Without even a hypothetical proposal of how the court could be acting in an unethical way, as you have been requested, that is a smear right there.
If that’s the highest level you can operate on, this is the wrong forum.
It isn’t the FISA court’s conduct in question here. To try to shift the topic from the conduct of the administration making the requests to the conduct of the referees is to smear the referees.
But “it will be interesting to see” if you can provide any basis, any whatsoever, for your inference that the FISA court’s conduct is in any way motivated by partisanship, as you have suggested. I don’t think we need to wait any longer to see, do we?
You know what you did as well as the rest of us. Take responsibility for it, okay?
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
I fear I have been lax in maintaining the thrust of the thread, as t were; and your facile reference forces me to ask how you reconcile or otherwise explain the following:
You will not, I hope, pretend that viogilience is prtecting us better from bloodthirsty tetrrtorists than it is from ambitrious lationos. So, where then the captures or incidents or roundups or any fucing thing on EITHER side of the enforcemnt issue?
Evan Thomas on Hardball, says much the same thing as the op–where’s the beef?
“THOMAS: … It’s such a fascinating question, because you would think after over four years, more than the length of World War II, we would know about some great operation where they thwarted an attack. And instead you get this list that the president trots out, which is pretty thin gruel. It’s a bunch of mokes (ph), basically, in Lackawanna and places like that, who are—you can’t—and so, what have we actually done?”
and, let us not ignore the widespread economic benefits that were justified, such as the small business loan for the north dakota dog groomer that came from Homeland Security funding.
I believe this proves that our government watchdogs are deadly serious about the threat from slavering salafists.
query:if that is all as seriously as THEY take the threat, why should we believe it is serious?
ASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
I read their comment and gave it the weight that any ass-covering generality deserves in the face of the discovery that they’ve been chasing their tails per the FBI.
I wouldn’t expect them to cop to their bullshit–But I submit to you that a more credible asessment would be one that came PROACTIVELY, as part of a regular or even special review, as opposed to a coerced response to an embarassing factoid that was not put out by the NSA itself but seems to have beenj an FBI sniper shot.
I take it from your silence that you think the New York Times Editorial
of this morning describes a junglefull of tigers, only barely kept at snarling distance by our heroic leader.
“About the only result the administration has been able to dredge up on behalf of the spying program is the claim that the information it gained helped disrupt two plots: one to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge and one to detonate fertilizer bombs in London. But officials in Washington and Britain disputed the connection. And that plot to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch has been trotted out so many times that it would be comical if the issue were not so serious.”
But the sources said that on dozens of occasions Cheney would, upon learning the identity of the individual, instruct the NSA to continue monitoring specific Americans caught in the wiretaps if he thought more information would be revealed, which crossed the line into illegal territory.
Cheney advised President Bush of what had turned up in the raw NSA reports, said one former White House official who worked on counterterrorism related issues.
“What’s really disturbing is that some of those people the vice president was curious about were people who worked at the White House or the State Department,” one former counterterrorism official said. “There was a real feeling of paranoia that permeated from the vice president’s office and I don’t think it had anything to do with the threat of terrorism. I can’t say what was contained in those taps that piqued his interest. I just don’t know.” [emphasis mine]
An NSA spokesperson would not comment for this story.