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

they don't anymore. but didn't they vote for something in Iraq? Afghanistan?

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

Perhaps I should clarify. I meant your own - personal - rights and liberties.

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

Apparently so.

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

in your hypo do I have an Afghan stamp?

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

So every aid worker and government contractor involved in relief and rebuilding efforts surrenders their civil rights? My, no good deed does go unpunished.


Or is it just the people whom we freed from tyranny you wish to punish?

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

Perhaps not, but you do have pretty ones from Pakistan, Spain, France and the House of Saud. Does that change your answer, or would you like to modify Hank's Handy Rule of Thumb for Civil Liberties?

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

It is a real and difficult dillemma. I also agree that letting lots of these people back on the street is not an attractive option.

But I think it is more than "nice" _if_ the laws catch up. It is vital that the laws catch up, because we are a nation of laws. Therefore, it is vital that the administration go through the process of a public debate and appropriate legislation to the extent they think we need to change the way we do things.

I think they also need to not play games with the legal challenges to try to avoid Court rulings on their policies -- which they have done with Padilla, and did with Hamdi. Good God -- when a man like Luttig slams the administration for playing games you know there is a problem.

One of the bottom lines, Hank -- is that there is _always_ a backlash and a reversal of policies over time. The backlash is made harsher when the G is seen as being unduly secretive, abusive and/or authoritarian. So, even those who agree with the policy should see that it is not in the best interests of the country -- long-term, for the G to handle it that way.

You can see what may be the beginnings of it now, when the GOP has a 55-45 Senate advantage, but there are enough Republican defections to defeat efforts to permanently extend the Patriot Act, the President is forced to accede to a ban on torture, at least three GOP Senators have called for hearings on the wiretapping program, and other Presidential priorities (ANWR and/or budget cuts) either go down to defeat or require Cheney to break a tie.

If the backlash from Watergate and the abuses under Nixon led to the Church commission and a backlash which resulted in a long-term degradation of our intelligence capabilities, it seems to me that we would want to avoid similar abuses to avoid a similar backlash this time around.

S_A_M

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

An unfair question to ask a board of lawyers, since "war" is a legal term of art.

As a legal mattter -- it is a crime. As a practical matter, it is both.

S_A_M

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

Let's say you do, but the government hasn't found out yet.

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

That is a bit harsh, and not entirely fair.

He is more willing than you are to trade some freedom for some security, and would draw the line differently than you. I'd probably draw it in a third location. That doesn't mean any of us hate America, or freedom, or Mom, or apple pie.

One problem, though is that once you trade some freedom, its damn tough to get it back.

S_A_M

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

He wants to trade an unspecified amount of freedom, to be determined without knowledge or consent, for some speculated security.

I have sought more details, and what we've learned so far is that he is willing to trade all freedom of certain people for this speculated security.

The problem with the bargain is that we know neither what we are being asked to give nor what we might get in exchange.

Please, Hank, correct me if I am wrong, and identify how much freedom you are ready to surrender, and whose.

Padilla
 

On a fundamental level, yes.

But the protests that started in the 60s were March on Birmingham kind of protests. The riots that originally came about were not dissimilar to the riots in Watts. Black people in America had/have legitimate gripes too. But in America, we started to deal with the problem, instead of arresting people without warrants and holding people without charge. America is not without race violence, but it doesn't have multiple armed paramilitary groups actively warring with each other and with the army.

Ultimately, in modern day western Europe, who really gives a fuck if they live in one country or another, if you're treated live every other citizen. As each day goes by, that becomes more and more like fighting over whether your land should be in California or Oregon. It just doesn't matter, on a fundamental level. It only matters out of a historical sense. Treat people fairly, and the historical sense of outrage will fall away in favor of the business of day to day life.

Britain could have taken the high road and maintained its moral authority. Instead, it panicked and created the second largest ethnic clusterfuck of the second half of the 20th century. (Note, Britain is also primarily responsible for Nos. 1, 4 and 5 as well.)

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

I disagree with Wonk. Pick one. Either one. And fucking stick to it. Personally, it would seem advantageous to treat it as a crime, to analogize Al Queda to the Mob or a drug cartel, and to actually be able to apply punishment toward the perpetrators.

But what we don't get to do is treat it as neither, changing the rules as we see fit. We don't get to say it's an act of war and so we can hold prisoners indefinitely without charge (as though they were prisoners of war) and then say that they aren't prisoners of war (and so are not eligible for the protections of that status).

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

1 The "no warrent" taps. I posted on these. Given the standards are so low to get a warrent, I believe there must have been a compelling GOOD reason to they skipped the procedure. I find that an acceptable thing- phone calls going somewhere overseas are tapped w/o a warrent in a few cases because there is some real reason.

The only answer I received was from TaxWonk who believes there was a compelling BAD answer (no real grounds). I ask why run the risk if the source isn't seemingly real paydirt- and if that is expected, then how could you not have grounds.

In sum, like the "Bush stole the election" "Bush lied us into war" arguments, I believe those that believe Bush evil, see evil motive everything he touches.

And i also don't see what protection a warrent provides here. They grant every request. Do you feel like the warrent procedure gives you some real protection? Please.

2 People held- i believe there are two groups- a few hundred caught in Afghanistan and a few scattered others- 1 a US citizen.

The people who fought in Afghanistan against us- i have no problem with holding forever. I beleive they are trying to work out how to do trials now, but hardcore Taliban/AQ guys being held- yes I'm willing to give up that freedom.

The other's have real direct ties to AQ. If a US citizen has gone to terror camps in Afghanistan am I comfortable that he may be held while the Government figures out how to try him- yes, i can live with that.

Given how long the problem was allowed to grow, and given how awful the injury anyone of these human bombs can inflict, I am comfortable that a few hundred effectively disappear. how is that worse than the thousands of complete innocents that are killed when we say bombed Baghdad? At least the guys were holding have done things to put themselves in that position.

In the end it boils down to whether you trust this administration*. Those that don't see very very bad motives when it does anything. I expect that it wouldn't do these actions unless there is avery good reason. TaxWonk/balt etc would not have been bothered by any of these actions taken by the clinton WH- of course the Clinton WH took no action soits moot.

*you and maybe Spank are the exception. you are both looking at this from a Professor's chair. That respectable, but not realistic in the world we are in right now.

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

When you consider the position of the Clinton administration, made clear by Gorelick's statements at the time, I would highly doubt that the Groper-in-Chief had any qualms about tapping phones.

Except, in his instance, it was the offices of American Spectator and Richie Scaife, not the Arab League.

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

I have some trouble understanding what you are saying here, but it seems to be that

(1) with respect to the taps, you trust the government to have had a good reason, and don't view warrants as providing much protection anyways; and

(2) with respect to holding people suspected of involvement in terrorism, you have no problem holding them forever on suspicion.

My response in each case is that we developed a system of checks and balances and judicial review so that these sort of decisions would be subject to some level of review, and so long as we have such a system in place, I can't understand why we should not give that review.

I have absolutely nothing against apprehending people in a war zone who seem to be threats and holding them for some period pending review; forever, however, I cannot see. At the end of the day, someone needs to build a case or we should let them go. Or, if they are prisoners of war and the war is ongoing, they should be held under the Geneva Convention.

And on the warrants, the fact that such a low threshold was not met strikes me as simply incredibly stupid and irresponsible. Warrants ARE one of the basic protections we have; someone needs to have enough of a case to get in front of a judge and explain themselves with a straight face. To fail to do so in these cases compromises our principles for nothing.

If an associate doesn't hand in a memo you asked for, and says you knew the answer anyway and he was just documenting it so he didn't think it was necessary, do you give him a raise for his efficiency?

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

This has been my point throughout. This is not a Republican / Democrat or liberal /conservative issue. It is an issue between the autocrats and the libertarians.

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

This reminds me of every cop's testimony for why a search was reasonable: "There was clearly a reasonable suspicion--he was the first off the bus, he was carrying a big bag, he paid cash for his ticket, he had on a large down jacket."

Translation: He was black.

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

that was sort of my point. it seems dumb that they didn't get a warrent in all situations- and they did get thousands. as I said previously, things must make sense to me. why would they not have done so in these few cases? That really is the heart of it, isn't it?

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

He hasn't explained why, having had a year to come up with a reason. The fact that 99.99% of these are approved gives me even greater pause as to the WH's judgment. Saddam may be right on this--it's the No. 1 liar in the world.

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

Yes, indeed. I'd like to know why, because I have trouble believing it is mere stupidity - these are smart people. And so much effort seems to have gone into not getting the warrants - certainly, getting 30 presidential authorizations is more work than getting several hundred warrants?

The fact that we don't know why, and no judge knows why, is disturbing to me.

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

how's that? Guy at FBI says--let's get a tap. DOJ says, what's your basis? FBI says, screw it, I'm calling Harriet Miers's assistant. Assistant WHC hits macro for the papers and short cover memo, gets on GWB's desk and off it within the day. Meanwhile the DOJ staffer is calling back saying give me another few hours to put together the application, and the FBI says "no need, it's tapped already".

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

I would be shocked if everything signed by the President isn't subject to a vetting process from multiple angles. I hope you are wrong on this.

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

Except for that 72-hour FISA grace period to get the warrant, this makes perfect sense.

And what's your basis for your scenario how these get put together? I'm thinking that - what, 15,000? - FISA requests is more compelling rationale for a macro than 30 memos to bush.

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

My basis is knowing someone who works at DOJ on these issues, and tells me that like any cops FBI wants unfettered wiretaps, and an informed guess at how things might work in the white house.

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.