STRANGELAND.NET

Listening to the Bush press conference today, I couldn’t help but shake my head at some of what was being said. Over and over again, Bush defended everything that had been done in the War on Terror as “good” because it protected citizens of the United States and stymied the activites of terrorists. I was struck by a feeling that Bush’s words were very much in the vein of ‘the ends justifies the means.’ He came off as trying to convince the American Public that since in the end all of these things keep them safe and stop the terrorists, then it’s a good thing. I want to believe that he has in the best of intentions in this, but as the adage does “The Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions.”

One of the major things that has been brought into the light is Bush’s executive order allowing the NSA to spy on people domesticly without going through vetting by a FISA court. Bush did his best to defend it, again and again saying what he did was perfectly legal and it was done for the security of the American People. Everyone in the Bush Administration is falling in line behind him to back him up, trying to sell the idea that their intentions were for the best and this was perfectly okay. This has been thrown up at the same time as the Senate failing to reauthorize all provisions of the Patriot Act, something that is causing the Bush Administration to cry foul.

I have very few doubts that the majority of people involved in the current administration want to keep the American People safe. They want to see the terrorists brought to justice and people able to go about their lives without having to worry about a recurrence of 9/11/01. However, like many in the past, they’ve gone too far in the wrong direction, forcing and/or requestion people to give up their Civil Liberties in exchange for security and safety. To my mind, that is absolutely the last thing they should be doing.

I look at all the changes that have been made over the last four plus years and can’t help but shake my head. I’m simply glad that some of those in Senate are less willing to simply go along with the rhetoric. Bush in his speech today brought up that he wants to know why all of those Senators voted for the Patriot Act when it was first passed and now want to vote against it. To answer that, I would ask President Bush to look back on the mindset and viewpoint of everyone in those few weeks immediately after 9/11/01. For the first time since World War II, the United States had been attacked on its home soil. Unlike Pearl Harbor, this took place in the mainland United States, not an island in the Pacific Ocean. This struck much closer to home for many more Americans than the attack on Pearl Harbor did. At the time, everyone was in panic mode and in many cases willing to go along with what looked to be the right thing to do. Now, several years after the fact, a more sober and objective viewpoint can be taken and the assaults on Civil Liberties can be curtailed.

There are parts of the Patriot Act that are good things, providing law enforcement with the tools they need. There are others that go too far, or that those enforcement agencies have proven, at least in part, too irresponsible (or power hungry) to use. Bush’s intentions were good in authorizing the wiretapping for the NSA domesticly. His good intentions, however, do not change how intrusive this is or how much it violates the Civil Liberties of those in this country. There are plenty of people out there who don’t care, because they don’t feel they’ve done anything wrong and therefore it doesn’t matter if the government listens in on the conversations. Even with their good intentions, they miss the point. It’s not the specifics of guilt or innocence, but the principle of the situation. There are guaranteed/acknowledged Civil Liberties in the Constitution that should not be abridged, infringed upon, or outright set aside no matter the good intentions of those doing so. And simply because someone else is willing to give up those Liberties does not give them the right to force or guilt someone else into doing it.

Personally, I don’t care how pretty the road is getting there or how comfortable the ride is on all those good intentions. I have no desire to have the average temperature of my surroundings shoot up to unacceptable levels.

stranger Uncategorized

On the heels of the American people discovering that the President of the United States had been complicit in a politically motivated burglary the Congress opened up an investigation known as The Church Committee. This committee was investigating reports of domestic spying and intimidation being carried out against leaders of the peace and civil rights movements. Their committee uncovered the NSA’s Project Shamrock and Project Minaret, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. All of these programs engaged in extralegal activities against dissenters in a very chaotic time in our nation’s history.

But this was not a new phenomenon in the history of intelligence agencies. In 1947 President Truman specifically barred the CIA in their charter from engaging in any form of domestic spying. The reason for this was that the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, was known for their skillful use of blackmail, extortion and other legally dubious activity to obtain intelligence during WWII. Truman’s fear was the implications of such activities within US borders during peacetime could be damaging to America’s basic democratic institutions.

It was the suggestion of the Church Committee that Congress should create rules that placed congressional and judicial oversight on the nation’s intelligence services. From that suggestion was born the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The act does not specifically ban the use of intelligence services for domestic surveillance; it does though place an oversight on that surveillance requiring a special secret warrant granted by the FISA court. The only thing that the Attorney General has to show to the FISA court is probable cause that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power, not that the target is engaging in any form of criminality.

The President though decided after 9/11 that the oversight, which was meant to keep the power of the Executive Branch in check, needed no longer apply. The President has even confessed on TV and radio that he has circumvented the judicial oversight of the FISA court on thirty different occasions by directly ordering the NSA to conduct surveillance within the United States on American Citizens. In essence the President has ignored Article II Section 3 of the Constitution in which it states, “He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.

The justification that the President has given for his actions was that going through the FISA court would have taken too long. This is a spurious argument though because there is always at least one judge of the FISA court in Washington according to the Counsel for Intelligence Policy in a 1983 House Committee hearing. And there are no specifics in the law limiting when or how often the court should meet; with current technology it would be possible to convene the FISA court in a matter of minutes. If Bush had simply worked with them, I am sure that they would have worked with him to return warrants to him as quickly as technologically possible.

Bush has even said that he had made Congress aware of the circumventing of the FISA court. But considering that Nancy Pelosi (D-California) reports that she was told on a couple of occasions that “Bush had authorized unspecified activities by the National Security Agency.” Considering also that Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has confirmed that a Senate investigation into the President’s actions will be carried out when the Judiciary Committee next convenes. It does not sound like the President supplied sufficient notification or justification to the Congress.

The President is recklessly taking this nation into a Constitutional Crisis. He has circumvented a legal oversight of the Executive Branch, and by doing so he has contravened the description of the responsibilities of the President. Bush’s defense of his actions are absurd, he is not a king, he is not above the law, and he is not given the power to do as he pleases because he is elected every four years. We are a nation of laws not men, we place trust in people to enforce those laws… but we also put laws in place to limit the power of the people we place in that trust. Because it has been proven before that we the people can never fully trust the people we place in power.

Now I know that I am a very vocal critic of the President, but I would not accept any leader of this nation acting in the way that our President currently is. No single person should possess the level of unchecked power that the President is claiming for himself. Ask yourself this; would you want Bill Clinton, or Howard Dean to be able to wield the unchecked power that Bush is claiming for the President? Because if he is allowed to set this precedent then there will be a leader in the future who you might not want to have this power, using it too.

code_archaeologist Uncategorized

I’m sure we’ve all noticed the half hour of good news from Iraq that the MSM begrudgingly buried among bombing references this week; of course, half of that coverage went to security precautions and the documentations of a few incidents that occured nationwide. Never mind that millions of Iraqis voted for candidates from over 300 parties; never mind that Sunnis went to the polls en force; never mind that insurgent factions are pulling themselves apart over how to respond to elections where the Iraqi people. That’s not news — at least not by CNN standards.

The MSM and the Democratic party are now invested in Iraq’s failure. The results of a positive outcome in Iraq will prove devistating. Don’t believe it? In the past month, we’ve seen John Kerry accuse American troops in Iraq of using ‘terror tactics’ and have had Howard Dean flat out say ‘ The idea(r) that we are going to win this war is an idea(r) that unfortunately is just plain wrong’ . Success in Iraq will mean electoral disaster– for the Deaniacs. It cannot be allowed to enter into the public perception; it must be marginalized and relegated to the back page.

The Democratic leadership isn’t hoping for a specific failure in Iraq– they’re hoping for some kind of domestic issue to divert attention as Iraq becomes more successful. Take the 9/11 commission report’s recent release of grades on the Administration’s performance — one noteworthy category was omitted [the actual performance against acts of Terrorism since the Comissions' report] — and that’s the one category that can be relatively unqualified in its success. Do we hear about it? No. Observe their frothing at the prospect of higher interest rates or the ‘collapse of a housing market bubble’ — never mind the economic growth that is underpinning it all. Never mind the accuracy of the GOP budget proposal of several years ago that implimented the current tax rates and projected cutting the deficit in half by 2009, despite the funding of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Democrats face a tough road ahead in 2006. While the MSM pumps up the ‘inevitability’ of a Democrat return to Congressional power (sounding eerily like 96, 98, 00, 02, 04), the party coffers run thin, and the money that does come in comes from ever more radical sources that pull the party away from a centrist message.

The Republicans aren’t much better off, at times tripping over themselves to squat left of center on spending and education– but they’re still a relatively healthy majoritarian party presiding over economic growth and a growing culture of ownership and life that rejects the miasma of what passes for culture on the coasts.

I went out of my way this week to buy a bottle of purple indelible ink; the three Iraqis I know loved the idea, and asked me to go by the mosque today [where I am a semi-regular guest] so that the expatriot Arab communities here could show their support for the free elections in Iraq by dyeing their fingers. I ran out of ink before running out of supporters- Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Kuwaiti, Saudi, Omani, and even a few Persians/Iranians.

So, in this Christmas season, let’s all give the Left a giant purple finger this year, for Christmas on behalf of the Iraqi people. The middle one seems most appropriate.

Publius Uncategorized