I just cannot buy the old idea that “The Czar is a good man, but surrounded by unprincipled villains”, that the Russians used to explain why their beloved Czar imposed such cruelties on them.
W. Bush knew exactly what he was getting, and was all in favor of it. It didn’t take a “rocket surgeon” to figure out that warrantless searches will almost exclusively be used against non-terrorists.
If you asked the FBI at that time how many terrorists and potential terrorists were in the US, they would have given you a low number, likely in the low hundreds. Oppressing 330 million people to sniff out a few hundred bad ones cannot be explained as a good faith technique.
I disagree. The concern was almost entirely with another truck-bombing or airliner-hijacking escapade. That's what they were telling the MSM, anyway.
You think Shrub and Big Dick Cheney actually sat around scenarizing sending a SWAT unit, a la the Elian grab, to crash into some woman's house and kitchen and drag her away screaming into the night?
The team that made the 1993 World Trade Center attempt were a small group, maybe what, six, eight guys including the Blind Sheikh?
At the time, USG sources were telling media that the towers were in no way ever in danger from Sheikh Abdul's truck bomb. More recently, I saw a statement that if it hadn't been for the prime spot's having been occupied by parked federal agency vehicles, their plan might actually have worked, and dropped Trade 1 with 25,000 people in it in the middle of the afternoon. Doubtful that bringing down Trade 1 would have broken the foundations of Trade 2 and brought it down, too (after all, that didn't happen on 9/11), but if it had, that would have been more than 50,000 dead, including the workers in WTC 4, 5, and 6 and the Marriott Hotel adjacent (and the Marriott hadn't yet been structurally strengthened, which was something done after the bombing).
That's the kind of stuff they were thinking about, not Obama's giant gun-grab wet dream.