Straw Man cite request! Please demonstrate where Evil One claimed some specific persons on this board said the above.
Evil One said no such thing, of course. He merely paraphrased an attitude, as is obvious to anyone reading the comment he made which you quoted:
“Anyone who leans in this direction:
'The NSA is listening to overseas calls?! It’s big brother! Slippery slope! For gods sake…SLIPPERY SLOPE!!!”’
I get so damn tired of this ridiculous practice of demanding cites for things that are clearly uncitable every time someone around here wants to defend against or derail some comment they don’t like but are otherwise unable to contend with! IMO, it is the foremost form of intellectual dishonesty that exists on this board!
I’m just calling for common sense. If we have to listen to some overseas phone calls to Pakistan from someone with an Arab surname, so be it. If we have to keep a terror suspect awake for a couple of days to make him talk, the republic won’t crumble.
[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
Yeah, like dropping white phosphorus on children, slaughtering civilian families in their homes, detaining and torturing people be they innocent or guilty, and invading sovereign states that had nothing to do with what appears to be the center of your life, 9/11.
I can’t even begin to comment on the above, Bob. I’ll let El Kabong ask for for some cites in the interest of fairness, however.
Maybe they can bury you with it rolled up in your hand if you are a victim of the next attack.
I messed up the coding on the above post. Please delete it.
You are absolutely right Bob. The United States makes Darth Vader look like a kindergarten teacher by comparison. Other than Haditha, I’ll let El Kabong ask you for some cites for the above in the interest of fairness.
Maybe they can bury you with it rolled up in your hand if you are a victim of the next attack.
But that really won’t happen, now will it? I’ve addressed this point before and nobody wants to deal with it because it’s inconvienient. You and I both know that a “police state” is not in the offing. The "slippery slope "argument is an intellectual luxury that can only reference “what ifs” that are grounded in baseless paranoia.
Glad I wasn’t the only person having the Diet Coke and Mentos thought - I thought I was going to hell.
Honestly, our homeland security seems to be made up of idiots. First it was “lets wand people boarding, but ignore their shoes.” Took me all of two seconds watching that to say “gee, if I were going to…I’d hide it in my shoes.” Now its “gee, people could carry on liquids in pop bottles, combine them, and blow up the plane” - no shit Sherlock - didn’t you guys blow things up in Chemistry like every other high school student? (OK, I went to school in a simplier time when the Chemistry teacher did show us some basic explosives cause the worst that anyone believed would happen is the toilets might explode). And, by taking airline service down to naught, we’ve made it easier - people carry EVERYTHING onboard a plane now - used to be you boarded with your purse or wallet and a paperback novel and trusted the flight attendant to keep you plied with liquids and a blanket.
I’m a big fan of carryon luggage, but between the electronics everyone carries on, the food, the water/pop, and everything else - yeah…it ain’t going to be completely safe.
Would I? I don’t know, why don’t you go ahead and bring in a cite and see if I do?
If, as you say, Gitmo has nothing to do with your arguments in this thread, why did you even bring it up? You dragged Gitmo in here as some sort of point you were trying to make. I asked you to justify its inclusion. You can’t. OK, understood.
Well, glad we got that straight.
Hey, you know, you’re right. It’s true, it’s not like you’ve called for more restrictions. All you’ve argued here, if I read you correctly, is that it’s perfectly all right by you that the administration can detain anyone they like for as long as they want, for any reason they want, and can torture them to obtain information that they may or may not have, on nothing more than vague suspicions. You have basically said that the use of the word ‘terrorism’ implies something so horrible, so far beyond the pale, that we must ignore any inconvenient legal limits to what a government may do to both its own and other people, or else we’re not being ‘realistic’. You’ve basically said that all inconveniences to the traveling public, no matter how silly or pointless, are justified as long as the magic word ‘terrorism’ is attached.
If I’m misunderstanding you, please feel free to correct me.
Water, pop, toothpaste, baby food, Gatorade, etc., are being prohibited in carryon baggage on domestic flights. Transatlantic flights further prohibit any carryon electronics.
Well, if you are asking my personal viewpoint, no inconveniences whatsoever are warranted. You see, I am not a terrorist. Your minions of paranoia can search me all you want, profile me all you want, ban me from taking my business laptop computer all you want, but it is all a complete waste of time, because I.am.not.a.terrorist.
Pretty much by definition all suicide bombers are amateurs. How do you become a professional suicide bomber?
All suicide bombers are going to be low-wattage wannabes who, if they weren’t strapping on explosive vests would be smoking pot in their parents basement.
Complaining that these arrested wannabe suicide bombers are “amateurs” is incredibly stupid. You don’t have to have much on the ball to massacre a bunch of people if you don’t care if you live or die. So all these guys are going to look like losers who couldn’t tie their own shoes…until they blow themselves to Paradise taking us with them. If we had arrested the 9/11 hijackers the day before they wouldn’t have looked very dangerous…just a bunch of idiots hopped up on the Koran. Except they killed 3000 people.
I know. That’s today - when we suspect a credible threat (I don’t want to say know, because that opens up another can o worms). How much do you want to bet that doesn’t continue and two months from now you’ll be walking on with your water (but you may have to buy it at the airport - for $6). If it does - great, they’ll have closed one avenue to blowing up a plane. but now I just shove my explosives in my body cavity - prohibiting something is not the same as it not getting on the plane. And I don’t think we will ever go to body cavity searches for everyone.
And if we run an anti-terror attack defense in accord with basic human rights and an occasional bomb kills some people the republic won’t crumble either. Righties are always sounding the chorus of “perfect safety is a pipe dream” when something like workplace or automobile safety is in question. However you seem willing to accept all sorts of restrictions (on other people most likely) in order to try to get perfect safety from terrorist activities.
You mentioned Jose Padilla in a post above and implied that there was nothing wrong with how his case was handled, those hand-wringing lefties notwithstanding. Didn’t a federal court agree that the government had erred in not granting him his due process?
Amendment V says that “no person” shall be held to answer for a [crime] … except through a process defined in the amendment. And the amendment doesn’t contain a exception for unusual circumstances like some other definition of rights, such as the right to habeas corpus. Notice that this right is not restricted to US citizens.
To adopt the Rumsfeld method: Are there people who want to do us harm? Yes. Will it be difficult to combat them and still maintain a free and open society? Yes. Are Americans able to finds methods of accomplishing our goal without turning the task over to a single individual’s judgement? I think yes if we keep our heads amd don’t expect an instant and perfect solution.
The knee-jerk reaction of the administration, the Congress and the people resulted in a first cut at combatting terrorism. There is no reason in all of human experience to suggest that a first cut, Mod 1 if you will, shouldn’t be subject to modification. And I don’t mean even more restrictions, unexamined snooping, and power to one person.
Just as “unfortunately,” when it comes to killing innocent civilians, no one does it better than Bush’s USA and its proxy army, the IDF.
Mayhaps you’ll realize this will only become a vicious circle. You keep killing them, they’ll keep trying to kill you – and succeed every once and again.
Well, in this postevil one did put some things in quotation marks as if quoting posters on this board. He hasn’t come up with cites to the treads or the posts but instead said we could find them ourselves. Screw that.
I have no doubt that some people have written that the Guantanamo Bayv prison is a bad idea and should be closed or that 9/11 is being used as an excuse. Rathen than just citing them it seems to me that the proper course would be to refute them by showing that they are wrong. I happen to think the isolation camp at Guantanamo is a travesty of our methods and that 9/11 and terrorism have been used as an excuse to say things like - You are either with us or against us and anyone who questions our methods is aiding an abetting terrorists.
If you had been watching anything besides Fox News during the wiretapping furor, you’d know that the issue wasn’t wiretapping - which everyone agrees is fine. It is wiretapping without following the not very onerous procedures set forth by law. All because Bush thought it inconvenient, and decide that the law no longer applied to him. Accusing everyone of being against wiretapping is a lie - just illegal wiretapping.
I can’t imagine how the country survived the real danger to its existence from 1945 - 1990 without treating the Constitution like toilet paper. How ever did we do that?