Glenn Greenwald is attempting to blind us with legal science, at least most of us, in relation to 'wiretappgate'. In that respect, quite naturally those with a predisposed persuasion will eagerly jump on everything he says thereupon. Incidentally, I defy the vast majority in all camps to expertly concur or disagree with most of the more nuanced legal issues and their implications. As it stands, we seem to have finally managed to move beyond this red herring.
In any event, that was not the nature of my criticism in my origianl post America's Useful Idiots.
Neither was "blind loyalty to the liberal cause of sabotaging the Administration with whatever means available at any given time", which according to Glenn's selective representation appears to have been some general criticism or general "theory" of mine.
Instead, I took exception to Glenn's attempt to ridicule and to dismiss out of hand President Bush's reference to the LA terrorist plot immediately after the President revealed details in his speech addressing the National Guard Association of the United States, chiefly on the grounds of suspicious timing.
The great big mystery of the day is what caused the White House to decide yesterday to disclose the classified details of George Bush's heroic salvation of the City of Los Angeles four years ago? People everywhere are scratching their heads in bewilderment -- why yesterday? What could possibly have caused the President to pick yesterday as the time to suddenly reveal the specifics of the diabolic plot by the terrorists to hijack an airplane into the Liberty Tower by putting bombs into their shoes? [...]
When it comes to Al Qaeda's targeting of the U.S. in this manner, nobody helps the terrorists achieve those objectives more than the Bush Administration, which (like Al Qaeda) really does have as its principal goal -- particularly in an election year, and particularly when it faces all sorts of political difficulties on an array of fronts -- keeping the fear level as high as possible. The more frightened people are, they believe, the more likely they are to support the President and his party. And so fear-mongering becomes the first and really only political weapon they have. [emphasis added]
The orange alerts aren't really that effective any more. Orange is so un-scary. But tales of thwarted terrorist attacks on our cities always give rise to the same set of images and warnings which keeps the fear level nice and fresh and edgy. It's only February -- I have no doubt we will be treated to many, many more episodes like this. The question is, with 9/11 now more than 4 years away, is there some limit to the water in this well?
What enraged me most of all though, was the scurrilous statement, in which Glenn callously accused the Bush Administration of pursuing the same goal as al Qaeda, namely striking maximum fear into our hearts.
My opening paragraph was quite specific:
Glenn Greenwald posits that the Bush administration is exaggerating al Qaeda's threat to the United States for purely partisan gain. Now "Al Qaeda has a good friend in the White House" and the account of the latest revelation by the Administration of the LA terrorist plot is bogus [emphasis added] according to Glenn.
"So I'll just celebrate the Great Rescue along with my fellow grateful citizens." [linked to of course Hinderaker and Malkin]. Amidst the celebrations, though, one can't help but marvel at just how ridiculous and inane these scary terrorist plots appear to be even when they are deliberately depicted so as to achieve the maximum possible scare value. Here is how the President described the plot."
Glenn's outrageous comparison and deliberate ridicule is what my post was all about; this was the context in which the following paragraphs were placed. But Glenn, true to his long training, nonchalantly yet masterfully deflects in his response:
Her primary argument in support of this theory [that of a seemingly unrelated and somewhat general "blind loyalty to the liberal cause of sabotaging the Administration with whatever means available at any given time"] is that I have "attempted to pulverize the talented John Hinderaker and Jonah Goldberg," that I hold "the brilliant Jeff Goldstein" to a "higher moral standard," and that I say unkind things about the "relentlessly talented and courageous Michelle Malkin."
No, that was neither the main issue of my post, or "theory" for that matter, as Glenn would have us now believe, nor was my "primary argument" Glenn's attacks leveled against my fellow conservative bloggers, as I have just shown.
Glenn knows this of course, and he knows that he seriously crossed some major boundaries, which is why he took great care to distance himself as far as possible from his original central premise that both the Bush Administration and al Qaeda pursue the same goal of keeping the fear level amongst the American people as high as possible.
I am both amazed and impressed how successfully he has managed to pull wool over our collective eyes as he is deflecting from his grave faux pas by invoking all of the political hot-buttons in one fell swoop, and I particularly love the nonchalance with which he introduces an entirely new and completely unrelated debate (note especially how comparing the Administration with al Qaeda has been reduced to "personal issues"):
I want to leave the personal issues to the side and examine a few of the substantive issues raised (unintentionally) by Alexandra’s post. It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day – social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.
No, Glenn, they weren't 'unintentionally' raised, they weren't raised at all! What a magician.
More @ Daily Kos, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan our resident political switch-hitter, who now enjoys quoting Daily Kos as a reference to criticizing Jonah Goldberg, Smirking Chimp, and Atrios who I refuse to link to on principle, you can find it somewhere in between his revolting Wanker of the Day posts without any help from me.
The responses to the original response by Glenn are by Rick Moran @ The Right Wing Nuthouse, Mark @ Decision 8, Jonah Goldberg @ NRO here and here, Charles Johnson @ LGF. My friend Tom Maguire is having a heated debate of his own with Glenn here, Sigmund Carl & Alfred, Anti Media's 'Who Is Glenn Greenwald', The Fly @ The Flying Lumber Yard, Johnathan @ Publius Rendezvous, and a mention of my original post by Scott @ Powerline, Pajamas Media (NSA files), National Journal's Hotline.
UPDATE: I don't think Glenn Reynolds @ Instapundit is too pleased either:
Ah, so the emails calling me a "facist" and the like, by people who had obviously not read my posts or my blog, were coming from this post by Glenn Greenwald, where he included my email address. I'm tempted to return the favor, but I suspect that he's just trying to repair his credibility with his followers after I committed the unpardonable sin of linking to him favorably.
But the downside of these astroturf campaigns is that they only ensure that I'll view critical email from lefties with a more jaundiced eye next time, wondering who's really behind them. Plus, the obvious ignorance (and frequent illiteracy) of the emailers hardly serves to improve my opinion of their side of the debate. Thanks for doing your small part to degrade the blogosphere, Greenwald.
The Real Ugly American has the transcript of Glenn's debate with Virginia's Law Professor Robert Turner which aired on C-Span last week. Their opinions differ quite dramatically.
Kenny,
Oh Gawd.
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Thursday, February 23, 2006 at 05:36 PM
Well, hell, Ron, if you're not trying to prove that we should be more worried about Bush than about al Qaeda, I don't have a whole lot of interest in the conversation. It's that view that I find absurd. "Our discussion" appears to be mostly two people talking about two different things, which is commonly the case when each side thinks the other side is "misrepresenting the tenor of the discussion," and is why I decided I needed to clarify what exactly it is you think we're talking about.
In the long response that I started writing to you in between helping the kids with their homework, I said at one point, "Stop protesting that you never said al Qaeda wasn't a threat; do you think al Qaeda is a bigger threat than Bush? -- that's the relevant question here." But that relevance is precisely what you would deny: you don't have any interest in arguing that at all.
I think the major difference between us (though there are other minor ones) is this: any liberty-loving person has only a finite amount of time and energy to devote to resisting encroachments of liberty. One has to pick one's battles wisely, based on the severity of the potential end-state, the likelihood of the end-state's coming to pass, and the imminence of the threat. And there are a bunch of government encroachments on liberty, without even mentioning Islamists, that I think are rationally far better worth spending time on than this particular surveillance program, by all three of those standards. I think that the federal government as a whole is a threat to civil liberty, and that the branches of government in decreasing order of threat to liberty are SCOTUS, Congress and POTUS; you seem to think (though perhaps I'm just misunderstanding you again) that the branch of government that most endangers American civil liberties is the executive. Therefore you are greatly exercised by the potential danger that might possibly in the long run grow out of what this President may perhaps be doing. By contrast I am exercised by the very present and actual dangers posed by the War on Drugs and Kelo, as well as by the actual dangers posed by the quite literal war of jihad presently being waged against the U.S. Any effort I’m going to put into halting the assault on civil liberties is going to go to a whole lot of other threats before it works its way down to the relatively minor threat that this surveillance program appears to pose.
As a consequence of the fact that I don't see any particular reason to think this surveillance problem is a huge threat, I only got involved in the discussion at all because I thought it was funny to see people trying with a straight face to maintain that Dubya poses a bigger danger than al Qaeda. As you are not arguing that position, I have misunderstood you from the beginning and this has all been largely a waste of time.
Since you've put a lot of effort into it, I'll honor that by adding the comments I wrote up last night, though I'm not going to go back through and put them into any particular order. The major conclusion is that if you think this is a big deal, well, go ahead and do what you want to do; but I think you're picking a very odd battle to fight.
"It may be those who worry about 'small infingements' who keep our liberties intact," is in particular a genuine attempt to deal with the empirical record, and one with which I have a great deal of sympathy. It seems to me that the principal difference between us is that I would pick different battles than you – for example, I’ve gone absolutely ballistic on my own blog about the Kelo decision. But that’s precisely because I think the Kelo decision is likely to have much more immediate and much more far-reaching impact on the civil liberties of Americans than is the NSA program (based on what I know about it): losing your house is way more traumatic than getting eavesdropped on for most people, and the only self-selection on people suffering under Kelo is a nasty tendency for it to be the relatively impoverished who suffer the most. Every bit of effort you spend on this surveillance program is effort you’re not spending on Vermont’s obscene restrictions on home-schooling, to take just one example. And while you’re desperately worried that this program might be the first step that eventually allows the Presidency to inhibit political speech some time in the indefinite future, right now at this very moment the vast majority of newspapers in America are afraid to print some largely innocuous cartoons about Mohammed because of the violent intimidation of Islamists...but it’s the people concerned about Islamists who are, you seem to say, overreacting. An America in which the vast majority of the press is too intimitated by the threat of violence to print editorial cartoons, is perhaps not an America whose “survival” (whatever you mean by that) is threatened, but it’s certainly an America in which freedom of speech has already taken one hell of a hit.
But hey, if that’s the battle you feel called to fight, go on and fight it. Just don’t be surprised if the rest of us think there are lots of places in the front lines where we’re needed worse than where you’re fightin’.
I think if I were more certain that the President actually broke the law, I would be more concerned. In the same way, I had no interest in the whole impeachment process for Clinton until the news about the dress broke and the President essentially confessed that he had lied under oath; before then I knew he was a liar and a sleaze but that just meant he was a politician, and I’m resigned to having politicians as Presidents. I don't see this surveillance program as an analogous case because (1) I have no real grounds (generalized philosophical suspicion is not the same thing as reasonable cause) to think the President did anything that I would intrinsically object to his doing; (2) I don't know whether Congress has the Constitutional authority to restrict the sort of activities that the President was engaged in, and therefore I don't know which side has actually behaved inconsistently with separation of powers; (3) even if in the end the Supreme Court were to decide that the President's interpretation of the Constitution is wrong, I don't know any reason to think that it isn't his honest interpretation of the Constitution (and hence not an attempt on his part to suborn the Constitution).
In short the dispute here seems to be on Constitutional interpretation: the President and Congress honestly disagree on what the Constitution means. By contrast, Clinton just outright lied. They aren't really particularly analogous cases. Now, if we were to discover that Albert Gonzales had told the President, "You can't really do this, but we don't think we'll get caught and even if we do we'll pretend we thought the Consitution said we could" -- why, then, in that case I'd lead the impeach-his-ass bandwagon.
Other points, in no particular order:
1. What the President says he did is something I want the President to do, and something that Congress seems to want him to do as long as he asks their permission, and something that (if he believes it will be effective) I suspect he is Constitutionally obliged to do, as long as due respect is paid to separation of powers. Only if the President was in actual violation of the Constitution, or if the nature of the program has been grossly misrepresented, do I want to see any action taken -- and in the former case I want the Constitutional issue clarified, I want FISA appropriately altered, and if the President thinks it’s effective then I want the President to then go right back to listening in on the phone calls of al Qaeda members overseas even when the other end of the phone call is in America. And I don't want him to have to get a warrant in order to do it, because I believe the term domestic is reasonably reserved for conversations in which both parties are within the United States, and I want Islamist terrorists to have as few opportunities to exploit our liberties as possible. I agree with the President: if you’re talking to somebody from al Qaeda, I want us to know why. That is because I believe that we are at war -- a real war, not the bogus War on Drugs. (Added note: I’ll respond to your assertion that I’m obliged to show that I have positive reason to believe that this particular program is in fact effective as soon as you show that you have positive grounds to believe that this particular program is in fact more nefarious than the President says it is.)
2. There is a fundamental Constitutional question that is not at all clear to me, and that is whether Congress has the authority to restrict the President's field of action in this case -- in other words, what constitutes "due respect for separation of powers." The guys calling for investigation of the President seem to consider that it's established beyond question that if FISA did indeed forbid this sort of activity, then the President was obliged to follow FISA. It doesn't seem nearly that open-and-shut to me – not nearly as open-and-shut as, say, that when a woman grows a few marijuana plants in her own garden for her own consumption, interstate commerce is not involved, and therefore that federal interference in that activity is a violation of the separation of powers between state and federal governments. So when you say, "The President has disregarded FISA," my own reaction is, "I don't know whether that's a bad thing or not." Furthermore, when you say, "I believe that everyone should be subject to the law," my reaction is, "Not if we're talking about the executive branch and the law is an attempt by the legislative branch to overreach its authority" -- because that would mean that Congress was refusing to be subject to the Constitution. And Congress, like everybody else, ought to obey the law. (As a side issue, members of a Congress that exempts itself from half the laws it passes, have no business whining about how "everybody should have to obey the law." That presumably doesn't apply to you, though, Ron, as I doubt you’re a member of Congress.)
3. If the Constitution really does give the President broad scope to act against foreign enemies with relatively little detailed oversight from "most of Congress," why, that shows the wisdom of the Founders. The last thing I want is for "most of Congress" to be informed in any detail whatsoever of our covert intelligence activites, for the simple reason that the day after most of Congress finds out about them is the day they will be leaked. You have a deep and abiding mistrust of President Bush; well, I have a deep and abiding mistrust of Congress, as well. You think the Executive branch has a long history of attempting to abuse power; well, Congress has a long history of being blabbermouths -- and also of abusing power. (Ask Anita Hill whether it's a good idea to believe a Senator who says, "Trust me, I won't tell anybody [fingers crossed behind his back as he mentally adds, '...unless doing so will advance my political career or hurt my political opponents'].")
4. Pretty much all of your arguments are based on the nature of something that is, effectively, unknown to yourself, despite your strictures on the practice of so arguing (“Isn’t is suspect to base your argument on something’s nature that is, effectively, unknown to yourself?”). You’re constantly saying things along the lines of, “I don’t know what the program is doing; so we have to have an investigation.” You think the details should be made known to a broad audience so that we can be sure the President isn't doing something nasty -- even though we don't really have any evidence that this program is anything other than what he says it is. "Yes," you seem to say, "but maybe he's lying, and we need to know, not trust." Now, if this did not involve the waging of war -- that is, if there were any good reason other than suspicion on general principles to think this program truly has involved domestic spying such as Hoover used to specialize in -- I would agree with you. But it does involve the waging of war, indeed intelligence operations; and I know of no evidence other than "many Presidents lie a lot" (not that I don’t agree with that sentiment) to think that this particular program is more than what the President says. I know that al Qaeda is a deadly threat. I do not know that this program is even an infringement on civil rights at all, much less a deadly threat. Potentially to increase your risk to a known and deadly threat in order to decrease a potential risk to a non-deadly threat, is not an appealing course of action, at least to me; and that’s what you appear to be arguing for. Furthermore, are you sure you aren’t in effect establishing a precedent by which any covert operation can be crippled simply by having a single disgruntled person within the chain choose to disregard the laws on control of classified information and recruit an anti-administration newspaper to “blow the whistle on the abuses”? You would seem to be willing to argue that lots of civil liberties over and beyond the right to trade banana nut pie recipes with Osama bin Laden in privacy, are at stake because of the slippery slope; do you not see that there is more than one slippery slope here?
5. "Why did the administration not seek to amend it before they disregarded it?" That's an easy one: because you would have had to explain why you wanted the amendment, and your chances of explaining to all of Congress why you want the amendment without seeing the full details of your surveillance program plastered all over the New York Times the next day, are pretty much nil. To defend your surveillance tactics to all of Congress is to defend them to the New York Times which is to explain them to al Qaeda which is to make them largely useless before Congress can even call the roll.
6. It would still help a lot if you could define exactly what you mean by "the survival of the country." I don't think either al Qaeda or President Bush is anywhere close to causing the Stars and Stripes to cease waving over the Capitol building. The question is whether American citizens on balance are going to suffer long-term changes to our quality of life. I think there's considerably more reason to think that al Qaeda intends to, and actually has genuine potential to, inflict such damage on us than that Bush does. Certainly they’ve already done severe damage to freedom of speech, quite apart from the dead at Ground Zero.
7. Your bold-face emphasis seems to say that you are very upset that Bush is attacking the leakers. My own opinion here is quite different from your apparent one: I think the leakers are the one set of persons here who absolutely, unequivocably, ought to go to jail. There are procedures by which true whistleblowers in the intelligence community can anonymously inform Congress of their concerns, without breaching security and revealing operational details to the world at large. The American people elected the President and entrusted him with the responsibility for managing covert operations in our defense; the leakers were not so elected, and are proscribed by law from making a unilateral decision that a particular program not only is an abuse of power, but can only be corrected in a manner that destroys the possible usefulness of the program. You think the President broke the law; so far as I can tell he doesn’t think so. But the leakers broke the law, they damn well knew it, and they did it on purpose. You like slippery-slope arguments; can you not see that each time some blabbermouth Senator betrays an Anita Hill’s privacy by leaking her name to the press because he didn’t like the results that the official process had produced, or each time some disgruntled CIA staffer leaks details of classified operations to the Times, we go further down the road that says that you can break the law and subvert the system as long as you have a political agenda for doing so?
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Thursday, February 23, 2006 at 12:05 PM
When you ask me which I think is a greater threat, you're basing your argument on government as 'trade-offs.' Your argument goes something like this: if one or the other (terrorism or executive over-reach) is a greater threat we should pick the lesser, regardless if both are threats - which they both happen to be. You're goal has been to prove terrorism is a greater threat than Bush's over-reach. The problem is that you have not given any evidence in support of your basic assumption that it is necessary for Bush to over-reach and order secret, warrantless spying in order to stop a terrorist attack! You haven't even given any evidence or reasoning arguing that you don't have to defend this assumption.
(1)You are assuming that Bush's over-reach and secret, warrantless spying are better at stopping terrorism than the legal way, going through the unarguably lenient FISA court. It also seems that you are assuming that this is true as well with any other way we could devise that wouldn't involve executive over-reach and secret, warrantless spying. You are assuming that a trade-off is necessary, without having given any evidence in support of that assumption.
(2)Until you can give evidence that warrantless, secret wiretapping and the rest of Bush's over-reaches are better at stopping terrorism than using FISA, your argument rests on an assumption that has absolutely no evidence, and actually only has evidence against it - that out of 5,000 leads turned over from the NSA to the FBI, none of them panned out.
So, I hope you can respond to this. I don't know any better way of saying it. So far the bulk of my writing has consisted in answering your questions and clarifying my points.
Recently you wrote to me:
Frankly, Ron, I want to hear a decent rebuttal of my arguments. If you can't address the substantive points, well, fine, then don't; but I'm not wasting my time in a pissing contest. If that's all you're here for then I have other things to do.
I have, very clearly, given rebuttals twice. To your trade-offs argument, your mathematical expectation argument and your slippery slope argument, and you have yet to respond to any of them.
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 07:34 PM
Ron,
It has suddenly struck me that perhaps I don't understand what you're trying to prove. I have thought that you were trying to prove that Dubya is a bigger threat to America than is al Qaeda. But perhaps you are actually trying to say something like this:
1. Yes, I agree that Islamic terrorism is a greater threat to America than is Dubya, but Islamic terrorism still isn't as much of a threat as you people think it is.
2. And yes, I agree that Dubya is less of a threat to American liberty than is Islamic terrorism, and perhaps even less of a threat than is a Supreme Court capable of rendering the Kelo decision and a Congress that has shown no respect for the Commerce Clause for the past three-quarters of a century -- but he's still more of a threat than you guys think he is.
Is that all you're fundamentally trying to say?
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 03:58 PM
Ron,
Much better; thank you very sincerely.
That deserves a thoughtful response and I don't have time to do that over lunch. Will get back to you. Could you perhaps answer a question:
You seem to be making a distinction between "a threat to the country" and "a threat to the survival of the country." Presumably you do not define the latter as "the Stars and Stripes cease to fly over Washington D.C.," since that is not threatened, even remotely, by executive overreach. What, then, do you mean by "survival" such that it is threatened more by executive overreach than by nuclear terrorism? (I'm not asking you at present to defend the proposition that our "survival" is threatened more by executive overreach than by nuclear terrorism, merely trying to clarify what it is that you mean by "survival.")
More later.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 01:24 PM
Now, since up until now you have insisted on shifting the "tenor" of the argument, let me insist.
It remains to be proven that warrantless, domestic, secret NSA spying is actually more effective than domestic NSA spying with a warrant, the legal way.
You have opined on this secret program before, what is your opinion on these points?
Important points to be considered are that (1)FISA allows spying for up to 72 hours before obtaining a warrant (2) FISA, contrary to what I've read here on ATB, has turned down only 6 requests... while they have modified 179 requests. This is out of 5,645 requests between 2001 and 2004 (the last year of which data was available) and (3) If FISA was obsolete, why did the administration not seek to amend it before they disregarded it?
The link to the FISA request data:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/253334_nsaspying24.html
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Tuesday, February 21, 2006 at 08:19 AM
I am addressing the serious arguments and points you have brought up. This is the conclusion of your logical argument:
Conclusion: you cannot simultaneously complain that the surveillance program is a dire threat to the nation and at the same time complain that people who say that terrorism is a dire threat to the nation are bedwetting fearmongerers.
(1) I have never argued that terrorism isn't a serious threat, and only called those people 'bedwetters' who believed that terrorists could bring about the DEATH (meaning the destruction of our government, our Constitution, and the fracturing of the US into pure localism) of our nation, so (2) your conclusion and your premises, while true, have no real bearing on anything I’ve argued. Pressing your logical argument without any response to these points obviously misrepresents our discussion. Your logical argument doesn’t represent our discussion because I have constantly written that al Qaeda is a serious threat. Just to be sure, here is every instance I have said that terrorism IS a threat:
“I haven’t heard anybody familiar with the matter say that “al Qaeda is not a serious threat.” I think that everybody believes we should be spying on al Qaeda.”
“I never said terrorism was not a threat, not once, in fact I said the contrary.”
“Spilling hot coffee is a threat, and on a much greater scale terrorism is a threat.”
So, basically every one of my posts. This is the one time I mentioned bedwetters:
If you think, like antimedia, that the US will crumble (die) because some of us may have to ride bikes, or turn the heat down to 60F , well, you're plainly and simply a bedwetter.
As you can see, I wrote that anyone who thinks terrorists can destroy the US is a bedwetter -not anyone who thinks terrorism is a serious threat.
As for the “slippery slope” argument. You write: a small infringement upon liberty does not automatically develop into a wholesale destruction of liberty, and therefore you cannot act as though the small infringement and the large infringement are the same thing.
You can’t argue that a person shouldn’t worry about a slippery slope in this case just because “a small infringement” doesn’t “automatically” lead to authoritarianism. It may be those who worry about “small infingements” who keep our liberties intact. Besides an infringement being offensive in itself, any small possibility that an infringement could lead to the loss of more and more rights is worth at least investigating, isn’t it?
The libertarian in ME calls warrantless, domestic wiretapping a pretty big infringement, and especially the power the President has used to justify this order. It’s bigger than not being able to buy Chianti on Sundays, for the reason that it has the possibility to affect more than just consumer choice – namely political involvement. Let me also remind you that you have no idea if this is a “small” infringement. We have no idea how far the program has gone. You are basing your argument on the President’s word that this spying program hasn’t been used for any political purpose. His word isn’t like that of the bible, or your father, or your best friend. What I am saying is that you have no idea how far down the slippery slope we may have gone. The potential for abuse, obviously, is there. We are dealing with a program that: (1)has disregarded FISA and (2) has been and has continued to be kept secret from not just you and I, but virtually all of Congress.
(1) This “small infringement upon our liberty” is also very potentially a disregard of the law, hence, you know, illegal. If there is a question that the President broke the law by ordering secret, warrantless, domestic wiretaps, shouldn’t it go to court? I’ve read your post here on ATB where you write about Clinton and his perjury: “That the blow job as such was of no great concern with respect to the general concern of respect for the rule of law, that that is even accepted by many as one of the perks of high office … but that the alleged act of perjuring oneself under oath in a court of law was the big deal there.” The alleged act of disregarding FISA (the law) is the deal here. I also am a citizen that believes, as libertarian as I am, that everyone should be subject to the law, no matter what law it is. Pan-handling, prostitution, whatever. If there is a problem with the law, it should be lobbied against and change should be fought for. Of course, prostitutes don’t have a very big lobby in D.C., neither do pan-handlers. Bush, I think, is doing okay, though. If Bush disagreed with FISA, he should’ve approached Congress and sought an amendment.
A responsible argument can be made that the we are already sliding down a slippery slope of executive over-reach. During the Iran-Contra affair Ronald Reagan denied any responsibility in the scandal, effectively claiming that only his ‘underlings’ were involved. Now we have Bush claiming that he signed the warrantless wiretap order, and that he will do so again. And instead of a debate on whether this is a permissable act by a President, we have the executive attacking the messenger… going after the leakers and the NYT much more aggressively than anyone’s going after the president’s highly questionable order. Bush has not only applied his unchecked power to a specific case, such as Reagan did in the Iran-Contra scandal, the administration has deemed their power as some kind of sweeping license to break laws passed by Congress.
(2) Isn’t it suspect to base your argument on something’s nature that is, effectively, unknown to yourself? You have said that you don’t know how far the program has gone. It’s like basing a logical argument on the statement: “He said it was this long,” or “He said it was greenish.” You’re taking the President’s word, which means you yourself have no real idea of what you are arguing for. On the other hand it’s very reasonable to be concerned about something that the Executive has such a horrible track record on – e.g. Nixon and secret spying on the civil rights movement.
So, I have addressed, I think, all your concerns.
So it remains for you to address this… this is the second time I’ve posted these points, and you have yet to address them.
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Tuesday, February 21, 2006 at 08:01 AM
Good God, Ron, do you really think that the people McCarthy attacked "had no effective way of defending themselves in the public's mind once they'd been charged"? Then how the hell did it come to be that "McCarthy" has been a dirty word in American politics ever since? Hollywood is still making movies attacking McCarthy. He lost, for God's sake. He got absolutely obliterated in precisely the court of public opinion that you say would provide no defense for the accused.
And if you were paying any attention at all it would be unnecessary for me to point out that that's EXACTLY the problem with your slippery-slope argument, which problem you still refuse to face or address: in the American democracy, the court of public opinion has a nasty way of striking back at politicians who genuinely overreach themselves, and that is more true for Presidents than it is for the inhabitants of any other government offices. If the President really does go on a McCarthian witch hunt, then you would expect him to suffer the same fate as McCarthy. If you have some reason to believe that this is a different case and history would not repeat itself, well, then, let's hear it.
I have no idea whether you're genuinely treating this as a partisan issue or not, because I don't know how hard you attacked President Clinton in similar circumstances. What I do know is that:
1. I've apologized twice, once withdrawing the "hyperventilating" label, which you are still bringing up despite my having withdrawn it, and once again over the apres moi quote. This is because I do, in fact, prefer civil discourse, and am genuinely interested in the issues. You don't seem even to have noticed. If you insist on treating everybody who disagrees with you as if they were jerks, even when they apologize, then (a) the people who aren't jerks eventually stop trying and certainly they stop bothering to apologize, and (b) you fuel ever more hotly the suspicion that the reason you suspect other people of "trying to score partisan points" is that that is the only form of interaction you yourself can imagine -- and therefore that it is the only form of interaction in which you yourself ever engage. Every paranoid nutcase on both sides eagerly assures everyone else that he is not being partisan but is simply appealing to undeniable facts. Saying, "I'm not treating this as a partisan issue," buys you nothing. Acting like somebody who is capable of civil discourse...well, that would actually be convincing. But then that generally entails gracious acceptance of genuine apologies and a willingness to apologize oneself.
2. I have provided two very specific and very detailed explanations of apparent logical problems in your reasoning, and practically begged you to show us what was wrong with them. You consistently choose to ignore these points of substance in order to complain about my perceived slights to your dignity. Frankly, Ron, I want to hear a decent rebuttal of my arguments. If you can't address the substantive points, well, fine, then don't; but I'm not wasting my time in a pissing contest. If that's all you're here for then I have other things to do.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Monday, February 20, 2006 at 06:03 PM
Kenny writes -
if McCarthyism means anything, it means demonizing one's domestic political opponents by making exaggerated claims that they are conspiring to destroy the American way of life. If you were to ask an observing Martian which person in this comment thread is accusing his domestic political opponents of conspiring to destroy the American way of life, to whom do you think he would point?
This is a funny little twist - precious.
Well, unlike McCarthy, I'm not making exaggerated claims - the available evidence in the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal points to the necessity of an investigation - I don't give a damn if it ends in a conviction or impeachment, as long is it results in the necessary oversight and a framework that protects our constitutional rights. When it comes to Bush's illegal power grabs - there are many who believe this is illegal - if there is a question that a person has broken the law, well, our society usually lets a court or an investigation decide. Also, unlike McCarthy, I'm not a senator who can drag whomever I want before my committee, nor would I want to. I'm not treating this as a partisan issue, I'm treating it as an issue that is dear to liberty-loving Americans and will be dear to our children in the future. This is far from reaching the hysterics of a "Red Scare." I haven't seen any hysterics, asides from your reports of hyper-ventilation.
Your definition of McCarthyism would effectively label many popular conservative pundits - Ann Coulter and her book "Treason," with its defense of McCarthy and the HUAC, O'Reilly, Hannity... George Bush's "your either with us or against us" rhetoric. McCarthyism is also something that targets a group (like Communists) who have no effective way of defending themselves in the public's mind once they've been charged. So, even if found innocent by a court, they're treated as criminals by the public and effectively "convicted." I am legitimately targeting the Bush administration, not conservatives in general. Do you really think the poor Bush administration could be "blacklisted" without ever being convicted in a court of law? It would be laughable if you did. Look at Ollie North - he was convicted, he's had no trouble finding a job.
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Monday, February 20, 2006 at 04:01 PM
It doesn't matter who is the greater threat - terrorism can be fought effectively without the executive powers Bush has given himself.
Your response accusing me of being so self-centered that I don't care for human life is typical of an argument seeking to take the spotlight off of the main issues, rather than who you are, or what I identify you with.
I think a charge of "slimeball" is in order when someone characterizes you as some uncaring monster, and especially when that person had no real intellectual reason to publish that charge. My response was mild, actually. Funny for you to insinuate fairness now.
I brought up the survival of the US in order to compare terror to other events or climates that actually DID threaten the survival of the US. Also, I brought it up to clarify your mischaracterization that I wrote that terrorism is not a serious threat.
You write - Fundamentally, you appear to think that George Bush is a greater threat to the typical American's quality of life than is Islamist terrorism. Therefore we disagree -- not because I think government is never a threat to liberty, nor because you think al Qaeda is no threat to American life and limb, but because we disagree about the relative imminence and severity of the threat. Governance is about trade-offs, and you and I think the terrorism / government trade-offs should be drawn in different places.
You are writing this after having admitted that you have no idea how far the NSA warrantless spying program has gone. How can you even be sure where the line has been drawn?? You haven't explicitly stated it, but since you support warrantless, domestic, spying, I suppose you are against an investigation into the program. That’s my biggest concern with people who, basically automatically and uncritically, accept Bush’s spying program and his illegal power grabs.
The problem with your logical argument is that it does not distinguish between warrantless spying and spying with a warrant, and whether Bush’s warrantless spying is actually more effective at stopping terrorism, as opposed to the legal way – spying with a warrant from a FISA court. Your formal argument just doesn’t fit with the reality of our discussion.
So there is an easy way out of your “mathematical-expectation argument”: Warrantless NSA evesdropping is not necessary to combat terrorism. Since intelligence agencies have always spied on al Qaeda at every opportunity, and since FISA laws have never prohibited intelligence agencies from spying domestically, as long as they get a warrant within 72 hours after the fact, and since I am not advocating an end to spying, it remains to be proven that Bush’s particular, illegal “surveillance program” is even necessary.
Come up with a “mathematical-expectation” argument that addresses this, then I’ll play.
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Saturday, February 18, 2006 at 01:20 AM
Kenny says:
"either you can argue that Bush's surveillance program sets a bad precedent and ought to be a matter of major concern, or else you can argue that al Qaeda is not really a serious threat and people who play it up are fearmongering. But if you try to do both at once, then you are an ass."
So, maybe you're saying that both are legitimate, but not at the same time?
These issues, the exaggeration and the political use of the threat posed by terrorists, and the lawlessness that the Bush administration has given itself title to, are intimately intertwined, since the former is used to justify the latter.
I haven't heard anybody familiar with the matter say that "al Qaeda is not really a serious threat." I think that everybody believes that we should be spying on Al Qaeda. Greenwald, whom you mention, certainly believes we should be. I certainly believe we should be. In fact, spying and infiltration should be what the "war" on terrorism is focused on.
I've already written how terrorism can be a real threat and at the same time be exaggerated and/or used by the Bush administration to defend the powers they have alotted themselves. I can, however, if you're a Republican used to fighting tooth and nail for whatever your party does, see how you would disagree with this.
What I cannot imagine is why anybody would not just sit back and allow, but defend, the authority the President has given to himself.
According to Bush and others, this is a "long war," that could last generations and longer. The fight against terrorism will last this long - terrorism has already been affecting Americans for decades. I'm sure you've all heard of the "Yoo Memorandum," which declares that Congress cannot put "any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make." This is a dangerous precedent indeed, when we're in what the administration describes as a "long war" or "endless war."
The President ordered the warrantless, domestic wiretapping of individuals inside the US in this spirit. He also stated in this spirit that he reserved the right to waive the law's restrictions, according to how he saw fit in the fight against terrorism, when he signed the McCain amendment against torture into law. Many, on both sides of the ideological fence, view Bush's actions as illegal. So, are we a nation of laws, or of Bush? Can you honestly say that no investigation into the NSA program is necessary? You're honestly saying you trust Bush not to overstep in this program, when he's already made it clear that what our country does in response to terrorism is his decision alone to make, regardless of what Congress or the law may say?
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Friday, February 17, 2006 at 08:24 PM
Ron,
Hm, perhaps I misunderstood what you are fundamentally arguing.
Do you think the terrorists pose a greater threat to America than does Bush's invasion of civil liberties? I have that impression. If it is incorrect, I sincerely apologize.
Now, as to your other points. By far the most important: I am glad to hear that you do not, in fact, think that the question of whether or not people in New York are related to you or to me has anything whatsoever to do with their importance. I absolutely accept that you meant no such thing, and I apologize for my reaction.
Of less importance:
1. "Typical response, Kenny." Typical of whom -- me personally, or some larger group of people with whom you classify me? I ask out of mild curiosity.
2. As to the various accusations such as "partisan slimeballs just looking to beat the other side," "you really exposed yourself for what you are," etc., it may some day occur to you that your chances of misunderstanding my motives and character are not any lower than were my chances of misunderstanding what you meant by talking about how a nuclear bomb in New York was not likely to hurt anybody I know. Do you consider that in saying, "You and your loved ones have a very statistically low chance of dying in a terrorist attack," you really exposed yourself for what you are? If not, are you sure that you are not in your turn reading into my post something that I didn't put there?
3. You seem oddly fixated on the "survival of the U.S.," which apparently is defined not as, "no foreign power takes over," but instead as, "The quality of life in the United States is degraded to a point at which we can no longer say we live in the same country that we used to." And then you seem to define quality of life solely in terms of privacy. I don't see any angle from which your argument works, unless we grant that getting eavesdropped on is worse then dying in a nuclear explosion. Personally, I think a person who gets killed, or who suffers bereavement, has suffered a greater loss in quality of life than has a person who gets eavesdropped on. And I think when a Manhattanite starts worrying that today could be the day the nuclear bomb goes off, that is a greater loss in quality of life than if that same Manhattanite starts worrying that today could be the day the government listens in on his two-minute 900-number phone call. You give the impression that you would rather die of radiation poisoning than have somebody overhear your phone conversation.
So I ask, Kenny, do YOU know that this Bush-ordered warrantless spying program does not threaten our civil liberties?
I do not, in fact, know. However, if the NSA program is as it has been described -- listening, without a warrant, to U.S.-to-international conversations in which there is reason to think the non-U.S. party is a terrorist -- then I think the risk posed by this particular program is small and that the trade-off benefit at least potentially outweighs the risk, and that there are a thousand things that the government does that are vastly more threatening to our civil liberties with much less excuse. In other words, I think this particular program is one hell of an odd place to draw your line in the sand. We continue to wage the obscenely destructive and (IMHO) shamelessly racist War on Drugs, and this (the NSA thing) is what you choose to complain about? If I'm going to go fight the civil liberties fight, there are hundreds of government intrusions that are vastly more invasive than this one and vastly harder to defend. If you can't convince the American people that the War on Drugs or gun registration is an outrage to our civil liberties, then you haven't a hope in hell of getting the American people upset over this NSA thing -- except, of course, for those who just need an excuse to indulge their Bush-hatred. Wanna wage libertarian war over Sunday alcohol laws and anti-prostitution legislation? I'll ride right along beside you. Wanna try to convince the American public that they should be more scared by the NSA surveillance than by the malice of al Qaeda? Buddy, you're on your own on that one.
See, you just can't seem to get a handle on what it is we actually disagree about. I don't have a problem with your being vigilant about protection of individual rights -- I think tons of stuff that the government does is stuff it has no business doing. Now, I don't think the NSA thing in itself is likely to be a significant threat to civil liberties, but when you try to prove to me that it is, you do so...by pulling in lots of other government behavior to show there's a real problem. This is rather as if somebody were to say, "If you let that person over there keep popping those children's balloons he'll wind up a child molester," and then when we pronounce ourselves unconvinced you say, "But he's been convicted of thirteen other sex-related crimes in the past." Well, okay, then, in that case we agree that the kids are at risk -- but it's not the balloon-popping that's significant, it's the other stuff. So why not use the real evidence first instead of clouding the issue with silly stuff about balloon-popping?
Fundamentally, you appear to think that George Bush is a greater threat to the typical American's quality of life than is Islamist terrorism. Therefore we disagree -- not because I think government is never a threat to liberty, nor because you think al Qaeda is no threat to American life and limb, but because we disagree about the relative imminence and severity of the threat. Governance is about trade-offs, and you and I think the terrorism / government trade-offs should be drawn in different places.
Now I would be happy to listen if you want to try again, but you'll have to do better than that statistical argument. Why don't you try this: my mathematical-expectation argument is an expansion of, and a more rigorous and complete formulation of, your own argument, though it arrives at an opposite conclusion. So, it's an argument, and that means that either the premises are wrong, or there's a logical fallacy in it, or else the conclusion is true. You clearly think my conclusion (that al Qaeda terrorism is a bigger threat than that posed by the NSA surveillance program) is false. So, is it the premises, or is it the logic; and if it's the premises, then which one(s); and if it's the logic, what's the fallacy? To help you find the attack lanes more easily:
1. It is preferable to be eavesdropped on rather than to be killed or to suffer radiation sickness, even setting aside property damage, etc.; and in particular being killed or permanently disabled does much more effective damage to one's practical liberty than does getting eavesdropped upon.
2. When a person is killed or suffers radiation sickness, the bereavement effect spreads to far more people than it does when he is eavesdropped upon, doing much more effective damage to their practical liberty in the process.
3. Therefore if you have both a surveillance program and a terrorist attack, and the same number of people are directly affected by both, the effective loss to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is significantly greater in the scenario of the terrorist attack.
4. Therefore, if a surveillance program is thought to be a greater threat to the citizenry than is terrorist attack, it must be because one believes that the surveillance program affects vastly more people, after adjustment for the likelihood of success.
5. But we have already had one terrorist attack in which significant numbers of lives were lost or drastically altered for the worse, and (if Bush critics are to be trusted) we are no safer now than we were before 9/11.
6. Furthermore, a successful nuclear attack (the scenario you posited) would kill vastly more people than were lost even on 9/11.
7. The number of people affected by the surveillance program is, so far as we know, on the same order of magnitude as the number of people killed in 9/11.
Conclusion: you cannot simultaneously complain that the surveillance program is a dire threat to the nation and at the same time complain that people who say that terrorism is a dire threat to the nation are bedwetting fearmongerers.
If you do not want to pursue the statistical line of reasoning that you yourself introduced, then go back and try to deal with the point I made to begin with about the limitations of slippery-slope arguments: a small infringement upon liberty does not automatically develop into a wholesale destruction of liberty, and therefore you cannot act as though the small infringement and the large infringement are the same thing. If you think the NSA program in itself goes too far, then we disagree. If you think the NSA program puts us on a road to fascism that we won't be able to escape, what -- and I mean this as a serious inquiry -- makes you think we won't stop before we go too far? For example, Shafly could have argued that the Supreme Court is not sufficiently constrained by public opinion and that therefore the general moderation of the American public would not be able to take effect. What argument would you use to say that the American people won't be able to monitor the situation and step in before it goes too far?
A final, minor point about "rampant McCarthyism:" if McCarthyism means anything, it means demonizing one's domestic political opponents by making exaggerated claims that they are conspiring to destroy the American way of life. If you were to ask an observing Martian which person in this comment thread is accusing his domestic political opponents of conspiring to destroy the American way of life, to whom do you think he would point? I agree that rampant McCarthyism is a danger to America. What measures are you personally taking to make sure you don't fall into that syndrome yourself without meaning to?
I am, genuinely, sorry about the apres moi thing.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Friday, February 17, 2006 at 08:14 PM
Typical response, Kenny. Quite a low-blow bitch slap.
I never said terrorism was not a threat, not once, in fact I said the contrary. I did say terrorism is not a threat to the survival of the US. To not survive, as you may know, is to die. Nuclear War, the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, the Cuban Missile Crisis - these were threats to the survival of the US.
If you think, like antimedia, that the US will crumble (die) because some of us may have to ride bikes, or turn the heat down to 60F , well, you're plainly and simply a bedwetter. The only terrorist-related event that could kill the U.S. is an inappropriate reaction by our own government: unending martial law, authoritarian power grab, rampant McCarthyism, etc.
It's too bad, Kenny, that you felt the need to accuse me of "self-centeredness" and to accuse me of not caring about thousands of people's lives. That's too bad. You know that statistics don't really have any place for morality, that's for the human being using it. Since I said statisticaly speaking, I thought that even partisan slimeballs just looking to beat "the other side" would realize that I'm not a statistics-producing machine, but a human being, who cares deeply for other human beings. You really exposed yourself for what you are, Kenny.
You see, Kenny, the intelligence organizations in the US govenrment have always spied on terrorists and foreign enemies. They were doing this before 9/11. They are doing it now, as we speak. Since 9/11, however, the spying has been in part conducted on American citizens, with no real oversight. I'm not against spying on Americans with ties to terrorism and who communicate with terrorists. But there sure as hell better be more oversight than Bush's promise that they're only spying on Americans with ties to terrorists.
I don't know if Bush's NSA spying program is a huge threat to our civil liberties. I very much suspect it is. Recently, under FOIA requests, the ACLU has received thousands of FBI documents that show the FBI has been monitoring, infiltrating, and in some cases provoking groups such as United for Peace and Justice, Greenpeace, community vegan projects, and the Catholic Workers with their "semi-communistic" ideology. These are all completely open groups, with absolutely no histories of violence. The Counterintelligence Field Activity Office has also been proven to have spied on Americans engaged in legitimate, legal activities. That doesn't sound like a government intent on protecting our constitutional freedoms.
So I ask, Kenny, do YOU know that this Bush-ordered warrantless spying program does not threaten our civil liberties?
I've always thought that Americans are a liberty loving people. I mean, we're bringing democracy to all corners of the world. We're defending America against terrorists that supposedly hate our freedom. I fail to understand how you can just blow off this secret presidential order that bypassed FISA courts, which is illegal and as far as we know may infringe on our civil liberties and may lead to even more infringement. Let's fight for freedom overseas, while not caring if our own may be curbed. Just doesn't make any sense.
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Friday, February 17, 2006 at 06:03 PM
To sum up what still seems to me to be fundamentally unanswerable: either you can argue that Bush's surveillance program sets a bad precedent and ought to be a matter of major concern, or else you can argue that al Qaeda is not really a serious threat and people who play it up are fearmongering. But if you try to do both at once, then you are an ass.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 01:15 PM
RJBJ,
Wow, suddenly you're everybody's favorite punching bag. I hate to pile on; but a couple of things I just can't let pass.
1. What scale of threat are they talking about? A threat to the existence of our nation? If that's the case, then I believe they're right - terrorists by themselves pose absolutely no threat to the survival of the US. They could set off a nuclear device in downtown Manhattan... the US as a nation would survive.
Well, that pretty much rules out the value of any war in our history other than the Revolutionary War (and, depending on just how much of the country you'd require to be obliterated before you felt that "the country" had failed to survive, possibly the Civil War), as being wars worth fighting on grounds of national security. What, do you think we as a nation wouldn't have survived if the Japanese had taken permanent possession of Pearl Harbor, and for that matter Alaska as well?
2. Or is this active movement talking about a personal threat? If this is the case, then I'd have to say that statistically they're very close to being right - you and your loved ones have a very statistically low chance of dying in a terrorist attack - even a nuclear one.
First, on a simple moral level, I hope to God I never sink to the level of self-centeredness necessary to be capable of saying, "Who gives a shit about a bunch of New Yorkers I'm not related to?" Apres moi le deluge, eh, RJ?
But as to the logic: remember that all of this talking about how a nuclear bomb in Manhattan would be no big deal (because, after all, what are the odds that anybody you care about would be directly affected?), is coming from a guy who at least seems to be going along with the general idea that a major threat to civil liberties is posed by Bush's surveillance program. ("If you let the federal government erode your civil liberties they will. I think it's that simple.") Now, this a surveillance program that has no chance of being extended to Americans who don't make a habit of talking to terrorist suspects overseas, and which in two years has affected, what, less than two out of every hundred thousand Americans? I'd have to say, RJ, that statistically you and your loved ones have a very statistically low chance of having a phone call listened into by the NSA, even without taking into account the self-selection that comes from the fact that the surveillance is not randomly directed, but instead targets specifically those people who converse with suspected terrorists overseas. Meanwhile, a nuclear bomb going off during the business day in Manhattan (which is the most densely populated piece of land in the U.S. as well as America's financial heart, and thus is consistently the prime target of terrorists) would very conservatively generate a million casualties, many of whom would not even be from New York. (There are a million and a half people who actually reside within the Borough of Manhattan, and the population rises dramatically every business day during the morning rush hour.) Under the scenario you dismiss as idle fearmongering from the President even if it comes true, let's look at mathematical expectation of pain personally experienced by the ordinary American (that is, you and me assuming neither of us spends much time talking to Wahabbite friends in Yemen):
1. At least two hundred times as many Americans would be directly affected as are affected by the surveillance program.
2. The damage experienced would be death or severe trauma, as opposed to having somebody overhear your (presumably casual) conversation about how your mother-in-law is driving you crazy.
3. Thus the indirect impact on loved ones (the bereavement effect) would be much more far-reaching, making your odds of being personally affected even higher.
4. The self-selection would be minimal (purely geographical and even that self-selection would be degraded by the numbers of tourists from all over the country present in Manhattan on any given day), thus even more increasing the odds of being affected for those of us not inclined to palaver with dubious buddies in the Middle East.
So why in God's name are you crazy enough to appeal to statistics to support your case that the terrorist threat is overblown while simultaneously insisting that Bush's surveillance program is a significant threat to our nation's civil liberties? If you want to argue that Bush is putting us on the road to a police state, then surely the very last thing you want to do is to suggest to people that perhaps they should consider statistical possibilities of being personally affected.
That's what gets me about the Greenwald posters who've been here the last few days -- you guys throw out one line of argument after another, without apparently ever pausing to think, "Hm, before I use this argument to attack the conservatives, perhaps I should consider whether the same argument could be fired back at me. And if it actually works much better against my own views than it works against the ones I'm attacking, then maybe I should look for a different argument." It's like someone from the Clinton administration complaining about how one Scooter Libby proves that the Dubya administration is a hotbed of corruption -- Joe Lieberman could make such an accusation with complete peace of mind, but the last thing a Clinton supporter could possibly want is for people to start thinking that you can pass judgment on a President based on the number of investigations, arraignments, trials, convictions and jail sentences undergone by people who work for him. Or again, if you work for Teddy Kennedy, then the last thing you want is for other Democrats to be comparing the Cheney hunting accident to Chappaquiddick.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 01:10 PM
The column didn't get nearly enough coverage, so I thought I would help things along. People should go back and read Scott Ott's archives. He's one of the best ever! And who wouldn't want that "pound key" option? Makes one wish that Osama or that krazy Kos kid would call more often!
Posted by: Darrell | Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 12:36 PM
Darrell, Scott Ott is my good medicine because he makes me laugh SOOO hard SOOO often. The man must dream funny dreams all night long :) And I have to laugh at this whole old world sometimes-me included- or I'd be tempted to despair .
Posted by: jess1dering | Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 01:26 AM
Good news for you folks on the Left...
*****
NSA Adds Alert and Choices on Tapped Calls
By Scott Ott, Editor-in-Chief, ScrappleFace.com
News Fairly Unbalanced. We Report. You Decipher.
(2006-02-07) — After a day in which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced tough questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about the legality of America’s best-known secret terrorist surveillance program, the National Security Agency (NSA) said it would alter its wiretap protocol to reduce the threat to civil rights.
Under the new procedures for intercepting a telephone call from an al Qaeda operative to a U.S. resident, the two parties engaged in conversation will hear a brief alarm bell every 30 seconds, followed by a recorded announcement that says: “In order to better protect the United States from devastating terror attacks, this call may be monitored.”
According to covert NSA spokesman Louis Slipps, “the new measures carry the assumption that some Americans may be unaware that they’re talking with terrorists, or do not realize that their casual chatter with an al Qaeda buddy may aide and abet the enemy.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, who yesterday told the Attorney General that he’s concerned about “peaceful Quakers who are being spied upon. and other law-abiding Americans and babies and nuns who are placed on terrorist watch lists“, today welcomed the new ‘liberty-enhanced’ secret wiretap program that the NSA dubbed “Operation Let Freedom Ring.”
“Thanks to these changes, the Quakers can stop quaking from fear and return to their regularly-scheduled quaking in response to divine revelation,” said Sen. Leahy. “And law-abiding Americans who just happen to have friends in al Qaeda, can rest easier tonight.”
In addition to the monitoring alert, Mr. Slipps said U.S. residents on NSA-intercepted calls will soon be offered a menu of options, including the following:
– To continue in Arabic press ‘one’ or say wâhid
– To hear a complete listing of the steps required to obtain a wiretap warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, press, or say, two
– If you’re a law-abiding American, press, or say, three
– If you’re a Quaker, a baby or a nun and feel you have reached this recording in error, please hang up the phone and dial a number that’s not associated with al Qaeda.
– To speak with an NSA representative, remain on the line until we complete the trace. You may hear a brief series of clicks, followed by a knock at your door.
– To call in a CIA predator-drone attack on the party to whom you are speaking, press the ‘pound’ key
*****
Hope this addresses all your concerns...
Posted by: Darrell | Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 01:08 AM
Our changing world seems to have left some folks behind. Those folks seem to be hopelessly stuck in the hardened cement of tired and ,in today's world, trite absolutes: absolutes which applied nicely to another time, to another reality. Even then, the ideal was just that, an ideal, and often not perfectly lived up to. Today's reality demands more intelligence and nuance and creativity and less recitation of formula. Our Joseph always seems to present himself as a beacon light for freedom and truth. Sorry Joseph, but here's how you read to me...."...Paw done told me that it ain't honorable to shoot nobody 'less you kin see the whites of thar eyes, so ah done let that varmit that blew up the homestead and killed the family. git away. Ahm gonna be practicing mah runnin' though, so that next time ah ken run ahead of him and MAKE him look me in the eye. We'll do it the honorable way then. Paw sure would be proud of me, that's fer sure!! !!" Joseph, I think that's sort of the kind of pride you hang onto. The IDEA is paramount to you , even if no longer applicable Well, long live the King rah, rah , rah..............but I say , let's get real and stay on top of what radical Islam is up to in our country. My nephew who works in London and had his train station blown up doesn't think the conflict is a "movie" Either does my nephew who ran for his life, covered in soot and debris, as bodies thudded to the pavement around him on 9-11. Either does my friend Rosemary who's beloved son was on the top floor as the towers crumbled out of existence along with his precious life and the lives of many of my fellow Americans. THINK Joseph!!! What on earth is so sacred about a phone call, for heavens sake !! Do you remember party lines or operator switchboards when nothing about a phone conversation was off limits to eavesdropping ears ? The only thing I really have to hide is Grandma's short- bread recipe. How about you?? ........................ PS Information about you is being collected by financial institutions like never before in the history of this country....all manner of information, medical, financial, etc. Are you not outraged by that, since privacy is so sacred to you ?? Seems to me you're a little too focused on George Bush and how " that Republican President can't do anything right" to be able to clearly see the BIG picture.
Posted by: jess1dering | Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 12:38 AM
RJBJ writes
This is an incredibly ignorant statement. (And I'm using ignorant in its proper form - i.e. uninformed.) If you don't think terrorism threatens the survival of this nation, then you simply do not grasp the nature of the problem at all. Mind you, I define the survival of this nation as a land where freedom of speech, religion and movement reign supreme. This is a cultural battle, not a religious one. If you don't understand that, then you will never see the threat. The concept of hating what someone says or believes yet defending to the death their right to say it does not exist in the Muslim cultures of the Mideast.If you don't think that is a threat to the survival of this nation, then you haven't given any thought to what terrorism is at all. Try to imagine, for example, if terrorists destroy Saudi Arabia's ability to export oil. If you don't think that would dramatically change your lifestyle, then you're a fool. Think about driving a bicycle to work, keeping your thermostat set to 60 degrees in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer, the collapse of the travel industry, the automobile industry, etc., etc. If you don't think those are possibilities then you've not thought the problem through.
First of all, I don't believe anything I read in the New York Times or anything given by anonymous sources. We have no way of knowing the anonymous source's qualifications, real knowledge of the information they're discussing or anything, and I'm certainly not going to trust the Times to tell the truth.Second, even if 5000 Americans have been spied on, do you realize how many Americans there are? 5000 Americans represent 178/100,000ths%. Does that sound like massive spying to you? If so, you have no sense of perspective. And if those 5000 are all people who spoke by telephone with known Islamist terrorist organizations, do you seriously want to say that we should not be listening to those calls simply because there's an American on one end?
Thirdly, the NSA program is not a domestic spying operation, no matter how many times the left lies and says it is. Period.
Finally, the fact that no arrests were made in America means nothing. The phone calls could lead to arrests overseas. Surely you understand that? Furthermore, we may not want to tip our hand on this end, because we still want to listen in to see who else the American end is talking to.
FDR spied on Americans. Plain and simple. He put Americans in detention camps and kept them there til the end of the war. He was spying on Americans before the war started.Learn some history, for crying out loud.
Posted by: antimedia | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 11:53 PM
Mr. Bon Jovi,
If one were to list the current top threats to the National Security of the United States what would be on that list? Nuclear missile strikes from Russia or North Korea? Perhaps a nuclear strike from Iran would be on the list? Maybe a conflict with China over Taiwan would be on there. Direct strikes from N. Korea, Iran, or Russia are clearly not the most pressing as they are unlikely or currently impossible. It is clearly not unreasonable to assume that, knowing what we as citizens are able to know, Terrorism is the single most impending threat to our nation at the present time, would you not agree? I see no other candidate. If that is the case then it also seems reasonable that the bulk of US security efforts are focused on preventing terrorism from occurring in the future. Although you weren’t speaking to me, you said: “you and your loved ones have a very statistically low chance of dying in a terrorist attack - even a nuclear one”. Yes, I will gladly grant you that point but that is really not the issue. It was also statistically improbable that I or my loved ones would be harmed by 9/11. It was even more statistically improbable that Americans or their loved ones would have been directly harmed by Pearl Harbor, or Nazi Germany, or fascist Italy. Does that mean that we over-reacted? Nor were any of the wars in which we have been involved in the 20th century (except the Cold War), it could be argued, were fought to preserve the “existence of our nation”. None-the-less, I think it is a reasonable reading of history to assert that most of these conflicts were of great importance to the world and to us and we were right and prudent to engage them seriously. If terrorism is a direct threat to us then it would follow that we should treat it at least as seriously. Therefore, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for our leaders to remind us of the importance and prudence of keeping vigilant and focused on the very real threat of terrorist attack. I think that fair-minded and honest liberals would agree that it is the top item on the threat list and they also understand that they are considered “high-value targets” just as much as Americans of other political leanings. The question then is how high on the overall list of national priorities our national security would rank. Conservatives seem to agree that it is at or near the very top. Wouldn’t you agree that this is not an unreasonable or reactionary position? If our security is at or near the top of national priorities then the question becomes how much and what kind of effort our government should make in preserving the lives of our citizens, even if it is “only” a few hundred lives, or a thousand, or a few thousand, and even if none of those people who may be saved are contributors to this forum or ones that they love.
Posted by: Stefan | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 07:47 PM
Granted, I begged the question in using hyperventilating. Let me rephrase the question:
With regard to the surveillance program recently leaked to the NYT, would comments such as "What else is this premise but abandoning all Liberty under Law, in favor of authoritarian rule?" be in your mind the same type of rhetorical ploy / psychological phenomenon as Bush's exaggerating the threat posed by al Qaeda?
Let me try to make more clear what I'm driving at (I'm not really try to dig traps for anybody). Back when Phyllis Shafly was campaigning against the ERA, she argued that the language of the ERA would be used by activist courts to say that gay marriage was a Constitutional right. Similarly, during debate over the Civil Rights Act conservatives argued that courts would use the Civil Rights Act as an excuse to impose de facto quota systems. Subsequent events have proved them prescient in those cases.
On the other hand, for every such accurate prediction, there are a thousand Armageddon predictions that never come to pass, simply because in middle-of-the-road-dominated America, you can get away with going a little ways down any particular road to perdition, but if you go very far people start pushing back.
So for people interested in thinking clearly, as opposed to scoring political points, it obviously becomes important to work out how to tell in advance which slippery-slope arguments are reasonably strong and which are probably not worth much.
Shafly's argument was an unusually sound one simply because the point of vulnerability was the courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular, and that is the branch of government that is least answerable to the People and least responsive to the People's will. Congress is more vulnerable to the voters' ire, and therefore more responsive to the voters' occasional sense of "this has gone to far," than is the Supreme Court; but thanks to gerrymandering and the immense institutional advantages of incumbency, Congress is nowhere near as responsive (because vulnerable) as is the Presidency.
In other words, if the Supreme Court goes too far and the voters rise up in anger, the Supreme Court says simply, "F*** all of you and your little dog, too; I'm here for life, baby, and you can shove your outrage where the sun don't shine 'cause you can't touch me." An irresponsible action by the Supreme Court takes a massive amount of time and effort to undo -- as a simple count of the number of Constitutional amendments successfully passed over the centuries will tell you. (This is by far the best argument against a Court whose activism, whether conservative or liberal, takes the form of declaring that the Constition demands a particular action in dubious cases as opposed to saying, "That one's up to the legislature and the executive:" human beings screw up frequently, but a Congressional or Executive screwup is vastly easier to undo than is a Supreme Court screwup.) Congress also remains largely insulated except for members in the occasional "vulnerable" district. But all you had to do is watch the rapidity with which Clinton adjusted policies based on the previous night's opinion polls to see how vulnerable the Presidency is to backlash.
So, you say, "If you let the federal government erode your civil liberties they will. I think it's that simple." But, with all due respect, despite the empathy my libertarian heart feels for such a sentiment, it is not in fact that simple. As a general principle I think it's true more often then not, and I believe it is very important to think about what sorts of implications other people can rationally draw from the precedents you set even if you yourself would be too nice a guy to push your own principles to their logical conclusions.
Yet, I know that such an argument is of somewhat limited use, because it simply doesn't hold up empirically all of the time. For example, I think that the very existence of laws against prostitution, gambling, recreational drug use, sodomy between consenting adults, and (what really honks this insomnia-prone Texan off) buying a nice little Chianti Classico between midnight and noon on Sunday morning -- as far as I'm concerned that's a straightforward and clear violation of our civil liberties. And yet two centuries of proscribed prostitution have not yet evolved into the right of the corner cop to rape my daughters at his own discretion. The erosion of some of our civil liberties has not, in fact, led to the loss of all of them, even with two centuries and more in which to do the eroding; and thus the slippery slope argument is too facile. It's not, after all, really that simple.
So to me, anybody who leaps from "the President has adopted a practice of listening in on conversations where one person is a likely terrorist outside of the United States, without a warrant, and with debatable authority to do so in the light of prior Congressional attempts to limit his options for domestic surveillance" to "if you support Bush then you support the complete destruction of American liberty and proper separation of powers," is a person whose sense of proportion appears largely impervious to empirical evidence. In fact such a person -- even though I'm a libertarian outraged by the impertinence of busy-bodies who tell honest prostitutes that they are not allowed to profit from their own marketable assets -- appears to me to be a fear-mongerer of a particularly silly variety. But I believe that not because I think slippery-slope arguments are always invalid, but because I think in this particular case the slippery-slope argument can't be applied successfully without ignoring the counterpressures that would erupt if the executive branch were to attempt to leverage this "transgression" into a wholesale destruction of the Bill of Rights. People like Joseph seem to me to be astonishingly ignorant of the two-hundred-year ebb-and-flow history of the struggle for supremacy among the three branches.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 06:28 PM
antimedia -
heehee. I can't believe you have to make these arguments, either. It's not a big deal or big news that Bush uses the threat of terrorism for political gain. Our government has almost always done this, with a variety of threats.
About the active movement trying to convince you that terrorism is no threat. What scale of threat are they talking about? A threat to the existence of our nation? If that's the case, then I believe they're right - terrorists by themselves pose absolutely no threat to the survival of the US. They could set off a nuclear device in downtown Manhattan... the US as a nation would survive. Or is this active movement talking about a personal threat? If this is the case, then I'd have to say that statistically they're very close to being right - you and your loved ones have a very statistically low chance of dying in a terrorist attack - even a nuclear one.
The effectiveness of the NSA spying has been leaked, whether you choose to let it weigh in on your beliefs, that's up to you. According to one source the NSA has turned over info. on up to 5,000 Americans to the FBI, none of which produced any real leads. The recent Bush description of the plot to attack LA has nothing to do with the NSA spying issue, and Bush didn't say that it did, because he would have been outright lying. In the LA plot terrorists were arrested in SE Asia - Indonesia. Not one arrest was made in the US, and Bush has said that there are no more leads in the case. NSA spying is about domestic spying on Americans... that's what Bush and yourself are defending. The fact that zero arrests were made in America means that the terrorists had zero contacts in America, which means the NSA spying program had zero contribution to foiling the plot.
Did FDR do any of those things in order to defend spying on Americans?
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 05:24 PM
Kenny -
Well, hyperventilating is always over-doing it. I'm also not very much of a liberal... though let's say I am for the sake of simplicity.
If you let the federal government erode your civil liberties they will. I think it's that simple. So, if liberals are hyper-ventilating, I'd have to say they might be overdoing it. If they're breathing calmly, they're not overdoing it.
Sure, some of it's for political gain. I can tolerate that if the byproduct is my civil liberties and those of others are protected.
Posted by: Ronald Jon | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 04:55 PM
RJBJ, if you warned me about the coffee every now and then, then no, I would not say it's overdoing it. Furthermore, if there was an active movement trying to convince me that the coffee posed no threat whatsoever or that the threat was so remote as to be nonexistant, then I would think it would be prudent to remind me, from time to time, that the coffee poses a threat.
One of the arguments the left has made is that the surveillance program has not produced any results. It's an unfair argument, because to describe the results that disprove their claims you have to risk exposing the program. But, when there is constant pressure insisting that the program is illegal and doesn't produce results anyway, then it's more than a bit disingenuous to accuse the President of playing political games with the program when he's trying to offset the political rhetoric of the other side and assure the American people that the program does get results.
I suppose you would accuse FDR of playing politics when he sold war bonds? And posted public announcements reminding people that we were at war? Or when he introduced gas rationing and reminded people we were at war?
Geez, I can't even believe I have to make these arguments. Our country has gone to hell in a handbasket.
Posted by: antimedia | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 10:40 AM
RJBJ,
A point of curiosity: do you think liberals such as the hyperventilating Joseph ("What else is this premise but abandoning all Liberty under Law, in favor of authoritarian rule?") are overdoing the warnings on Bushite threats to civil liberties? If so, do you think they are doing it for political gain?
This is a question of genuine curiosity, not a sarcastically rhetorical question...see, the problem with having fifty different visiting liberal commentors is that they are mutually inconsistent, but that doesn't mean any particular individual is inconsistent -- and no one liberal is responsible for the views of another liberal, any more than I'm responsible for the views of fellow cynical libertarian Vodkapundit.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 09:29 AM
In response to a statement that Bush is hyping the threat of terrorism for his party's political gain,
antimedia writes -
This is true, if, and only if, the threat of terrorism is not real. This, of course, is precisely what Greenwald et. al. claim repeatedly. Never mind that the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.
antimedia, let's say you purchase a cup of coffee at 711 and you read on the lid "beware - hot coffee"- wouldn't you agree that you had been adequately and truthfully made aware of the threat your morning coffee posed to you? What if the 711 cashier had also warned you, and the cup had a small hot coffee color coded alert telling you how close you are to spilling your coffee, and when you got in your car the radio talk show host released a government statement warning you of the dangers of spilling hot coffee, and when you got to work your boss warned you about hot coffee, and when you got home your kids told you how they were warned about hot coffee... that's a bit overstated, isn't it? The original warning was plain, adequate, and truthful. The rest of the warnings will just make you scared witless that you'll spill your coffee.
Spilling hot coffee is a threat, and on a much greater scale terrorism is a threat. However, you can still overdo warnings on both. And in Bush's case, do it for political gain.
Posted by: Ron Jon Bovi Jovi | Wednesday, February 15, 2006 at 04:25 AM
Josh writes
Let's see - declaring war - not a foreign affairs power. Congress can only declar war. They can't wage it.Grant letters of marque and reprisal - not a foreign affairs power. Congress can grant them, but the executive or a citizen has to request them. IOW, all Congress can do is authorize the action, just as when they declare war.
Same for making rules for capture. Congress cannot authorize a capture - only make rules governing them.
Raise and support armies and the navy and make rules governing them - not a foreign affairs power. All Congress can do is create them and define them. It can't do anything with them.
In case you haven't noticed, Congress cannot take any action with regard to foreign affairs. It can only define the rules or authorize the appropriations or grant someone else's request. Congress cannot conduct a war, make or sign a treaty, negotiate trade agreements, etc., etc., etc.
Posted by: antimedia | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 09:42 PM
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales speaking at Georgetown:
“Finally, let me explain why the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program fully complies with the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.”
“The Fourth Amendment has never been understood to require warrants in all circumstances. For instance, before you get on an airplane, or enter most government buildings, you and your belongings may be searched without a warrant. There are also searches at the border or when you’ve been pulled over at a checkpoint designed to identify folks driving while under the influence. Those searches do not violate the Fourth Amendment because they involve “special needs” beyond routine law enforcement. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that these circumstances make such a search reasonable even without a warrant.”
“The terrorist surveillance program is subject to the checks of the Fourth Amendment, and it clearly fits within this “special needs” category. This is by no means a novel conclusion. The Justice Department during the Clinton Administration testified in 1994 that the President has inherent authority under the Constitution to conduct foreign intelligence searches of the private homes of U.S. citizens in the United States without a warrant, and that such warrantless searches are permissible under the Fourth Amendment.”
I am interested to know: was the Clinton administration wrong?
Searching the homes of US citizens in the United States itself is 1000 times more intrusive than listening in on the international telephone calls of known terrorists. Ya think? I don't recall much Demoratic uproar over this. Perhaps someone could explain how a program like Echelon was legal while listening in to terrorists is not?
Posted by: Stefan | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 09:27 PM
Joseph Marshall writes
I'm going to assume that this question is for rhetorical effect, because surely you can't be serious.If the President authorized warrantless electronic eavesdropping on Americans talking to other Americans inside the US with no foreign agent connection that would clearly be illegal. If the President put US citizens in jail with no evidence that they had done anything wrong and no access to US courts, that would clearly be illegal. (Careful - read what I wrote before you choke on your bagel scrambling to get to your keyboard.)
There are plenty of things the President could do that would be clearly illegal. Warrantless electronic surveillance of US citizens when one end of the conversation is with a terrorism-affliated person (defined in the law as a foreign agent) is clearly not illegal. So has said every court, without exception, to address the question. In fact, warrantless electronic surveillance of US citizens inside the US is legal, according to the courts, if the capture is incidental to court-authorized surveillance of someone else, and you can be convicted of a crime based upon the evidence obtained through that wiretap.
IOW, if the government is legally wiretapping Joe Blow, with warrants in hand, because Joe is suspected of murdering someone, and you call Joe and, during that conversation, you admit to your involvement in a crime (any crime), you can be arrested, tried and convicted and the wiretap evidence is admissibile.
It's past time for some of you to stop reading Glenn Greenwald and start reading what the law says and what the courts have said. Either that or shut up.
Posted by: antimedia | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 09:17 PM
Ok, Josh. Whatever you say.
Posted by: Stefan | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 08:42 PM
Antimedia,
Notwithstanding the dictum of one of hundreds of federal trial courts, Art. I gives Congress the power:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces
If those powers aren't "foreign affairs powers" I don't know what are.
Posted by: Josh | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 08:36 PM
Those on the left and right that have attacked Bush over his actions are generally those who believe that civil liberties trump every other concern that a society may have and that any encroachment or (as is most often the case) perceived encroachment is a sure sign that we are on an one way road to a police state.
Thanks for setting up your straw man in the second sentence so we didn't have to bother reading the west.
Posted by: Josh | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 08:26 PM
I think that much of this fight over the NSA surveillance is very interesting. Those on the left and right that have attacked Bush over his actions are generally those who believe that civil liberties trump every other concern that a society may have and that any encroachment or (as is most often the case) perceived encroachment is a sure sign that we are on an one way road to a police state. A very quick aside: I think that many who take such positions clearly betray that they have very little concept of what living in an actual police state would be like. It is disingenuous to continue to characterize this as “domestic spying” when any reasonable and fair minded person will concede that this was limited to international calls, was strictly targeted, and was by no means a wide dragnet. Much of this fight is between Congress and the Executive who have always fought over power. They always have (even Republican Congress folks are interested in preserving and expanding their own powers in relation to the other branches) and always will. Another part of this story is straight-up politics. If a President Kerry had done the same thing by wiretapping known al-Qaeda members calling into the USA (seriously think about that for a second) does anyone think that conservatives would be crying, “Fascist”? Not bloody likely. Would liberals be up-in-arms? Nope. As a matter of fact, it would most likely never have been “leaked”. What does tell us? What does it tell us when those Democrats on the intelligence committee have no problem with the actual program what-so-ever but are just spinning their argument into quibbles over FISA jurisdiction to benefit their political agendas? This is a continuation of the fight over the Patriot Act. We have been told over and over that the Patriot Act is this great affront to our freedoms. Where are all the cases of Civil Liberties that have been so egregiously violated? Basically they are non-existent. While there have been a few challenges they have been either dismissed or adjudicated properly which is why we have courts. The great Patriot Act boogey-man we have been so shrilly warned about turns out to be fantasy. Is Islamic violence a real threat? Of course, there is no question about it. Should any administration have a free hand to do anything it wants in the name of National Security? No, but to couch this debate in terms of the use of wildly unreasonable abuse of power is disingenuous and unhelpful. When Civil Libertarians cry wolf over every action this administration takes they aid (however unwittingly) those that would benefit from our inaction and our self-centered tendency to elevate the rights of the individual so far above those of the collective society that the citizen is freed from any responsibility or obligation to sacrifice for the health and safety of their civilization. Why do we willingly submit to random drunk driving checkpoints? Because we understand that, however inconvenient or intrusive they may be, they are in the service of our personal safety and the health and safety of our communities. I think that Terrorism is at least as dangerous as drunk driving and justly asks us to deal with some reasonable level of intrusiveness.
Posted by: Stefan | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 07:50 PM
So let me get this straight: you actually believe Bush's tale about thwarting an Al Qaeda plot to blow up the "liberty" tower? And you believe this because of all those copius "details" that turned out to be bogus or just made up. I refer you to Frances Townsends ridiculous press gaggle, wherein she was unable to answer questions about the so-called "plot" about which she claimed to have details. And that this plot to have shoe bombers take control of an airplance and flying it into a building by, what? Blowing their feet off?
How much more credulous can you be?
Posted by: theBhc | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 07:22 PM
Josh writes
What planet did you say you were from?I think I'll take the US District Court's word over yours, if you don't mind, setting aside the bad grammar. :-)Mona writes
Yet, somehow, all the courts, including SCOTUS, disagree with your position. Imagine that.Then you wrote this
This, of course, misrepresents the case (a favorite Greenwald tactic), because Hale was not discriminated against in his govt-controlled livelihood. Rather he was prevented from entering the profession, a completely different kettle of fish.You also wrote
If holding the opinion that blacks and Jews should be killed because they are inferior is not an indication of a moral flaw, what in God's name is? Do you really want to assert that being a bigoted racist is merely a "pure political opinion"? Has the legal profession sunk that low?I assume you think that a profession should not have the right to regulate its membership or prevent anyone from entering, regardless of their character or political views? (Quite the odd opinion, that!)
Posted by: antimedia | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 07:07 PM
Not a lawyer myself, but I continue to be fascinated by:
1. The insistence that it is completely unreasonable for anybody to hold an opinion on this arcane point of law that differs from Mona's or Greenwald's -- despite the fact that I will bet a million dollars against a warm Coke that if it ever gets to the Supreme Court, it'll result in a 5-4 decision one way or the other.
2. The insistence that Bush's surveillance program is a looming and imminent threat to our civil liberties and to the rule of law, with full-blown fascism scheduled for implementation by Easter...
3. ...along with utter confidence that the threat posed by al Qaeda and other Islamists is grossly overrated, cynically exaggerated for political effect by the evil Bush/Rove cabal.
As previously noted, I find the accusations that people hurl to be in general a much better guide to their own motivations than to the motivations of those they accuse. I wonder whether Mona and similar posters have ever seriously stepped into their private self-confessional and asked themselves honestly, "Am I grossly exaggerating the threat posed to civil liberties by this President's actions, out of partisanship?"
Since that question is probably too abstract, I suggest another for those of you who buy into Greenwald's wag-the-dog theory: what did you think of the sanity and reasonableness of those conservatives who accused President Clinton of taking us into war in Kosovo in order to distract attention from his domestic (in both senses) difficulties?
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 05:21 PM
He who lies and knows he lies is a Leftist. Shun him.
The only group totally aligned with the agenda of Al-Qaeda is the Left, including the Democrat Party.
Mona. Perfect name!
Posted by: Darrell | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 02:36 PM
And about this: As a lawyer, you know full well that our government was designed as three separate and co-equal branches. As Commander in Chief and the plenary foreign affairs power of the US, the President holds powers that cannot be taken away save through rebellion or subterfuge. Will you at least admit to that?
What I admit to is understanding the Youngstown case, just as Kerr, Epstein, and myriad other non-leftist lawyers do. Justice Jackson's opinion and tripartate analysis in that case, tho a concurrence, has become the gold standard on these issues; the Supremes just employed it in the Hamdi case.
Per Youngstown and Jackson's opinion, when the President acts under the inherent authority that everyone agrees he has, but Congress also acts(legislates) in an area where it is entitled to be, Congress will almost always win. No one seriously doubts that Congress may legislate in the area of the procedures regarding how U.S. persons in the United States may be subject to federal wiretapping. Orin Kerr is no fool. Neither is Richard Epstein. And they -- like me -- know that Youngstown means that the likelihood of Bush prevailing in the SCOTUS is about 2%. Which is to say, his brazen flouting of FISA is, in fact, illegal.
Posted by: Mona | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 12:01 PM
Antimedia displays sheer ignorance: Then you, like Greenwald, haven't a clue. The government isn't discriminating against anyone. The Bar Association of Illinois is. Do you seriously want to argue that the bar should have no ethical standards whatsoever? That professions cannot regulate their members, sanction those who misbehave and block those from joining who display a lack of moral character?
Bar associations are quasi-governmental agencies who issue *licenses* that the law (i.e., the govt) requires in order to practice. Disputes about those requirements take place in and are settled by courts. The process is teeming with government action and actors.
You continue: Is it OK for someone who advocates rape to be a lawyer? Someone who advocates murdering blacks and Jews? Should a NAMBLA member be admitted to the Bar? Are they OK? Are there any standards at all that you would apply to those who seek to practice the law?
If someone advocates that rape should be legal, if NAMBLA advocates that adult-child sex should be legal, then their members who engage in mere advocacy are engaging in political speech, and that is exactly the type of speech our Founders first and foremost sought to protect. NOTHING is more purely political speech than advocating for what one believes the law should be.
Moral character requirments should not reach to pure political opinions. They should constitute criteria like whether one has committed crimes of theft or fraud, or other serious felonies. But as to *political* opinions, they should be entirely neutral, and the state should not employ such opinions as a moral character test.
I detest Marxists. Lynne Stewart is a raving, anti-American, Castro-loving Marxist who totally despises everything the United States stands for. But she should not have been, and was not, denied a license to practice. Rather, she ran into trouble when she committed a *felony* of passing messages for a terrorist client to other terrorists. For *that* she should be prosecuted, imprisoned and disbarred. But not for her loathsome political views.
No citizen -- ever -- should be discriminated against, or have their govt-controlled livelihood imperiled by -- discrimination based on their mere political views. No matter how putrid those views might be.
Posted by: Mona | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 11:52 AM
As Commander in Chief and the plenary foreign affairs power of the US...
Bad grammar aside, the President's "foreign affairs power" is not plenary.
Posted by: Josh | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 11:46 AM
Mona writes
I'm not impressed. Have you read US v. Bin Laden? Have you read N RE SEALED CASE, 310 F.3d 717 (Foreign Int.Surv.Ct.Rev. 2002). How do you reconcile what those courts have said about the President's inherent authority to conduct warrantless surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes, despite FISA, with the view that the President doesn't have the authority granted to him in Article II § 2?What kind of conlaw are they teaching nowadays, that posits the bizarre theory that Congress can restrict the President's inherent constitutional authorities? Even Congress, when passing FISA, admitted that it may be unconstitutional. Jimmy Carter's AG stated that FISA did not take away the President's inherent authority. Yet Greenwald, in his infinite wisdom, knows better?
I don't object to someone holding an opinion. I don't object to the use of the words, "I believe" or "It is my opinion that", but Greenwald claims the illegality without even so much as a disclaimer that the courts might disagree with his analysis. (And they've disagreed with most of his arguments when he's been in court.)
As a lawyer, you know full well that our government was designed as three separate and co-equal branches. As Commander in Chief and the plenary foreign affairs power of the US, the President holds powers that cannot be taken away save through rebellion or subterfuge. Will you at least admit to that?
Posted by: antimedia | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 11:03 AM
Mona writes
Then you, like Greenwald, haven't a clue. The government isn't discriminating against anyone. The Bar Association of Illinois is. Do you seriously want to argue that the bar should have no ethical standards whatsoever? That professions cannot regulate their members, sanction those who misbehave and block those from joining who display a lack of moral character?Is it OK for someone who advocates rape to be a lawyer? Someone who advocates murdering blacks and Jews? Should a NAMBLA member be admitted to the Bar? Are they OK? Are there any standards at all that you would apply to those who seek to practice the law?
The law is most precious and cherished asset we have as Americans. Lawyers should be, in all things, above reproach. That a man as detestable as Matt Hale could be accepted to and graduate from law school is a slap in the face of every American who has ever given their life for freedom. Hale represents the antithesis of what it means to be an American. Yet Greenwald not only chose to represent him, but, even after being rejected by SCOTUS, refused to give up, making a nonesensical claim that Hale's First Amendment claim had not yet been litigated. The court laughed at that attempt as well, and told Greenwald to go away.
Hale has a First Amendment right to say whatever foul thing he wants to say. But that is a totally separate issue from whether or not he should be a member of the bar.
My God! What has the legal profession come to?
Posted by: antimedia | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 10:55 AM
Antimedia: I am fully aware of Greenwald's public litigation history, and as a lawyer myself I understand that your indictment is silly. He is a NY lawyer who was representing the racist, Matt Hale, pursuant to a pro hac vice admission into Illinois to do so. In NY, what Greenwald did in that case is legal and he did it from NY; but the IL court decided that even if the recording of witnesses did not occur in IL, because it was an IL case that state's law would control. Open question, and Greenwald wasn't sanctioned, he just couldn't use his recordings.
Further, I strongly endorse his First Amendment based defense of Hale; the govt ought not be discriminating against ANYONE on the basis of their political views, no matter how rancid. I believe that for the safety's sake of us all. If nothing else, that case should demonstrate that Greenwald stands on constitutional principles, because obviously he is Jewish, and Hale is a virulent anti-Semite.
Further, Greenwald has never said -- and in fact has repeatedly affirmed the opposite -- that terrorists do not pose a genuine threat. Hell, he apaprently was living in NYC during 9/11. But his point, which I agree with, is that actual threats can be exaggerated and hyped for political gain, and that is what is happening here. As I have already written, there is precedent for that, as for example when McCarthy and Nixon built careers hyping and distorting the (actual) threat of domestic communism.
Civil liberites can all too easily die when the populace retains no sense of proportion about a threat. I don't want to see that happen.
Finally, Greenwald is not lying about the warrantless surveillance being illegal; as an attorney I have read all the case law he has, and all the legal opinion available -- including right-of-center Orin Kerr's at Volokh. Kerr, conservative Con Law prof Richard Epstein, former FBI Director under Reagan Bill Sessions, Bob Barr... all these non-leftists know and articulately and definitively state that Bush is on the worst of shaky legal ground, and that he would lose if the matter were heard by the SCOTUS. I agree with them all.
Posted by: Mona | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 09:57 AM
Well, I must say, Glenn appears to have jabbed you all in the sorest places. Why? Because you have abandoned all standards of good judgment about this Administration, in preference for your own hysterical Islamophobia.
This sometimes reaches the point of pure incoherence: "In that respect, quite naturally those with a predisposed persuasion will eagerly jump on everything he says thereupon. Incidentally, I defy the vast majority in all camps to expertly concur or disagree with most of the more nuanced legal issues and their implications."
I defy anyone to put in plain English what that really means.
The essential point of both the President and his cheerleaders, here and elsewhere, is quite simple and can be stated in English that is quite plain and clear:
Absolutely nothing that the President does in the name of "fighting terrorism" can ever possibly be illegal.
Do you deny this? Then put in plain and coherent words what action of the President would be illegal even if he was fighting terrorism.
Think about it. And try to come to real terms with the real meaning of it if you have any common sense left.
What else is this premise but abandoning all Liberty under Law, in favor of authoritarian rule? It does not matter that you abandon it only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It does not matter that [so far] only people of one certain religious background are the usual target of arbitrary authority. It does not matter that our Government is still a "democracy" in its outer form despite it.
That premise, "the President can do no wrong as long as he is fighting terrorism", is the beginning of tyranny.
The Leader can do no wrong. Sound familiar? It does to me. But then I read stuffy old books of history. Who cares for those?
I have my own private opinions about the President's motives in the matter, just like Glenn. They may be wrong. And I am perfectly willing to, truthfully, profess agnosticism about his motives, whatever my opinions, because neither my opinions, Glenn's opinions, nor the President's motives ultimately matter. What matters are results.
I judge the tree by its fruits and refrain from meddling too much with its roots. The party in power has abandoned vitually every other principle that it stood for [with the possible exception of cutting taxes] in the name of "fighting terrorism".
This is a real fruit that is really on the tree. It does not matter that they weren't my principles. They were principles, they have vanished, and they have been replaced with nothing but "The Leader can do no wrong".
The President has now started two indecisive wars and spent billions of dollars over the past five years, with not a jot of evidence that "terrorism" is any more well combatted because of it. Or that it will be any more well combatted by it four years hence when the President retires to Crawford, Texas as an "elder statesman", and, in all probability, we will still be shooting at people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is also a real fruit that is really on the tree. If you deny it, show us some plain evidence of how and why it is more well combatted.
We have also recently had a wonderful demonstration, by Mother Nature, down in New Orleans, that the party in power is no better prepared to cope with the tragic consequences of a major terrorist attack within our borders than they were in August of 2001.
This is also a real fruit that is really on the tree despite all the colored alerts, despite all the money poured into "homeland security", despite all the "special powers granted", and despite the premise that The Leader can do no wrong--which allows the President to extend those powers--absolutely, indefinitely, and in any direction--solely by Executive Order and on his own private judgment.
Finally, we now have to confront the probability of a nuclear armed Iran well within a decade. And we will have to confront the fact that this probability was perfectly preventable before The Leader Who Did Nothing Wrong, actually started doing things.
It is not very likely to be prevented now. This is also a real fruit that is really on the tree.
Do you deny this? Then try to come up with a sensible suggestion to prevent it, given the two nasty and inconclusive wars which we are still fighting.
We have had four years now of a country and government "fighting terrorism" without a single intelligent assessment of what it would mean to "win" such a fight, and without a single policy that has been anything but made up as we went along.
The faction which so constantly asserts that The Leader Can Do No Wrong When Fighting Terrorism has been too busy to notice this fact.
Too busy with the chronic squeezing of their own adrenal glands over a Clash Of Civilizations--which is a mere lurid Mel Gibson movie version of a real world of real dangers where the unintelligent use of our power can, and already has, made those real dangers far worse.
Hey, there's lots of Wrong that The Leader can do, and lots of it that he's already done.
Posted by: Joseph Marshall | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 08:20 AM
Mona writes
This is true, if, and only if, the threat of terrorism is not real. This, of course, is precisely what Greenwald et. al. claim repeatedly. Never mind that the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.It is question-begging of the worst kind to claim there is no threat and then claim that the President is therefore hyping the threat. Tell that to Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl or Steven Vincent or the 2267 American men and women who have given their lives for the cause of freedom in Iraq. (Never mind the almost 3000 that died on one day, in 2001!) Tell that to the 4227 innocent people who have been killed by terrorists since 9/11. Tell that to the countless Iraqis who have been beheaded, blown up and executed by the animals that Glenn claims are no threat.
Tell that to the mayor of Tal Afar, who wrote this in a letter of thanks to the Americans for "saving" his town.
Yet the left would have us believe that we are the aggressors - that the US is imperialistic - that we have no business in Iraq - that there is no threat of terrorism - nay, that the terrorists are "freedom fighters" and "insurgents" and "rebels" fighting against the aggressor US.The left is morally bankrupt and lies routinely about terrorism, then claims the high ground based upon those very lies. Greenwald is a master at it. And his sycophants lap it up. Few of us are fooled, however, because there is too much truth available for the asking for us to fall for the falsehoods of the left.
Greenwald's lies about the President are the worst of all. He has claimed, without equivocation, that the President has broken the law. Even when confronted with contradictory evidence, he has refused to even moderate his view. As a lawyer he knows he is lying, but he does it anyway. Of course, that's how he practiced law, so why should he change now? (I have documented all of this on my blog, so complain all you want - it's a matter of record. He has been accused, by the courts, of violating the laws of Illinois, and of "acting in bad faith". He represented a racist bigot and argued repeatedly, in court, that despite his views, a white supremacist who hates Jews and blacks should be allowed to practice law, despite every court, up to and including the US Supreme Court, rejecting his arguments and repeated appeals.)
Posted by: antimedia | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 01:30 AM
I just wonder what part of the Omnivore, Carnivore, Echelon CLINTON Executive Orders you libs missed? Bush's EO actually LIMITS those programs to people suspected of terrorism connections.
You dunces.
And frankly, Alexandra, I've done enough defending when you don't give me any open, wide open, credit. Or even a slight thanks.
Ciao bella,
D. Ox
Posted by: Dumb Ox | Monday, February 13, 2006 at 10:20 PM
Alexandra, if you are not gullible, then surely -- surely -- you will recognize that Bush either leaks or declassifies and then hypes things purely and only to deflect from criticism and to keep the population scared of terrorists.
Do you recall the first week or so after the NYT revealed the NSA warrantless spying? A hue and cry went up about Bush's violation of the law, and not all of that was coming from the left. It was about a week later, and to *my* absolute amusement, a so-called other leak happens in which it is revealed that the federal govt has been using radiation detection devices around American mosques, all without (gasp!) warrants. Remember, this was purportedly a "leak."
Now really. Where is the demand to find and prosecute these leakers, one akin to the flap over the NSA leakers? Answer: there is none, and won't be, because that "leak" was a Bush-friendly one, meant to evoke images of crazed Muslims secretly plotting in mosques to blow up bombs -- and no one is going to get much exorcised about using radiation detection technology without a warrant to sniff out dirty bombs. That "leak" put the issue of warrant requirements and the fear of those scary Muslims right front and center, and away from warrants for telephones and email communications as *required* by FISA.
But the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy still continued, and more and more conservatives and Republicans were coming out to say Bush is acting in violation of the law. So, the next move is to suddenly declassify the LA plot, and to hype it as some real near miss, and attempt to again stoke fear and remind us Bush keeps us safe, so we should not worry our little heads about this rule of law thing and FISA.
Well, I voted for Bush in '04, but I didn't just fall off no turnip truck. The cynical exploitation of the fear of terroism could not be more apparent to me, and that's why I find much to agree with in Greenwald's posts. Not, btw, that I have one bit if use for Kos and some of the others who are emerging as his biggest fans, but then, The Corner isn't going to be receptive to serious criticisms of Bush on issues of illegality and national security any time soon. That's just the way it is.
Posted by: Mona | Monday, February 13, 2006 at 10:14 PM
Mona,
Generally speaking, I am of course not as gullible to dismiss such political tactics, far from it.
But how exactly do you know that this is true in this particular incident? How do you suggest should the President have changed his speech to have avoided the scorn?
But that is really besides the point. Glenn is going much further than making your general point. He was deliberately and purposefully whipping up the hype in a manner, which I found equally disturbing as distasteful. But, sadly, that is what his new found audience expects and upon which it feeds. I repeat, my criticism is that Glenn did not resist lowering his standards to appeal to this lowest common denominator, which he should have.
Posted by: Alexandra | Monday, February 13, 2006 at 09:16 PM
Steve,
If they mean that Democrats are actually motivated by a desire to destroy the country, then that would require a great deal of evidence, without which it would be scurrilous, malicious, unchartable, and intellectually lazy. If they mean that Democrats' behavior -- perhaps simply through stupidity -- is such as endangers the country, that's a different matter, as it is an attack on policy, not on motives. (It seems to me that Democrats have trouble distinguishing between the two and respond to any complaint that their policies would endanger Americans by screaming, "How dare you question my patriotism!" But perhaps I'm not being fair.) If they mean that certain Democrats behave in a way that makes very little sense on any theory other than a willingness to put personal advantage above the national weal, and that their behavior makes a great deal of sense on that theory, then it depends on how good a case they can make.
I don't personally have a problem with somebody's speculating on Bush's motives as long as (a) they have decent evidence for his actual state of mind, (b) there do not exist other theories (e.g., that he simply disagrees with the Democrats) that do just as well in explaining his behavior and do not require him to be evil, (c) they recognize at least the possibility that the bulk of the malice might be coming from them rather than him (that is, they are willing to have their own motives questioned), and (d) they aren't hypocritical or inconsistent.
If we're talking in general terms, the camp that sees in every twitch of Bush's eyebrow a new and looming threat of "fascism," can't credibly accuse other people of "fearmongering." The accusation of fearmongering is essentially an accusation that the fear that the mongerer hopes to produce is disproportionate to the actual threat. Anybody who sees in Dubya an imminent threat of fascism has -- whatever other admirable qualities he might possess -- no sense of proportion whatsoever. So generally speaking Bush-conspiracy-theorists would be tactically well advised to avoid proportion-driven arguments (e.g., "Bush is a fear-mongerer").
I can't speak to Glenn specifically because I have eight children (four of whom have special educational needs) and a full-time job and, frankly, have not been able to make time to read his blog.
Posted by: Kenny Pierce | Monday, February 13, 2006 at 08:40 PM