You can get an emergency supoena or a hearing with a Federal Judge about as fast as you can set up a wire tap or send agents to a house. If necessary you could have an emergency panel of judges available 24/7 to hold hearings. Civil liberties, and not just at the President' s whim, are that important.
"FISA already addresses emergency situations where there is not time to get pre-approval from the court. It includes an emergency exception that permits government agents to install a wiretap and start monitoring phone and email conversations immediately, as long as they then go to the FISA court and get a court order within 72 hours." Where do you draw the line? This supposed "war on terror" doesn't seem to have any end in sight. Do we just resign ourselves to living in a constant state of fear while sacrificing our liberties for a temporary sense of security? Were the British in 1812 as a sovereign nation, not a greater threat to our national security than some loosely confederated terrorist threat overseas? That didn't cause us to sacrifice the ideals this nation was founded upon and neither should this. This is a country that is ruled by law and a firm belief in unwavering principles. We cannot allow a tyrant to sacrifice the integrity of the Constitution under the guise of immediate necessity or we have lost. If this isn't grounds for impeachment, then I don't know what is.
i know not many have addressed this but when the administration continously uses the 'during a time of war' phrase...well doesn't that bloody war have to be declared? how can you assume powers that basically over-ride the constitution when the congress hasn't declared war?
Why doesn't the President do the honorable thing and declare martial law and get it over with? If I were him, I would start a war with Iran already, that will get the damn treasonous liberals off his back and concentrate the populace on a larger foreign threat. ------------------------------------------- “There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice and truth can regain their authority over the public mind.” James Madison. Federalist No. 63 "If there is no struggle, there is no progress…Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Frederick Douglass "No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders." -- Samuel Adams (letter to James Warren, 4 November 1775) "Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." -John Adams "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.": Aldous Huxley “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves”: Edward R. Murrow
Good point,...especially when you have Bush stating, "I don't think you can win the war". So we have a president who is giving himself extra power in what he clams is a time of emergency and at the same time stating that the time of emergency will never end. Also spin-doctors are claiming that it is OK because they are just monitoring people with ties to terrorist. Are they trying to tell us that the thousands of people who have been monitored ALL had ties to terrorists? I didn't know that it was that easy to find terrorist? Lastly, the court is almost a rubber stamp to get approval. It's a check and balance just to make sure that power isn't being abused. If the white house had said that 50 or so were urgent so they bypassed the court and later got the courts approval ok, but surely the thousands that were done were not all so urgent that they could not follow the law. The lawyer will have to fight this one out, but I think this is a disgrace by this administration and shows how they feel that they are above the law.
exactly the post reported this: The Bush administration's guidelines after the Patriot Act transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies. and Most of the U.S. residents and citizens whose records were screened, the FBI acknowledged, were not suspected of wrongdoing. does that not freak you out? they have peace groups on the list. how is that not nixonian?
Thanks to both you and Deckard....usually I just have fun winding folks up, but the thought that our government is circumventing the constitution is MADDENING to me. DD
"I pledge allegiance to the republicans, and the united police state they have created. One nation, under surveillance, with wire taps and torture for all."
this is used to erode liberties all around Information is POWER the more they have on you the more they can manipulate you It is ok to find terrorist but what If someone on his last day with the buruea decides to gather all the names of the people cheating on their spouse . . . .and blackmail them? using old emails etc or people doing things that are unethical/immoral and threaten to expose them ? I mean Sure you can say they should not being doing that but it is not the govt. job to regulate that Rocket River
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12-05/12-17-05/a09lo650.htm Agents' visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior By AARON NICODEMUS, Standard-Times staff writer NEW BEDFORD -- A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book." Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program. The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said. The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further. "I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said. "Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it." Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times. The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country. The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants. The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung. In the 1950s and '60s, during the Cultural Revolution in China, it was required reading. Although there are abridged versions available, the student asked for a version translated directly from the original book. The student told Professor Pontbriand and Dr. Williams that the Homeland Security agents told him the book was on a "watch list." They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said. Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored. "My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think," he said. Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk. "I shudder to think of all the students I've had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that," he said. "Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless." Psychotic. This is completely over-the-top psychotic.
I can not believe the number of people in this country that are willing to defend these old communist control tactics.
So the President taking the necessary precautions to defend us against terror is received in this manner by the liberals? The Constitution and past rulings provide for this action. Guess what? The Clinton administration instituted much broader phone tapping surveilance than what the Bush Administration is currently doing. Congress was briefed on this issue 12 times. The phone tapping is involved in cases with known ties to al Qaeda and are used on international calls only. Whoever leaked this story to the NYT should be investigated. This makes the Plame 'scandal' look like a case of 'who stole my Cracker Jacks'. This leakage, in a similar manner to the Osama bin Laden phone tapping leakage from the 90's, endangers Americans. With the upcoming book coming out on the topic, it's obvious that the NYT is being used as a strategic liberal propaganda arm. The responses in this thread are simply laughable. Bush going on the offensive today to defend against these wild allegations is a wonderful signal. He made the liberals look like the irrelevant jokes that they are.
