Anyone have any experience in this area?
regards
And Gore is NOT ignorant of basic American principles?
Al Gore speaking on our Founding Fathers' views on diversity: "As we all know, E Pluribus Unum means, 'From the One, came many.'"
Al Gore in Montecello: "Who are these guys? [pointing to the busts on the walls]" Tour guide: "Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franlin, John Adams..."
Eavesdropping
Ashcroft Got It Just Right
By Ann Coulter
The Week of November 19, 2001
What this country needs right now is a real civil liberties crackdown to give liberals something serious to worry about.
I’m leaning toward an emergency suspension of the 1st Amendment. My reasoning is this: Most newspapers last week carried yet another breathless report on how liberals might have finally discovered some method of counting the Florida ballots that would have made Al Gore the winner.
On the basis of every recount either requested by Gore or ordered by any court, George Bush still won. But, evidently, if the country had allowed liberal Democrats in the media one full year to engage in unsupervised ballot counting, Gore could be our Commander in Chief right now! As if the country weren’t scared enough, newspapers are putting that on their front pages.
When not being sore losers to the point of self-parody, liberals are on red alert for any government meddling that might prevent another terrorist attack. Rifling through the personal effects of Americans who have done nothing to raise suspicion except try to board a commercial airplane is of no concern to civil libertarians. Only close scrutiny of imprisoned terrorists raises the hackles of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Messengers of Jihad
In addition to the widely reported ACLU fantasy that the FBI was torturing terror suspects, liberals are upset with Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft for allowing the Bureau of Prisons to monitor terrorists’ communications from prison.
Concerned that certain terrorists could be plotting more attacks from their jail cells and using their attorneys—wittingly or unwittingly—as messengers to jihad-minded colleagues on the outside, the Department of Justice has decided to listen in on certain inmates’ conversations. The attorney general’s rule authorizing the eavesdropping makes no exception for conversations with attorneys.
Lawyers believe this spells the end of civilization.
The president of the American Bar Association, Robert E. Hirshon, railed against this unspeakable violation of the attorney-client privilege, saying: "No privilege is more indelibly ensconced in the American legal system than this privilege."
Lawyers think they should be above petty concerns such as the potential murder of thousands of Americans. They believe the attorney-client privilege should trump all rules of society—except the payment of lawyers.
Among the many, many exceptions to the attorney-client privilege is one that allows lawyers to breach it themselves if the client refuses to pay. But you never hear lawyers complaining about that exception to this sacrosanct, deeply ensconced privilege.
Another exception to the attorney-client privilege, analogous to the national security exception recognized by Ashcroft’s rule, is the crime-fraud exception. For ongoing or future crimes, "the privilege takes flight," as the Supreme Court said in Clark v. United States.
In fact, Ashcroft’s new regulation is extremely limited and bristling with protections for the precious attorney-client relationship. It permits the attorney general to authorize monitors only if he has received intelligence information creating a reasonable suspicion that a particular inmate is currently plotting acts of terrorism.
So far, the regulation has been applied to only 13 imprisoned terror suspects—among them, sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
To protect the attorney-client privilege, there is a firewall between the monitors and the prosecutors. Government officials listening in on the inmate communications are prohibited from communicating with criminal investigators. Indeed, the monitors are forbidden from disclosing the contents of the suspected terrorist’s communications for any reason other than preventing an act of terrorism. Even that requires a court order.
The government’s only interest in these communications is to prevent future terrorist attacks.
These are not secret wiretaps. The suspected terrorists and their lawyers are clearly advised that their conversations are being monitored. Since the terror suspects are given advance notice of the government surveillance, they can have no expectation of privacy in those conversations and no court order is required.
There are already all sorts of limits to the constitutional rights of prisoners and pre-trial detainees, inasmuch as they are in prison. They cannot, for example, leave. The attorney general’s new rule places another limit on the freedom of some inmates: Certain terror suspects can no longer expect privacy on the prison phone.
The new rule allowing terror suspects’ conversations to be monitored from prison serves a quasi-military function. Its purpose is solely to prevent another attack on American citizens—not to gather evidence for civilian trials, which would implicate due process concerns. There are procedural safeguards to separate the government’s national security interest from the inmate’s interest in confidential attorney-client communications.
Naturally, therefore, liberals have responded with their typical overwrought hysteria.
American Civil Liberties Union official Laura W. Murphy said the regulation sets "a terrifying precedent." Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Democrat chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the monitoring of terrorists’ prison communications "deeply troubling."
In a snippy letter to the media—technically addressed to Atty. Gen. Ashcroft—Leahy rambled on and on about "the better angels of our nature" and instructed the attorney general that "[t]rial by fire can refine us, but it can also coarsen us." In addition to the maudlin clichés, Leahy cited a series of irrelevant cases, the Japanese internment and, generally, the Nixon era.
But most importantly, Leahy expressed his annoyance with the attorney general for being too busy preventing another terrorist attack to show up for a Judiciary Committee hearing—a hearing that would likely be broadcast on C-SPAN.
Thus, in the very first paragraph of his letter, Leahy complained that Ashcroft has "declined several requests to appear before the committee to answer questions." But Leahy vowed that the committee would persevere with its little hearing even without the attorney general in attendance. Perhaps C-SPAN would still be interested.
In a touching bleat, Leahy told Ashcroft: "I have felt a growing concern that the trust and cooperation Congress provided is proving to be a one-way street." It would be interesting to know what valuable service the Senate thinks it has provided the Justice Department on this "one- way street." Thus far, the only evident contribution Congress has made to the war effort has been to blab classified information to the press.
Perhaps the attorney general should look into monitoring senators’ phones. C-SPAN would probably come to a hearing on that.
Does this moron know that it WAS the REPRESENTATIVES and SENATORS that DREW UP the bill, PASSED IT, and THEN sent it to President Bush to become law?
Memo to N. Hentoff: Your village called; they need their idiot back. Please check in with them.
I didn't reread it before I posted it. I read it the other day and thought she covered both subjects. It was somewhere else then that I heard or read the discussion on the military tribunals. Maybe it was on Fox Sunday.
This is one of those times I wish I had just shut my mouth (fingers)
I still disagree with Hentoff and think he's a jerk in this article. </participation on this thread> LOL. Thanks, btw, for being a much nicer person than dead.
All of those prisoners executed did have appeals, and the Federal Courts found no problem with them. Moreover the Supreme Court has twice ruled military tribunals constiturional for those who commited acts of war against the US, under both Lincoln and FDR. Mr Hentoff's constitutional expertise seems a good deal more questionalbe that President Bush's.
"The only times that military tribunals have been permitted in the past have been in a declared war with respect to enemy aliens—people who are involved in fighting against us in a declared war on behalf of a nation with which we're at war."
So people who perform the identical acts receive a higher standard of consideration if they're working freelance rather than for a country with which we're at war? That doesn't make any sense at all. If anything it should be the reverse.
Anyway, if the Congressional Resolution isn't the functional equivalent of a declaration of war, I don't know what would be. The Constitution doesn't delineate the precise form required for Congress to use its war powers. The entire Civil War was fought without a Declaration of War, and saboteurs and spies were dealt with harshly (by both sides).
WHATEVER it takes, we will take down the bastards who attacked us.
Perhaps soon an oh so great liberal whiner will again park his/her trailer outside the White House and take this country further down the road to anarchy.
GWB is a great president and the Village Voice is a POS.