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Yeah, that's what I mean Mr. Dense.
It wasn't deflection. I specifically asked who was in chains and enslaved. I want to respond to your assertion but, you provide no support for the claim.
My reference to Sharia Law was an attempt to inform my opinion that it is my standard for what cons utes "chains and slavery."
And, why did it take you a year to get incensed about this latest NSA program which was reported by the New York Times in 2005?
Yeah, that's what I mean Mr. Dense.
You used to work there. Key words "used to". I did to. Want to compareI used to work there. Diddybop.
You thumbsuckers on the right slay me. A handful of misfits from the middle east get together and conspire to fly planes into buildings and you are ready to shred the cons ution. Please, protect me Mr. Bush!
Now go change your pants.
notes?
By the way, those "handful of misfits" took over a country, blew up the
WTC twice, several embassies, a barracks, a naval ship and assassinated
several people. Busy little "handful" weren't they. Want to restate your
statement?
Actually no. First of all they did not take over any countries. They found refuge in a rogue state is the way I would characterize it. There was very little hue and cry from anyone when the first WTC attack occurred and the other overseas acts. Like I said, when a handful of misfits flew some planes into buildings here then people began surrendering their freedoms for security.
Only an extremely small number of people opposed the military being sent into Afghanistan in pursuit of Bin Laden. I along with most others, were proud of the accomplishments of the military there. They literally took over the country with special forces when the Russians were bogged down for years to no avail.
Then it was off to Iraq. Afghanistan and Bin Laden were shoved to the back burner.
Here at home we were implored that our fight against terrorism was to preserve our way of life. Yet the freedoms and privacy we have enjoyed were being taken away. True, we are not under Sharia law but why are we inching toward something like it? Just because we aren't as bad as someone else does not excuse bad behavior on our part.
I hold my country to higher standards than other nations or cultures.
That's exactly what makes you un-American. Ironic, huh?
I really don't know how to take your post, as sarcasm or what?
I find his statement dumb and misinformed. He holds his country to a
higher standard. Is there a "standard"? I don't think so. Every country,
should and must look out for their own interest, which includes the
safety and security of their citizens. What is different now days is that
people in our own country will reveal the secrets and inner workings of
our government to obtain a leg up on the opposition party. This started
during the VN era and has accelerated during the Bush administration by
operatives of the opposing party, the dimm-o-craps. They have placed
their ideas and party ahead of the security of their own nation and use
the idea of "truth above all else" and "purity of ideas" as their excuse.
I am lucky in some ways over the younger crowd and idealist on this
forum. I have lived a country that prospered and took much pride in
its self. I served many years overseas and saw the gradual deterioration
of ideas that the "progressive" and "liberal" thinkers brought to the
fore. Like the old "ugly American". We should be ashamed of being an
American and acting like an American when we were overseas, hogwash.
I was proud to be a "Texas first, American second". I had pride in my
country and State. In Canada I used to remind the Canadians: "hey
you know you are an American too". You live on the American continent
just like Mexico. They too are Americans, just from a different region.
(But they should be here in the US of A legally).
Now we have the next generation of those who wish to put this country
down and tell everyone within earshot that we, US of A citizens are a
sorry lot, we dominate the world, which is wrong as two left feet, we
bend over backwards to get along with the world. We kill, torture, spy
on our own people, throw people in jail for no reason, wont give people
a fair trial.....on and on and on.
Like I said, I am in the twilight years of my life and have experienced the
a great life in this wonderful country. Those that advocating and
preaching this hate for our country to will rue the day, mark my words.
I was fortunate enough to have been able to serve this great country in
two great jobs for over 50 years, and yes enjoyed every one of them.
Although some were tough. But I did serve from shortly after WWII,
Korea and Viet Nam and most of the cold war years. Those who are
trying to put this country down and give it away, I feel pity and
will resist you till my dying breath. It may only be with words, but
I will not be quite.
The Bush lovers here would go into apoplexy if was a Democratic president doing this. No one, neither party, should have the power this president has grabbed.
Clinton did do this. Can you say "Echelon," I knew that you could...
The Clinton administration compiled with the FISA law or at least there is testimony to that effect:
http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/20/the-echelon-myth/
The Clinton administration program, code-named Echelon, complied with FISA. Before any conversations of U.S. persons were targeted, a FISA warrant was obtained. CIA director George Tenet testified to this before Congress on 4/12/00:
"I’m here today to discuss specific issues about and allegations regarding Signals Intelligence activities and the so-called Echelon Program of the National Security Agency…
"There is a rigorous regime of checks and balances which we, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the FBI scrupulously adhere to whenever conversations of U.S. persons are involved, whether directly or indirectly. We do not collect against U.S. persons unless they are agents of a foreign power as that term is defined in the law. We do not target their conversations for collection in the United States unless a FISA warrant has been obtained from the FISA court by the Justice Department."
So Clinton is the new ethical standard-bearer for the Republican party? If Clinton did it, then it must be OK, right? Even the most politically gullible can see the fallacy in that argument.
Meanwhile, the reason the WH didn't want to go through the FISA court was because they KNEW would lose their case...
Thursday, May 11, 2006
No need for Congress, no need for courts
I just this morning read the obviously significant USA Today article detailing the fact that the NSA is maintaining a comprehensive data base of every call made by every American – both internationally and domestically – whether they have anything to do with terrorism or not, obviously all of this without warrants or oversight of any kind. I'm not going to pretend to have all of the legal issues figured out in two hours, and so I won't yet opine as to whether there are serious grounds for arguing either that this is legal or that it’s illegal.
But there is one highly significant, and revealing, item buried in the USA Today article regarding Qwest's refusal to cooperate with the NSA’s demands (and it heroic refusal to capitulate to the NSA’s intimidation tactics and threats) that it turn over its customers' calling data:
The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.
Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.
In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.
The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.
This theme emerges again and again. We continuously hear that the Bush administration has legal authority to do anything the President orders. Claims that he is acting illegally are just frivolous and the by-product of Bush hatred. And yet, as I detailed here, each and every time the administration has the opportunity to obtain an adjudication of the legality of its conduct from a federal court (which, unbeknownst to the administration, is the branch of our government which has the authority and responsibility to interpret and apply the law), it does everything possible to avoid that adjudication.
This continuous evasion of judicial review by the administration is much more serious and disturbing than has been discussed and realized. By proclaiming the power to ignore Congressional law and to do whatever it wants in the area of national security, it is seizing the powers of the legislative branch. But by blocking courts from ruling on the multiple claims of illegality which have been made against it, the administration is essentially seizing the judicial power as well. It becomes the creator, the executor, and the interpreter of the law. And with that, the powers of all three branches become consolidated in The President, the single greatest nightmare of the founders. As Madison warned in Federalist 47:
From these facts, by which Montesquieu was guided, it may clearly be inferred that, in saying "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates," or, "if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers," he did not mean that these departments ought to have no partial agency in, or no control over, the acts of each other.
His meaning, as his own words import, and still more conclusively as illustrated by the example in his eye, can amount to no more than this, that where the whole power of one department is exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another department, the fundamental principles of a free cons ution are subverted. This would have been the case in the cons ution examined by him, if the king, who is the sole executive magistrate, had possessed also the complete legislative power, or the supreme administration of justice; or if the entire legislative body had possessed the supreme judiciary, or the supreme executive authority.
I was specifically answering this post:
Pay attention.
Eh, yes a higher standard. The country you and I live in should not be:
1) Abridging freedoms that are protected by the consi ution
2) Torture.
3) Spy on our own citizens without judicial oversight. One man is not above the law and even if he has our best interest at heart, successors may not. How about we borrow something the righties have been saying lately, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't have anything to hide." And you Mr. Bush?
4) Attacking sovereign nations that have not attacked us.
etc.....
No dan, once again you show your colossal ignorance. Lincoln did his
thing, FDR did his thing, and Clinton did his thing. Most Presidents did
their thing about spying. Growup. You act like a dumbass teenager.
Spying is about keeping an eye on people who will do you harm. Some
dictators have set up programs where neighbors spy on neighbors, but
as yet, I haven't seen that here. We have not infringed on anyones
rights. Congress has been briefed on all aspects of our programs and
until now have had no problems. Get a life, learn a little bit. And do
enjoy all the freedoms you do have.
FISA did not exist during either the Lincoln or Roosevelt Administrations. It did exist during the Clinton Administration and, as shown above, that President's efforts to undertake domestic surveillance efforts were apparently preceded by the procurement of an appropriate warrant.
That's the thing that is different here, xray. The Bush II Administration is subject to FISA (and the Fourth Amendment, to which FISA creates a limited exception) but has done nothing -- apparently -- to obtain warrants to legalize its actions. If the Administration had the appropriate warrant, I can assure you that my concerns would be wholly assauged.
. . . while you can.
Those Phone Records Sure Are Secret!
The Qwest privacy policy for telephone customers on the Web:
So . . .
It's a great invasion of privacy to data mine calling patterns for national security purposes, even if the call is not listened to.
But, isn't it noteworthy that the phone company does this on a far more personal level to decide what services to try to sell to you and, probably, to do joint marketing to you with others?
Moral of the story: Those hot and bothered by the telephone call database mining program don't know or appreciate what telephone companies do all the time for their business purposes or the purposes of their business partners.
And wasn't there a big news story just a couple of months ago about the fact that, for a nominal sum, you can buy anyone's cell phone records? In fact, liberal bloggers tried to put together a plan to buy and analyze the telephone records of prominent Republicans in hopes of finding calls that would somehow be embarrassing. These same liberals, of course, are now up in arms about the fact that the NSA does computer analyses of phone records, not with the malicious purpose of singling out political enemies for harassment, but to try to stop terrorist attacks.
There is really no hypocrisy quite like the hypocrisy of a liberal.
One more thing: since Qwest shares its customers' records with companies with which it has a "business relationship," but not with the NSA to prevent terrorist attacks, there is no way I'm doing business with Qwest.
You should never trust a company that can't spell.
Show me where Clinton received the millions of search warrants that surely would have been "appropriate" for the Echelon and Carnivore programs.
No you wouldn't, you'd be bashing them on something else.
Greg Palast dwells into who is DATA-MINING for the Neocons...
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed , called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "[B]hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States …linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.
" And that scares the out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence … that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting iden y thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.
But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).
But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to iden y victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.
" Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.
It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.
The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.
But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.
And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.
Scoop? We Didn't Have Any Scoop!
The New York Times editorial page is in its usual hysterical form today:
The Times' conflation of "monitoring" and "collecting information on" calls is quite dishonest. What the government is doing here is essentially maintaining a database of people's phone bills--information the phone companies store and use for their own marketing and billing purposes. In Smith v. Maryland (1979), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law-enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to collect such information.
That's not even the most astonishing thing about the Times piece. The USA Today report that leaves the editorialists so breathless turns out to be largely a rehash of a story that appeared way back on Christmas Eve--in, yep, you guessed it, the New York Times!
The Times, of course, helped land one of its own reporters in jail by pushing for an investigation of who "leaked" accurate information to journalists in the Valerie Plame nonsense. Now the paper is so eager to hyperventilate about President Bush that it is willing to give another paper credit for a scoop it reported itself months ago. This is demented.
Considering how the liberal intelligence community is leaking like a sieve, I wouldn't be surprised if our secrets end up being the absolute domain of conservatives.
Well now that the CIA is under the guise of a Dubya apologists, we won't have that 'pesky liberal intelligence' getting in our way anymore, right?
By the way, I switched to QWest this morning, and when my contracts up, I'm switching to T-mobil....
WASHINGTON, May 12 — The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws, a lawyer for the telephone company's former chief executive said today.
In a statement released this morning, the lawyer said that the former chief executive, Joseph N. Nacchio, made the decision after asking whether "a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request."
Mr. Nacchio learned that no warrant had been granted and that there was a "disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," said the lawyer, Herbert J. Stern. As a result, the statement said, Mr. Nacchio concluded that "the requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."
Qwest was the only phone company to turn down requests from the security agency for phone records as part of a program to compile a vast database of numbers and other information on virtually all domestic calls. The program's scope was first described in an article published on Thursday by USA Today that led to an outpouring of demands for information from Congressional Republicans and Democrats. The article said that At&T, BellSouth and Verizon had agreed to provide the information to the security agency.
Yeah, dan. That is why all the leaks are occuring. CIA is under the guise of
a dubya apologists. Care about switching, you know how long it takes you
learn anything.
Two cheers for McCarthyism!!!
That's funny,, the fourth ammendment still existed back then, what's your excuse?
You dumbass. The FISA Court was created to strengthen the rights granted in the 4th amendment by requiring the government to seek a court issued warrant before wire-tapping domestic phone calls.
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