Whatever our decision is from this point forward, to wage war or not, it must be seen as something we decided to do, not because of fatigue, but because of success and realizing it was simply time to move on.
Our resolve is of primary importance, rather the perception of it overseas.
We must make it clear, any more nonsense and we’ll be right back in bigger numbers and causing much more havoc.
Paper tigers invite their enemies to attack. Stern, determined tigers are feared and avoided.
Oh, I dunno. Think it might have something to do with the allegiances of the Current pResident?
As we have bent over backwards to absorb the foreigner peasants who have invaded our homeland, American citizens are forced to foot the bills to pay for the invaders' welfare benefits. And as we avoid offending Muslim pressure groups by profiling our actual enemies, we are turning America into a police state for its own citizens - while our visitors enjoy the freedoms that were once our birthright.
Arguing against excessive government secrecy, JFK warned that it wouldn't matter if our nation survived if its traditions of freedom and independence did not survive with it. How right he was!
I loath big government, have contempt for statism, and quite libertarian save sovereignty and social. I also refuse to condemn the NSA and fully support its efforts to track threats. While Snowden’s allegations demand hearings, I am definitely not “silent” on natsec as a consequence of his revelations — the subtext of McCarthy’s article.
The Country’s greatest obstacle to security and liberty is the body of elected officials that claim to represent the Citizens and Constitution.
There, I fixed it that sentence.
The PATRIOT Act was a product of our vigorous and persuasive contention, on the national-security right, that the challenge was an enemy force, not a criminal-justice problem.
The PATRIOT Act was a hysterical, Tyrannical abomination, Orwellian in both name and (as we have now seen) in practice...
When the left controls national security, it is the right that is targeted, not foreign threats. That is why the concern, Andy.
I, did not support FISA when it was overhauled nor the Patriot ACT and PA II.
I knew that they would be used by those who don’t see the Constitution as a barrier to their self serving nefarious ambitions.
Sure enough, that is what we have going on here.
A trawling net for any information under the rubik of National Security and then making it available across a wide swath of agencies.
It’s wrong.
Further, here is where I have always parted ways on the issue of access to my records:
“Records of subscriber usage maintained by service providers such as telephone companies — called “third-party” records because they are the property of the provider, not the subscriber — enjoy no Fourth Amendment protection”
That always been so much BS to me as the records, in fact, belong to the service provider and to the subscriber. You don’t get to bifurcated because you found a way to do so and no one challenged you on this.
Why not make the argument the bank owns my house and all you have to do is go to them for permission to search it?
Or my car. Just ask the leasing company for permission.
Hey, why stop there? What about all those computers and multi-function printers? They’re leased a good many times.
Why, just ask the leasing company for permission to peruse “their” equipment and ask the landlord for permission to enter the premises?
That argument never made sense to me that the service provider is the holder of the records.
They are also the responsible organization(resporg) for managing my phone numbers and toll free numbers. Does that make them the owners? No, the numbers belong to me. They are only responsible for maintaining service and routing traffic “As I direct”.
They cannot use those lines or numbers for their own. They belong to me.
That argument still does not hold water today.
But if American terrorists account for maybe .00000001% of the population, why do they need %100 of our phone records?
Now, I know that one terrorist can potential kill and sicken tens of thousands of people but aren't the security personel in our government smart enough to stop terrorists without intruding into our innermost private matters, where the government can make any of us absolutely vulnerable to its power even if we didn't do anything wrong?
Mr. McCarthy, the constitution isn’t optional.
All this government spying isn’t about making us safe from terrorists. It’s about making the elites safe from us.
Seems like I’m seeing lots of defense of the NSA surveillance in the press—NY Post and Wall Street Journal anyway. Of the amnesty bill too. Am I reading this right? So where do we go for constitutional defense, besides FR and the left-wing press?
OK, here’s my retort to yahoos like Excitable Andy:
We’re not and, with the exception of overthrowing the Taliban in ‘02, haven’t been engaged in a real “war on terror.”
We’ve been engaged in this idiotic, twisted pretzel logic of “Islam is a religion of peace” one the one hand, while acting surprised when it isn’t on the other. In between, we’ve done seriously stupid things like allowing terrorists to escape our grasp while we worry about “building coalitions” and “respecting our partners.”
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
If there were a real “war on terror,” we’d see the same level of activity as we saw in ‘02: B-52’s dropping very large munitions on the enemy.
My new litmus test of whether or not we’re truly making “war” on something is “Are there B-52’s involved? No? Then it’s a ‘war’ only in the minds and mouths of politicians.”
“War on drugs?” Not a war, unless we’re talking about the shredding of the Constitution.
“War on terror?” Not a war, and again, we’re talking of shredding the Constitution.
“War on poverty?” Yea, that’s a huge grifting off of future generations of Americans.
When I hear or use the noun “war,” I’m referring to a situation where we don’t give a rat’s ass about being nice to people. In my version of the word “war,” we kill people, stack their bodies into trenches and wreck real estate by the square mile.
Somewhere, these weasel lawyers who now run everything have ruined our ability to make real war. Oh, we want to “pursue” terrorists, and “bring them to justice.”
Bullcrap. We need to simply kill them, not bring them into court. There’s no point in “bringing them to justice” in Gitmo. We’re just building a more complicated problem. We should simply kill them in the field.
The lesson to be learned from the Bush/Obama era is this: Never send a lawyer to do the job of the US military. That’s what these “wars” have now become: public policy debates by Ivy Leaguers, enforced by our military. When the “enforcement” goes wrong, the lawyers never suffer. Our people in the military suffer.
This is bullcrap. Want to talk about “war?” Then cry havoc and turn loose the dogs of war. Watch the funeral pyres’ smoke rise into the sky, drive the enemy into a corner and kill him. That’s war.
If we want to win the war against Islam (and that’s what we’re fighting - not some “radical strain of Islam”) then it is high time we tell the lawyers from the Ivy League to go powder their noses and play their intellectual word game onanism with each other while hard men go forth to kill people and break things.
There is no confidence that the administration uses its power and intelligence data against our enemies instead of us.
Obama has shown more hate and disdain for working class and middle class American citizens than he has shown toward Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Taliban
It'd also shown that whole crowd that it wasn't just the Russians who knew how to deal with their kind.
I like McCarthy and respect his view.
The problem is I really don’t know if he understands we have other enemies than foreign ...we are fighting enemies domestic as well.
I don’t trust my government to protect our people or our interests.
I
A simple equation: The enemy are over there, not here.
So national security should focus on the enemy over there, not here. Leave here for the police and FBI, with the normal tools they used for the last 100 years. They don’t have to have dossiers and wiretaps on every American.
Other than that, stop having really stupid policies, that go out of their way from offending Muslims. There is no easy way to tell bad Muslims from good Muslims, so ALL Muslims should get extra scrutiny. Scrutiny that everyone else DOES NOT get, because everyone else are not at war with us.
America persecuted some Germans during World War I, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t give them extra scrutiny during World War II. Americans were unfair to blacks a long time ago. This doesn’t mean we should not give Muslims of all colors extra scrutiny today.
There is NOTHING, ZERO, wrong with profiling, if you are at war with the people you are profiling. And their families and friends. Nothing.
Treating the enemy the same as everyone else during wartime is just stupid.
The even average intelligence security people know that Muslims are the ones creating all the fuss. Making them pretend that’s not the case just forces them to figure out a way around the system, so they can give extra scrutiny to Muslims.
So not only is the system wasteful and inefficient, it forces the authorities to cheat to do their job. So get rid of it.