and decided what course of action to take.

Having decided on it, and determined that it was plausibly legal, they said "let's roll". And by "roll" they mean, "let's not gum up the works any more on this stuff." So, now, the policy decision having been made, whoever has the power to do so tells the president what he's signing and he does it, trusting his staff not to mislead him.

But maybe by "multiple angles" you meant "Karl Rove", in which case I just wasted a couple hundred key strokes.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

I would think the FBI would just say "nevermind" and skip the part about it being tapped already.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

I'm with Noam Chomsky on this one. Crime. Probably worst one ever on U.S. soil. There are certainly political advantages to defining it is an act of war, but it doesn't fit any legal definition of an act of war that existed prior to 2001.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

A limited grant of authority, which, IIRC, under the War Powers Act is lawful for a limited period of time. And it didn't say anything about suspending the Constitution.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Apparently you didn't understand Hank's post. You see, he gets to answer the question for you, based upon whether you agree with him or not.

It's kind of like civil liberties, you only get them if we don't need to abandon them to save them.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

regardless of its precise effect, at has the benefit of declaring exactly what it is we're fighting. If Congress had declared war on al qaeda, and the president said that these taps were all aimed at transmissions to/from/within al qaeda, even in the US, I doubt there would be as much handwringing. It's all so vague that it sounds pretty threatening.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

There's an interesting passage in Michael Herr's book, Dispatches about his experience covering the Vietnam War. It discusses an area of SVN known as the BoHo Woods.

It seems the USA had been trying to drive the VC out of the BoHo Woods in advance of a spirit day that figured very powerfully in the local animist religious tradition. Basically, in the locals' eyes, whoever controlled the BoHo Woods would control the area.

The Army dropped enough napalm to completely eliminate the forest. As a soldier Herr interviewed put it:

The locals needed to see the BoHo Woods was free of VC, but we couldn't bust them out. So, no more BoHo Woods.

But I digress. Please, explain again how you can have the government choose to apply the Bill of Rights to some people, but not others, on a basis which nobody can clearly articulate, as long as the government sees a need to do so for national security reasons?

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

You misunderstand. The President himself is not authorizing each individual warrantless wiretap. That kind of review process would take longer than going to FISA and would defeat most of the whole point for the program.

Instead, the "30 authorizations" Bush has talked about are the times Bush reviews the continuing need for the _program_ every 45 days, as set out in the EO, and reauthorizes the program.

There is no evidence of whether this program is frequently used or not. The WaPo story, however, quoted an administration source as saying that many of these requests are approved by "shift supervisors" (presumably at the FBI).

S_A_M

Holiday Funneez . . . .
 

This is not Nice, falls along the theme of "we are smarter than you" which has worked so well for the Dems since 1998, but it gave me a chuckle and has some little known facts. (The real key question is who gets stuck with DC.)

Merry Christmas to all:

"Subject: Dear Red States

"Today, 2005

"Dear Red States,

"We're ticked off at the way you've treated California, and we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, the Blue States include Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of our new country.

"To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and all the slave states; we get stem cell research, the Sierras, the entire Pacific Northwest, and the best beaches.

"We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs; you get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the US tax revenue; you get to make the Red States pay their fair share. We get the Statue of Liberty; you get Opry Land. We get Intel and Microsoft; you get World Com. We get San Francisco and Carmel; you get Fargo, North Dakota and Picayune, Mississippi. We get Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- In fact, we get all the Ivy League and Seven Sisters, plus Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Chicago, Berkeley, Cal Tech, UCLA, and MIT; you get Oral Roberts University, Ole' Miss, and Bob Jones University.

"We get the Golden Gate Bridge; you get the Atchafalaya Causeway. We get Elliot Spitzer; you get Rush Limbaugh. We get PBS; you get Professional Wrestling and the Daytona Speedway.

"Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get most of the happy families; you get a bunch of single moms. You get The Alamo; we get Yosemite.

"Please be aware that our new country will be pro-environment, pro-choice and anti-war. We're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight your wars, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths under false pretenses, and they don't care if the news censors pictures of their dead children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs eventually turn up so you can feel that the sacrifice of our country's reputation, money, and young men and women was worthwhile and that your President is not a liar (and you will be rid of those of us who believe he is not even our President).

"With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, 86 percent of the aerospace industry, more than 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines, 90 percent of all cheese, and most of the high-quality low-sulfur coal. We also will have all living Redwoods, Giant Sequoias and Condors. We will get the solar energy industry; you will get 90 percent of the most polluted toxic waste cleanup sites in the US. We will have the Pacific Coast salmon industry; you will have Louisiana's crayfish. We will get the high-tech industry; you will get Kentucky.

"With the Red States, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all US mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, and virtually 100 percent of all televangelists and telemarketing companies, thank you.

"Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale and that Joshua made the Earth stand still in its rotation, 62 percent believe life is sacred (unless they're discussing the death penalty or gun laws), 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent still believe that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 terror attacks, and 61 percent believe they are people with higher morals then ours.

"Sincerely,


"A Thinking American"

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Unassailable logic. But the locals might not have seen it that way.

I don't.

S_A_M

Intellectual dishonesty?
 

I've received a lot of emails from WH-apologist friends today with stories of previous administrations conducting warrantless searches in the foreign intelligence realm pursuant to the President's inherent constitutional powers. Most of these stories begin by discussing warrantless electronic surveilance, and seem to say that previous Presidents have engaged in identical behvaior. However, the stories use the term "warrantless searches". My guess is that this refers to physical searches, and not electronic eavesdropping. The interception of communications without judicial review is new ground.

My question is, to the extent that the practice of previous administrations is relevant to making a determination of the President's constitutional authority to authorize warrantless wiretaps, even in the face of an explicit congressional statute saying the contrary (the relevance of which may be zero -- it may well be that the last several presidents have all exceeded their constitutional authority), are warrantless physical searches more or less problematic than warrantless electronic searches? Can one argue, with principle, that previous administrations properly conducted warrantless physical searches, but that electronic wiretaps require a different standard?

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Small point, but per the NYT article, it was shift supervisors at NSA who decide what conversations they should listen in on.

The FISA violations discussed in the NYT article relate to NSA listening in on US citizen phone calls. I am not sure of the applicability of FISA to FBI wiretaps, and, if there is applicability, whether there is a parallel program in the WH to justify actions by the FBI that correspondingly violate FISA requirements.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

It's not a matter of believing that Bush is evil and seeing evil in everything he touches. It's a matter of whether the President of the United States views himself as subject to the law, or above it.

I simply turned your question around on you, Hank. Once again, if the warrants (that's how the word is spelled by the way) are so easy to obtain, then what possible reason could there be for not obtaining them?

Perhaps the Administration had a compelling good reason for the initial taps being put in place without a warrant. But given the ease with which one canbe obtained after the fact, the approval for a second round of taps, without having gone for a warrant in the first round retroactively, has the smell of either abuse or the belief that Bush is simply above the law.

Again, here you mistate my position. That's not surprising since you are seldom interested in actually responding to people, finding it easier to attack straw men.

If Clinton had engaged in similar conduct with respect to the illegal arrest and denial of due process to American citizens or had engaged in illegal wiretaps of American citizens, I would be calling for his impeachment. The fact that you seem to feel lying about a blow job is a definitive condemnation of character, but the willful and intentional flouting of actual law is not is what separates us politically Hank.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

I don't care what the argument or what anyone says. Throwing a US citizen in Jail without access to the outside world and being able to hold them indefinitely is beyond any sort of rational debate. I don't care how many planes are hitting buildings. I don't care how many Americans have died. No emergency is worth that scenario.

If that is going on we might as well call this whole "Republican grand experiment thing" over and say that the Republican model we tried in 1787 doesn't work in the modern world.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

No, that's not the heart of it. The heart of it is that once the issue came out, the Adminsitration's response wasn't to admit they made an error, apologize, and explain how they were going to prevent making that error in the future. Their response was, essentially, I'm the President, the Commander in Chief, and I can do as I see fit, regardless of the law, where I deem, in my absolute discretion, it to be a matter of national security.