Bush Violates Terrorists' Nuclear Privacy
Human Events Online ^ | 12/26/05 | Mac Johnson
Posted on 12/26/2005 10:50:26 AM EST by harpu
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1547157/posts
Just over a week ago, the New York Times revealed the shocking news that the Bush administration has been spying on the international communications of suspected terrorists, thus setting off a rippling artificial scandal in the Times private reflecting pool, the increasingly stagnant mainstream media.
Not to be outdone, U.S. News and World Report put on its water wings Friday and tried to create a splash of it own, by reporting that the same renegade Bush administration has been monitoring radiation levels in the public air -- without a warrant! Gasp! The power-mad Bushies have done this in a diabolical attempt to get early warning of terrorists preparing to use a nuclear or dirty bomb against an American city. According to the story, this program is fraught with all sorts of subtle privacy issues.
Obviously, such warantless radiation monitoring creates a searing civil rights crisis for the average American, who now must live in fear, knowing that his private high-energy photon emissions, personal beta-particle broadcasts, or even his confidential radionuclide wafting could be subject to detection by the crass and intrusive thugs of the federal government.
I mean, when you don’t have the right to leak radiation into the communal air from a clandestine nuclear bomb, what rights do you have really? Clearly, Bush is Hitler, but worse.
Let us examine what this “far-reaching” and “controversial” program of “questioned” legality entails. A technician in a vehicle drives around Washington, D.C., or another high-risk city, and samples the air with a little device. If the air is not radioactive, he drives somewhere else. Disturbing!
The technician never kicks in a door, or even knocks on one, but he does -- from a publicly-accessible area -- sample the air. SHOCKING!
All this raises very important privacy issues, such as: What if the air was radioactive for a perfectly harmless reason? Wouldn’t detecting this radiation violate the privacy of the person contaminating the air for this harmless reason? You can see what a slippery slope this becomes really quickly.
Am I kidding here? The article quotes Georgetown University professor David Cole, a “constitutional law expert,” on this legal conundrum: "They don't need a warrant to drive onto the property -- the issue isn't where they are, but whether they're using a tactic to intrude on privacy. It seems to me that they are, and that they would need a warrant or probable cause."
Professor Cole did not explain, however, how exactly the right to privacy would cover the emission of harmful, illegal radioactive material into the common air. If ever there were a narrowly focused and non-intrusive search, monitoring the air for radiation would seem to be it. Name for me one legal personal activity for which such monitoring would violate the expectation of privacy, or what harm would likely result.
The reason many searches are regulated by constitutional law is they can impose a significant burden upon the searched, and the search can reveal much more than its target. For example, having a policeman search your body cavities or rifle through your personal possessions is potentially unpleasant and demeaning and could lead to the revelation of personal information unrelated to any legal investigation. But what can measuring roadside radiation levels reveal -- other than your possession of materials causing unusual roadside radiation levels?
Radiation monitoring cannot detect whether you look at goat porn on the Internet, belong to the ACLU, voted for Ross Perot, cheat on your spouse, or secretly prefer catsup to ketchup. It cannot read your thoughts or fumble through your underwear drawer. It can do only one thing: determine if you have a significant source of radiation in your possession, which I believe is both illegal and not healthy for children and other living things. And it can do this one limited thing as an unnoticed drive-by service. So you don’t even have to lose any personal time or face social stigma.
But exposing this alleged “invasion of privacy” is what U.S. News has been reduced to in its eager quest for a Bush-bashing warrantless search “scandal.” For political expediency and a desire to ape the New York Times, the 4th Amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable search and seizure” has now been morphed into a guarantee against any search for Cesium. You know, because high-level gamma emissions might be part of someone’s protected political speech.
The degree to which the mainstream media’s hatred of President Bush has pushed it into a state of logical incoherence is simply amazing. But even more amazing is that this incoherence is not lessened even by the basic human desire to protect innocent people’s lives. “Exposing” the government’s radiation monitoring program in such detail will not help the public fend off any real assault on our liberties. Neither does it contribute to any significant political debate. It won’t even harm Bush politically. All it does is inform our terrorist enemies what measures we have taken to catch them before they can harm us, and allow them to attempt more effective countermeasures.
If the media keeps this up, Bush's approval rating will hit 65 very shortly...
I would surmise that a substantial portion of Bush's recent poll bounce comes from the covert approval of the American public that Bush has been wiretapping suspected terrorists and their affiliates...
I also surmise, the public at large would agree that putting radiological detection equiptment around mosques is not only logical, but the obvious thing to do...
Michael Barone: All the news that's fit to ignore
townhall.com ^ | December 26, 2005 | Michael Barone
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/michaelbarone/2005/12/26/180370.html
Posted on 12/26/2005 6:31:50 AM EST by Puzzleman
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547098/posts
The New York Times' Christmas gift -- sorry, holiday gift -- to the nation's political dialogue was its Dec. 16 story reporting that the National Security Agency has been intercepting telephone conversations between terrorism suspects abroad and U.S. citizens or legal residents in the United States.
What the Times didn't bother telling its readers is that this practice is far from new and is entirely legal. Instead, the unspoken subtext of the story was that this was likely an illegal and certainly a very scary invasion of Americans' rights.
Let's put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America's enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say that the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America's enemies but not to wiretap -- or, more likely these days, electronically intercept -- their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century.
To be sure, federal courts have ruled that the Fourth Amendment's bar of "unreasonable" searches and seizures limits the president's power to intercept communications without obtaining a warrant. But that doesn't apply to foreign intercepts, as the Supreme Court made clear in a 1972 case, writing, "The instant case requires no judgment on the scope of the president's surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country." The federal courts of appeals for the 5th, 3rd, 9th and 4th Circuits, in cases decided in 1970, 1974, 1977 and 1980, took the same view. In 2002, the special federal court superintending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wrote, "The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power."
Warrantless intercepts of the communications of foreign powers were undertaken as long ago as 1979, by the Carter administration. In 1994, Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, testified to Congress, "The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."
In the Dec. 15 Chicago Tribune, John Schmidt, associate attorney general in the Clinton administration, laid it out cold: "President Bush's post-Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents."
"News stories" in the Times and other newspapers and many national newscasts have largely ignored this legal record. Instead, they are tinged with a note of hysteria and the suggestion that fundamental freedoms have been violated by the NSA intercepts.
Earlier this month, a Newsweek cover story depicted George W. Bush as living inside a bubble, isolated from knowledge of the real world. Many of the news stories about the NSA intercepts show that it is mainstream media that are living inside a bubble, carefully insulating themselves and their readers and viewers from knowledge of applicable law and recent historical precedent, determined to pursue an agenda of undermining the Bush administration regardless of any damage to national security.
And damage there almost certainly would be were the program to be ended, as many Democrats and many in the mainstream media would like. Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of NSA and now deputy national intelligence director, has come forward to say, "This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States."
The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, should not be interpreted in a way that makes it "a suicide pact." The notion that terrorists' privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact. The Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in the United States should not be stretched into a ban on interceptions of communications from America's enemies abroad.
The mainstream media, inside their left-wing bubble, evidently thinks that there is not much in the way of danger. They should take a trip to Ground Zero, to the Sept. 11 memorial at the Pentagon, to Shanksville, Pa., where the heroes of United flight 93 prevented the terrorists from hitting their target in Washington.
I guess it's not top secret anymore. Interesting how eager the MSM is to expose our national security measures as opposed to reporting the positive achievements in the war on terror.
I personally believe the MSM should be subject to the same penalties for compromising top secret information as is for example an individual contractor or DOD employee...loss of clearance and prison. Somehow the MSM seems to be granted immunity from prosecution. I would like to see this changed retroactively all the way back to the pentagon papers.
They should be allowed to nuke us first before we can get a search warrant. Then we can wring our hands about what we did to them to make them hate us.
Just pretend it's during WWII, and change the word "Muslim" for "Nazi", because during WWII there were plenty of them here. "Bush spying on nazi's without warrants." Who would have complained back then?
Good! Now Tom Kean can crawl back under his rock an stop saying the President is doing nothing to prevent a terror attack.
It's a good start, but there must be thousands more of such sites that need secret monitoring as well. Let's hope the gov doesn't rest on its laurels here.
The ones that want to destroy Bush, and our country along with him, disagree.
The MSM will always be able to find some liberal, so-called "expert" to disagree with whatever.