I'm going to keep yelling it from the rooftops. The key point all these reports neglect is that these taps were on calls and e-mails either originating or terminating internationally. This is not domestic spying.
Just another assault by the enemies of America.
We have enemies here and they are abetted by the New York Times and the Democrats.
I am sick of it.
Time for a major boycott of any New York Times input whatsoever.
That's what I thought when I heard all of the hoopla over this. Didn't Clinton do it daily? I remember Echelon and something called Carnivore as well. I've always just assumed we were long past this stage of Big Brother, living with the legacy of Clinton. I don't have any problem with surveilling non-citizens at all. I consider this somewhat of an improvement, since the callers had direct links to Al Quaeda.
MESSAGE TO DEMOCRATS: If there is another attack "democrat" will be a term of hatred and scorn, disloyalty and self-destruction. Kennedy, Reid, Pelosi, Kerry, Boxer, Levin, Rangel et al., will be hunted as terrorist sympathizers worthy of listing beside Benedict Arnold, John Walker, and Albert Ames.
It has been rumored in the past that someone from the David Koresh compound had the "key" to Echelon. That is why it had to be destroyed.
If you can operate under normal civilian law, you are not yet at war. If warrants and judges and men in suits can handle it, you are not yet at war.
If you are at war, you have moved beyond normal civilian law. War is the state of affairs that exists when civilian law is no longer adequate to the circumstance. That is what war is.
When you declare war, you are making a public acknowlegdement of that fact, and you are putting your own people on notice that for the time being, against a defined threat, you are going to do whatever it takes, you are going to identify the threat, identify its support system, and then you are going to destroy it. You are going to re-shape the facts on the ground, overthrow governments, re-draw borders, push whole peoples from one place to another, and kill anyone who won't surrender.
When the circumstances have been re-shaped, the die-hards are dead, and their pals have given up the fight, when in other words it has become possible to return to civilian law, by definition the war is over.
First. FISA allows the President to do all that he did without end running the courts. He just took it upon himself to remove that check to his power. Apparently in contravention of the Fourth Ammendment to the Constitution.
Remember that document. Says that since too much power tends to be bad lets make sure that there are checks and balances on each branch of government so that people don't get trampled.
And saying that "liberal" Congressmen were briefed and they didn't say anything what about that? Well, they are not allowed by law TO say anything. They are simply briefed. They are not allowed to tell anyone about the breifing, including their staff or any outside counsel. They are also not allowed to act on what they have been told in any way. The Senators in question did the only thing they were allowed to do. They both wrote letters to the person that breifed them (Dick Cheney) saying that they had grave misgivings about the legality of the program. This turned out to be a good idea as the President and Vice President did what they intended to all along and said as soon as this story broke that Congress had been breifed on it including some "liberal" Congressmen. Thereby implying that it had been signed off on when it had not.
More Later. Must Work :)