Posted on 11/23/2008 6:14:03 AM PST by publius1
Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power. The list of abuses that President-elect Barack Obama must address is long: once again require the government to get warrants to eavesdrop on Americans; undo scores of executive orders and bill-signing statements that have undermined the powers of Congress; strip out the unnecessary invasions of privacy embedded in the Patriot Act; block new F.B.I. investigative guidelines straight out of J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook.
Those are not the only disasters Mr. Obama will inherit. He will have to rescue a drowning economy, restore regulatory sanity to the financial markets and extricate the country from an unnecessary war in Iraq so it can focus on a necessary war in Afghanistan.
Even with all those demands, there is one thing Mr. Obama must do quickly to begin to repair this nation’s image and restore its self-respect: announce a plan for closing Mr. Bush’s outlaw prison at Guantánamo Bay.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“Does anybody have an example of an American citizen whose rights were trampled?”
Joe the plumber. (oops...that wasn’t Bush)
I'll take "tent city, White House Lawn" for $500, Deja!
Yeah, the NYSlimes is right on the mark here. If President Bush had not taken the lead from J. Edgar Hoover and instead followed the example of their Liberal God Roosevelt, hundreds of thousands of people of Middle Eastern descent would have been thrown into fenced camps.
Barack! Barney! Chuck! Nancy! See how much we hate Republicans...It's all Bush's fault...Only you can deliver us from evil...
Now send us some of that economic bailout money...
TO SAVE THE 1ST AMMENDMENT!!!!
Other than those vital and necessary Liberties, the Times would gladly cede all power to the beneficent designs of Obama, The Most Magnificent as he proceeds to make of us a more fully-Europeanized socialist state. In the further depths of self-loathing, they would also have us ignore any true American geopolitical interests in places like Iraq and Iran in favor of tilting at windmills, and pursuing stupid, doomed ventures into hell-holes like Afghanistan. Not that you will read about American combat deaths in places like that on the Times' front page. Not any more you won't. Perhaps on page C35, after the Gay style section, but never again above the fold.
I'll read what I want to.
Yes, I've always been a bit amazed at the difference between the administration's rhetoric on national security, leaks, etc., and its actions...
For all the talk about national security, leaks of classified material and border security seem to have been singularly ignored.
$5.34 on Friday In 2002, it hit $50.
The NYT bathhouse boys are hysterical.
These people are dispicable and unreliable.
If you ever doubted that the manifest self-loathing of the Left contains a powerful suicidal impulse, this sentence ought to disabuse you of such a notion. The problem with suicidal psychotics is that they want to take everyone else down with them.
The only differences between Timothy McVeigh and Bill Ayers is the Timothy McVeigh was drug-addled when he planned and committed his acts, and he was a lot more competent than Ayers.
Of course, another difference is the McVeigh didn’t have a President Elect as a close personal friend.
But hey, who is counting.
There has been a lot of discussion regarding what to do with the remaining hard-core terrorists at Gitmo, once it's been closed. I think that we have the answer right here...
It seems to me that the editors at the NY Slimes are DEMANDING that these poor little terrorists be released, so I say we do so... We release them into the custody of those who want them released so badly, and make them responsible for the "care and feeding" of those "detainees."
Let Pinch take a terrorist home with him. Let Frank Rich take one to the theater. Let Paul Krugman lecture a terrorist on how the evil USA turned him from a peaceful goat herder into the bloodthirsty terrorist he has become, and give him a heartfelt apology.
I'm all for releasing the terrorists, as long as we make those calling for those releases responsible for the "bad guys." And then make them live (and probably die) with their decisions.
Mark
I noticed that, too. The NYT has NO clue. Period.
LOL
They'll blame Bush, because it worked then, and it will work again. See "George Orwell."
Mark
If the NYT were a dog I’d shoot it. Come to think of it.... naw...., well...?
If NYC gets hit again, their on their own. President Bush did exactly what they asked and got nothing but knives in the back. If they get hit again, so what?
Pray for W and Our Troops
From Norman Podhoretz's World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
... the attack on 9/11 did indeed come out of the blue in the sense that no one ever took such a possibility seriously enough to figure out what to do about it. Even (Richard A.) Clarke himself, who at a meeting on July 5, 2001, warned that “something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it’s going to happen soon,” had to admit under questioning by one of the 9/11 commissioners that if all his recommendations had been acted upon, the attack still could not have been prevented. And in its final report, the commission, while digging up no fewer than ten episodes that with hindsight could be seen as missed “operational opportunities,” thought that these opportunities could not have been acted on effectively enough to frustrate the attack. Indeed not: not, that is, in the real America as it existed at the time.
It was, to begin with, an America in which the FBI had been so hobbled by congressional restraints that it could scarcely make a move, and so intimidated by legal restrictions that it shied away from taking action even when it had very good reasons to pounce. The most egregious case in point was what happened when, only a month before 9/11, an agent in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office discovered that one Zacarias Moussaui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, had enrolled in a flight school in order to learn how to take off and land a Boeing 747. The agent initiated an investigation, which, the 9/11 Commission report would tell us, led him to conclude that Moussaui was “an Islamic extremist preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals.” The agent also suspected that Moussaui was planning to hijack a plane, and to check out this suspicion he wanted to seize and search Moussaui’s laptop computer. For this he needed a warrant, but his superiors at FBI headquarters in Washington did not believe that there was sufficient probable cause of a crime to obtain one. In the hope of getting around this problem, the agent and his colleagues now tried to show that Moussaui was an agent of a foreign power. This set them off on a wild–goose chase involving intelligence agencies in England and France, not to mention the CIA, the FAA, the Customs Service, the State Department, the INS, and the Secret Service. But still no warrant. Why? Because, the 9/11 Commission report explains:
There was substantial disagreement between Minneapolis agents and FBI headquarters [in Washington] as to what Moussaui was planning to do. In one conversation between a Minneapolis supervisor and a headquarters agent, the latter complained that Minneapolis’s…request was couched in a manner intended to get people “spun up.” The supervisor replied that was precisely his intent. He said he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.” The headquarters agent replied that this was not going to happen and that they did not know if Moussaui was a terrorist.
Well, the headquarters agent would eventually find out not only that Moussaui was a terrorist but that he was a member of Al Qaeda and slated to participate in a West Coast follow–up to 9/11.
As if such obstacles were not enough to block an effective counter to the threat of terrorism in pre-9/11 America, there was also the “wall of separation.” This wall was erected during the Clinton administration to obstruct communication or cooperation between the FBI and the CIA. The main purpose was supposedly to prevent secret information and intelligence sources from being compromised by law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. But the idea must also have owed more than a little something to the hope among leftists and liberals that keeping the FBI and the CIA apart would reduce the menace they both allegedly posed to “dissent” and civil liberties.
Be that as it may, let me cite only three mind-boggling examples of what the “wall of separation” wrought. They come from Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker by way of the conveniently succinct summaries by Dexter Filkins of The New York Times (two publications that one would expect to be justifying the “wall of separation” and not exposing the horrendous damage it did). Here is the first:
The CIA…knew that high–level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The CIA failed to inform…the FBI—which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot—until late in the summer of 2001.
The second such example of the damage done by the “wall of separation” is even worse:
At meetings, CIA analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of FBI agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The FBI agents could sense that the CIA possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with FBI and CIA agents shouting at each other across the room.
And the third of the three examples may be the worst of them all:
Ali Soufan, an FBI agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on September 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the CIA had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.
Finally, the America of those far–off days before 9/11 was a country in which politicians and the general public alike were still unable and/or unwilling to believe that terrorism might actually represent a genuine threat. Attention was of course paid by the professionals within the federal government and in various law enforcement agencies whose job it was to keep their eyes open for possible terrorist attacks on American soil. Yet not even they could imagine that anything as big as 9/11 might be in the offing, and when the few lonely exceptions were not being stymied by the “wall of separation,” the initiatives they tried to take were invariably killed off by bureaucratic bungling.
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