I am sure that you have cites for these extravagnt prounoucements, and merely failed to adduce them through an oversight,
Feel free to make some up if you don’t have them handy. Your reverence for accuracy is all that we will need to assure ourselves that the studies you cite are legit.
No, what I am saying is that your opinion that any of this stuff violates the 4th Ad is worthless. So far the USAG claims it doesn’t. Until and when SCOTUS (or perhaps a lower federal court, depending) rules it does, his opinion holds. Thus, unless you can show us a Cite where it has recently been held UnConstitutional by a high Court- then I’d like to see your qualifications for deciding it does. Like, for instance the brief you are presenting to SCOTUS. Until then, I’ll have to assume that the Attorney General knows just a tad bit more about Constitutional law than you do. :rolleyes:
The Attorney General knows.
The Attorney General lies about what he knows.
Deos that help any with your confusion?
As you wish…
Support for Terrorism Declining in the Muslim World
Support for the U.S. is surging in some parts of the Muslim world.
Next time, you might try leaving the snarkiness out of your post until you find out whether or not I was actually being accurate, lest you find yourself looking stupid.
There aren’t enough “rolleyes” in the world… 
Sam Stone- still, a 28% “very unfavourable” means we have a long way to go.
fThe voice of America? Please.
Even in yiour cite, Telhami makes it plain that Al Q benefits from our current policy.
The drop off vis a vis terror that came as a bllip after the Jordan bombing could be attributed to americn policy, I guess, since Zarqawi works for us, but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind.
Likewise, editorials from the wall sttreet journal are not authority in the visigotrh courts.
As ever, your faithful correspondent,
Stupid.
Using the criteria of preventing potential harm to the most Americans I think a good case could be made for having the NSA monitor all corporate phone traffic for evidence of Enron/Worldcom/Anderson/Sunbeam/Morgan Stanley type fraud. If they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, right? 
.?
Let me walk you through this:
Major pREMISE: 'Sama never sleeps. And when he does sleep, he dreams of huge body counts of inocent american civiliians.
Minor premise: He can be prevented from this crime only by constant vigilence and effective action of our steely eyed president.
Facts:
I was easy to fuck us up on September 11
Per the 9/11 commission, it is STILL easy
Every test of our security apparatus shows that it is utterly porous.
TTHERE HAS BEEN NO FURTER ATTACK,( even though our, per the major premise, our enemies go to bed every night thinking a day without killing an american is an affront to allah.)
I submit to you that if something is easy to do, and someone wants to do it, it will get done.
All the government has done in four years is piss into the wind.
cconclusion:The major premise is flawed.
I suppose you didn’t read close enough to see the source material, huh? The first site references the Pew Global Attitudes Project, which is hardly a Republican front. The second references a poll conducted by AC Nielson.
The rest of your comments, especially the juicy bit about ‘Zarqawi working for us’, I’ll just let stand for other people to gape over.
I thought it a nice bit of understatement.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that guerrillas set ablaze a gas pipeline carrying gas from Kirkuk to Samarra, via an improvised explosive device that they detonated in southwest Samarra,
We, for instance, have no such exposed infrastructure, do we??
Actually, money laundering restrictions have probably affected white collar crimes (embezzlement, tax evasion, fraud) far more than it affects terrorism. All the money al-Queda needed to bring into the country in order to launch the Septemer 11 attacks was living expenses, plane fare, and $0.99 box cutters, along with a few months of aviation school tuition for a few of the agents. That is peanuts compared to the billions that are laundered in real estate scams and off-shore banking institutions every year. (Which begs the question–if in fact the restrictions are within Constitutional bounds–of why we waited so long to explicitly attack money laundering schemes.)
But the argument that the provisions of the Patriot Act might have prevented some unspecified terrorist activities–and we can be certain that if any specific, realistic threats had been averted the Administartion would have held a press conference complete with names, places, times, and other details to taut the success of Patriot and the Department of Homeland Security–doesn’t really hold water with respect to unConstitutional, unwarranted wiretaps and other surveillance. Are there immediate and quantifiable harms if the people under investigation “keep their noses clean”? Perhaps not. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind if the goverment installs a video camera in every room in your house, subjects you and your family to random searches, records your television watching preferences, demands periodic drug testing, and the like. After all, if you don’t do anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?
This is, after all, the sort of logic that permitted would-be despots, from Josef Stalin to Richard Nixon to justify any number of eventual abuses. This is the rationale that led Joe McCarthy to make his (largely groundless) accusations of a massive underground Communist conspiracy on his unseen list. People who have even the most tenuous affiliation with Communist or socialist movements or organizations suffered unjust accusation and lost jobs, marriages, and fortunes. The Patriot Act, or rather the mentality behind it, is merely a continuation of that ill-begotten philosophy, that it is better to threaten and persecute many innocent people in the hopes of deterring some unidentified boogieman.
Oh, but you want a specific example of abuse leading to harm? How about Brandon Mayfield.
On the topic of Homeland Security, I find myself in complete agreement with David Simmons’ comments; we’ve seen a new bureaucracy that has rapidly become entrenched but has failed to provide any of the services that it was created to do. The debacle with FEMA in New Orleans is a clear sign that moving organizations–particularly one like FEMA which has a past reputation for actually being effective and responsive–under the aegis of Homeland Security is no panacea for fixing communication problems and agency rivalries which prevented information from being put together in a cohesive picture. Given that the analysis that has come from CIA, NSA, and other sources has been skewed to support this Administration’s agenda, rather than vice versa, and that the senior posts in Homeland Security and its child agencies are largely political appointees loyal to the Administration above all else (including the free dissemination of factual data), I think we can fairly conclude that objective analysis is not occuring, and that where abuse is permitted by the Patriot Act and similar permissiveness it will occur in the service of advancing said agenda.
Stranger
That’s what I don’t get. If we’re being silently protected from terrorists, then why do billions & billions of dollars’ worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin make it over our borders every year? Why do thousands and thousands of illegal immigrants make it over our borders every year? And as you say, what about all the money laundering?
We aren’t being protected from anything but illegal parking and the ability to grow your own organic pot.
I agree that our infrastructure is vulnerable. I would go so far as to say you understated the idea.
Your conclusion is flawed. You assume if it was easy it would be done and since it hasn’t then a threat doesn’t exist. You are dismissing the 9/11 commission outright. If all the government has done is piss in the wind then the commission would be recommend dismantling of the Patriot Act.
It would be a more logical conclusion to assume that attacks have been prevented over the last 4 years and that every effort should be made to decrease the odds of it happening again.
All of this discussion revolves around the premise that we are being spied on by the NSA in any calculable fashion. I don’t see it happening to me in even the remotest percentage of probability. What I do see is my local government spying on me with cameras. The percentage probability of that happening is 100%. Twice a day, 365 days a year. The best I can hope for from this little slice of 1984 is that a terrorist bomber will get an electronic traffic ticket (posthumously).
If the NSA’s job is to seek out foreign enemy’s who have infiltrated our open borders it shouldn’t even be a discussion that we monitor them during a time of war. If the President’s job is to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic then it is his duty to use whatever tools are available to achieve that goal. If Congress wants to monitor and advise then it should be done in such a manner that doesn’t provide aid to the enemy.
What do you mean by “whatever tools are available?”
If you mean legal tools that don’t violate the constitution, I don’t think anyone is disagreeing.
If you mean illegal or otherwise unconstitutional tools, you’ll need to be more specific–since you surely don’t believe that every method of gathering information is an appropriate method.
P.S. The NSA’s job isn’t to seek out foreign enemies who have infiltrated our open borders–that’s the FBI’s job.
The same AG who tried to define torture such that it wouldn’t be a violation of the Geneva Convention. Yeah, he’s got the Constitution tattoed on his dick, he loves it so much.
Funny thing though, my cite is Bush himself:
Hell, I’m gonna violate the rules on quoting from a copyrighted article if I keep going. Read about it here.
On a slightly different subject, my opinion is worthless, huh? Damn it, I’m a veteran, a citizen, and a registered voter who hasn’t missed an election in the 19 years I’ve been eligible to vote … , this isn’t the Pit so I can’t say what I think of the attitude.
I may not have a law degree, but I can read one sentence written in English and understand it. Which part of “shall not” and “no” are you struggling with? I’ll do my un-JD’d best to help.
Here’s some interesting information that sheds some light on why the Bush administration went around the FISA court:
Secret court modified wiretap requests
So much for, “FISA always grants the request, so why not go through the process?”
As for whether these wiretaps are new:
What will be interesting to see is whether the court started rejecting these because the Bush administration was asking for something very abnormal, or whether the court was acting in partisan fashion.
Nonetheless, there have been 18,000 wiretaps since 1979, of which only 5,800 came from the Bush administration.
In general I mean legal tools. If my community is about to be nuked or poisoned then all bets are off. And the NSA does not operate as a counterpart to the FBI. Their function is in the area of surveillance and cryptology.
You would do well to give a possible, even hypothetical, example of how a particular request would be rejected on “partisan” reasons, unless of course you’re defining “partisan” as “questioning Bush”.
First, cite? Second, generously assuming that’s both true and applicable, that’s 32.2 % of the taps over 19.2% of the years in question, including the years when Bush 1 and Clinton had their eyes on the ball. Third, of the wiretaps we know to be illegal, 100% have been under Dubya.