To his credit, New Yorker's "chatter" argument is not only the first argument against warrants -- it is the first attempt at an argument against them. So riddle me this. Why has it not been raised by the administration (in all the congressional hearings and all the rest of the hoopla surrounding the program) or any of the other defenders of the program? Answer: While a good try, that's not the reason. If it were, it would have been raised, at least once, by the admin or its defenders. And, if it were, it would have been subject to scrutiny at which point it would have become clear that that was not indeed the reason. In other words, the fact that the chatter argument hasn't been raised is proof it's not a sustainable argument as it would have been such a simple out they would have used it if they thought it was sustainable. So why no warrants? Still no answer, here or elsewhere. With all the heat, you'd think they'd come up with something by now. Try again? Maybe the Bush administration thinks the warrants would actually be served, in person, to the terrorists as Jorge did. Or maybe even they are not that dumb. This isn't a mystery, y'all. The admin's had ample opportunity to explain its resistance to warrants and it just doesn't want to. There are shady dealings here, AGAIN. And again nobody seems to care that much. A hallmark of the Bush years.
This may all be true, and the chatter argument may be so bad as to not meet even the lowest (i.e. Bushiest) standards of empty rhetorical pretext. Still, would you be so kind to explain to those of us of lesser intelligence exactly what makes this argument so unsustainable, as you put it?
I'll admit my argument is speculative. But when you're dealing with the secret world of intelligence, maybe that's all you can be... Why wouldn't it have been brought up? Perhaps because the NSA might not want to hide thier capabilities and keep it under wraps. If groups know that their conversations are being monitored no matter what - that might result in two things: Wide spread paranoia and groups finding other means of communication to get around someone screening their communications. Now, if someone inside an intelligence organization said - wait people, we don't need to have this law - then I'd think we're going over the line. But I want someone from the intelligence community, who's been on the inside...recently, and at a senior level, to go against this.
NY: You honestly think Bush hasn't defended himself with the chatter argument because he's afraid the terrorists will find out he's listening to chatter? That's rich. LScola: What makes the argument unsustainable is that it hasn't been floated, even once over the course of various hearings, by an embattled admin. I'm not an intelligence expert, but I suspect that over the years they have existed FISA and the NSA would have come up against the question of warrants and chatter at some point in the past and worked that out. And, if they hadn't, there is a zero percent chance that argument wouldn't have been raised to defend the program. Unless you're with New Yorker and believe they can't raise the concept of chatter because it would alert the terrorists to stop chattering -- a concept almost as funny as Jorge's belief that FISA required serving the warrants in person.
