A Great Time To Be Paranoid

[red states rule]

This op-ed sums up the lefts view of proteting Amercia so well - he got his own thread

For some strange reason, the left wants to protect the rights of terrorists



Great Time To Be Paranoid

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, August 7, 2007; Page A13

Several times a month, a woman calls my office in the middle of the night and leaves long voice-mail messages about how she's the target of a vast, sinister conspiracy. I won't give her name -- obviously, she suffers from a mental illness. The conspiracy she perceives involves the U.S. military, the CIA, interference with her brain waves and constant monitoring by the evil people who, for whatever reason, have decided that her thoughts somehow threaten their nefarious plans. Sometimes she disguises her voice and pretends to be a lieutenant in the heroic resistance against mind control.

She always seems upbeat and energized, and I think I understand why: This must be a great time to be a paranoid.

People with a tendency to imagine that they are constantly being watched now have evidence to support their delusions. This weekend, when Congress legalized the Bush administration's practice of eavesdropping on citizens' international phone calls and e-mail without first seeking court warrants, my occasional caller must have said to her imaginary lieutenant, "See, I told you so."

My purpose here is not to endorse paranoia, and I'm not even going to blast the White House for further eroding our traditional guarantees of privacy. Well, maybe I'll blast the White House and Congress just a little: I'm as anxious as the next guy to catch terrorists before they strike, but what's wrong with having at least a fig leaf of judicial oversight? Why is it so onerous to have the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court continue to rubber-stamp eavesdropping requests, even retroactively?

Still, I'm having trouble getting as worked up over the new anything-goes snooping law as I should, because fighting for privacy as we once knew it is a lost cause. Our lives are public now.

What's stunning about the National Security Agency's surveillance of phone calls and e-mail is not just that it can now be done without a warrant but that it can be done at all. If I were to pick up the phone and dial a terrorism suspect in, say, London, the call would have to be routed through some major telecommunications node. The NSA could somehow plug into that node and find my call amid the countless calls that happened to be passing through.

In the process, the NSA would be able to capture an enormous amount of data about all sorts of phone calls. Most of that data might never be examined, but it would still be there if anyone cared to browse.

Of course, we've known for a long time that phone records, as opposed to the conversations themselves, have the ability to live forever -- and to tell the world more than we would like it to know. Just ask Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), whose phone number showed up in the records of "D.C. Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

The interesting thing is that Palfrey herself had no idea that Vitter had been one of the clients of her escort service. All she had was a set of her records, listing only the phone numbers of her callers. She released them on the Internet, and legions of the curious dug in to match numbers with names. Vitter was there all along, buried in the data.

Phone calls are just a start. Everyone should know by now that e-mail is all but eternal. Even those messages that Karl Rove and the rest of the White House political staff sent and received through a parallel Republican National Committee e-mail system, and that now can't be found, must be out there somewhere in cyberspace. But I digress.

The text messages we send back and forth on our cellphones are similarly long-lived. And if your mobile phone communicates with the Global Positioning System, it sends information about precisely where you are. What was that again about having to work late at the office?

Who needs GPS anyway? Think of all the security cameras that record your movements every day. Use an automated teller machine, fill the gas tank, drop into a convenience store, visit the mall or walk into the lobby of an office building and chances are you've been caught on videotape.

What if someone had predicted 50 years ago that someday all this once-private information would be captured and stored? Psychiatrists would have issued a quick and definitive diagnosis: paranoia.

The writer will answer questions at 1 p.m. today athttp://www.washingtonpost.com. His e-mail address iseugenerobinson@washpost.com.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/06/AR2007080601160.html

[red states rule]

The libs over at the NY Times are ready to shit thier pants

The Fear of Fear Itself
It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress — now led by Democrats — caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush’s powers, this time to spy on Americans in violation of basic constitutional rights. Many of the 16 Democrats in the Senate and 41 in the House who voted for the bill said that they had acted in the name of national security, but the only security at play was their job security.

There was plenty of bad behavior. Republicans marched in mindless lockstep with the president. There was double-dealing by the White House. The director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, crossed the line from being a steward of this nation’s security to acting as a White House political operative.

But mostly, the spectacle left us wondering what the Democrats — especially their feckless Senate leaders — plan to do with their majority in Congress if they are too scared of Republican campaign ads to use it to protect the Constitution and restrain an out-of-control president.

The votes in the House and Senate were supposed to fix a genuine glitch in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to obtain a warrant before eavesdropping on electronic communications that involve someone in the United States. The court charged with enforcing that law said the government must also seek a warrant if the people are outside the country, but their communications are routed through data exchanges here — a technological problem that did not exist in 1978.

Instead of just fixing that glitch, the White House and its allies on Capitol Hill railroaded Congress into voting a vast expansion of the president’s powers. They gave the director of national intelligence and the attorney general authority to intercept — without warrant, court supervision or accountability — any telephone call or e-mail message that moves in, out of or through the United States as long as there is a “reasonable belief” that one party is not in the United States. The new law all but eviscerates the 1978 law. The only small saving grace is that the new statute expires in six months.

The House handled this mess somewhat better than the Senate, moving to the floor a far more sensible bill. Mr. McConnell certified that the House bill would address the problem raised by the court. That is, until the White House made clear that it wanted to use the court’s ruling to grab a lot more power. Mr. McConnell then reversed his position and demanded that Congress pass the far more expansive bill.

In the Senate, the team of Harry Reid, the majority leader, gave up fast, agreeing to a deal that doomed any good bill. The senators then hurriedly approved the White House bill, dumped it on the House and skulked off on vacation. Representative Rahm Emanuel, the fourth-ranking member of the Democratic House leadership, said yesterday that his party would not wait for the new eavesdropping authority to expire, and would have a new, measured bill on the floor by October. We look forward to reading it.

But the problem with Congress last week was that Democrats were afraid to explain to Americans why the White House bill was so bad and so unnecessary — despite what the White House was claiming. There are good answers, if Democrats are willing to address voters as adults. To start, they should explain that — even if it were a good idea, and it’s not — the government does not have the capability to sort through billions of bits of electronic communication. And the larger question: why, six years after 9/11, is this sort of fishing expedition the supposed first line of defense in the war on terrorism?

While serving little purpose, the new law has real dangers. It would allow the government to intercept, without a warrant, every communication into or out of any country, including the United States. Instead of explaining all this to American voters — the minimal benefits and the enormous risks — the Democrats have allowed Mr. Bush and his fear-mongering to dominate all discussions on terrorism and national security.

Mr. Bush claims that he has kept America safe since 9/11. But that claim ignores the country’s very real and present vulnerabilities. Six years after the 9/11 attacks the administration has still failed to secure American ports, railroads and airports from terrorist attack, and has put the profits of the chemical and nuclear-power industries ahead of safeguarding their plants.

Mr. Bush also worries Democratic strategists by talking about “staying on the offensive” against terrorism, but it was his decision to invade Iraq that diverted resources from the real offensive, the one against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr. Bush’s incessant fear-mongering — and the Democrats’ refusal to challenge him — has had one notable success. The only issue on which Americans say that they trust Republicans more than Democrats is terrorism. At least those Americans are afraid of terrorists. The Democrats who voted for this bill, and others like it over the last few years, show only fear of Republicans.

The Democratic majority has made strides on other issues like children’s health insurance against White House opposition. As important as these measures are, they do not excuse the Democrats from remedying the damage Mr. Bush has done to civil liberties and the Bill of Rights. That is their most important duty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/opinion/07tue1.html

[KarlMarx]

http://991.com/newgallery/Black-Sabbath-Paranoid-320135.jpg

See?!?!? Black Sabbath ---- they knew!!!!!!

[red states rule]

The left keeps providing such great material day after day

Sometimes I damn near pity them

[KarlMarx]

The left keeps providing such great material day after day

Sometimes I damn near pity them

they sometimes me of an line from an old Abbott and Costello film

Abbott: Costello!!!!!! How stupid can you get?!?!?!??!
Costello: I dunno .... how stupid do you want me to be?

[red states rule]

they sometimes me of an line from an old Abbott and Costello film

Abbott: Costello!!!!!! How stupid can you get?!?!?!??!
Costello: I dunno .... how stupid do you want me to be?


Libs do resemble that remark

[red states rule]

Bush's Big Victory
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, August 06, 2007 4:20 PM PT

National Security: President Bush got help from 16 Democratic senators and 41 Democratic congressmen in expanding warrantless surveillance of terrorist communications to the U.S. Still think he's ineffective?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Related Topics: Global War On Terror | General Politics


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We don't, though the media constantly tell us there is no more wind left in the sails of this presidency. But if that's the case, why are dozens of Democrats in Congress more scared of George W. Bush's bully pulpit than any threats from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid?

Last Friday, the Senate voted 60 to 28 to pass the Protect America Act, a modernization of the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), with 16 Democratic senators defecting from their party's leadership to vote with 43 Republicans and independent Democrat Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.

The House of Representatives followed the next day by approving the bill 227-to-183, with 41 Democrats in favor and only two Republicans opposed. Democrats provided the margin of victory.

The president swiftly signed it into law on Sunday, making a point of thanking Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for her work "on an effective bipartisan solution."

In the days preceding the vote, the president was relentless in insisting that FISA was "badly out of date — and Congress must act to modernize it . . . our national security depends on it."

He was obviously heard loud and clear by some of his own harsh critics: Democratic senators like Evan Bayh of Indiana, freshman Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, and Jim Webb of Virginia, along with congressmen like Henry Cuellar, a senior whip in the House Democratic Caucus who has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, and Brian Higgins, who represents urban Buffalo, N.Y.

What was passed into law did not end up being the narrow alterations that were expected, but a broad legal framework that should squash the left's claims that the National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance program violates the law.

The U.S. government may now once again sift through millions of phone calls and e-mails between U.S. and foreign sources, a great many of which pass through telecommunications switches located here — but only when a foreigner is the target.

The bad news is that, in a concession from the White House, the Protect America Act remains in effect for only six months. And how sad that well over 200 Democrats in Congress — including their leaders — voted against what ought to be utterly uncontroversial: letting the executive branch do its duty under the Constitution and protect Americans from our most dangerous foes.

No wonder only 14% approve of the job this Congress is doing. Not long after House passage, Speaker Pelosi issued a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, calling on them to prepare "corrective action" legislation after the August recess.

And Sen. Reid promised: "Over the course of the fall, I expect the Senate to work diligently on more permanent legislation . . ."

But it won't be easy to get those same 57 Democrats to weaken the anti-terrorist weapons now finally in place — especially when a supposed lame duck, ineffectual president once again grabs hold of the mike and strikes fear into them.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=271290742937899

[diuretic]

Great Time To Be Paranoid


Hey who said that? Come one, who said it? I wanna know! I need to know! I can't trust anyone these days...no-one's telling me anything....I know someone's out there though. I know it. I need to be careful. You just can't tell these days.....





:laugh2:

[red states rule]

Hey who said that? Come one, who said it? I wanna know! I need to know! I can't trust anyone these days...no-one's telling me anything....I know someone's out there though. I know it. I need to be careful. You just can't tell these days.....





:laugh2:

Glad to see you addressed the point of the article.

[red states rule]

Fear, Frenzy, and FISA
How the Bush administration has kept Congress locked in a September 12 state of panic.

Julian Sanchez | August 7, 2007

Like Bill Murray's hapless weatherman in Groundhog Day, America is locked in a perpetual September 12, 2001. How else to explain this weekend's frenzied passage of a sweeping amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), effectively authorizing the program of extrajudicial wiretaps first approved in secret by President George W. Bush shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001? How else to make sense of a Democratic Congress capitulating to the demands of a wildly unpopular executive for yet another expansion of government surveillance powers, mere months after the disclosure of the rampant abuses that followed the last such expansion?

The hasty passage of the massive USA PATRIOT Act, a scant 45 days after those attacks, was ill-considered but understandable. Six years later, however, the administration has grown comfortable with the prerogatives panic affords. And, perversely, it has learned that it can continue to wield those prerogatives even under a Democratic majority, provided it insists on regarding Congress always and only as a last resort.

Consider the provenance of this "emergency" legislation. President Bush first authorized the National Security Agency to carry out a range of surveillance activities without court order, the full scope of which is still unknown, but which at the least included monitoring communications between persons in the United States and targets abroad. (Wholly international communications had always been exempt from the privacy restrictions imposed by U.S. law.) When this was revealed by The New York Times late in 2005, the administration insisted that national security required that intelligence agents be allowed to bypass even the super-secret—and highly compliant—FISA courts. Then, following the 2006 midterm elections, which gave Democrats a congressional majority, the Department of Justice abruptly announced that it had found a way to work within FISA after all. Finally, according to The LA Times, a spring ruling by a FISA court judge found that even this restricted version of the six-year-old program ran afoul of the law.

Suddenly it became urgent that Congress "modernize" what was invariably described as "the 1978 FISA statute," conjuring images of forlorn agents in white polyester leisure suits vainly hunting for al-Qaeda terrorists hidden under Pet Rocks. Yet FISA had already been updated dozens of times since its initial passage, including six major amendments since the September 11 attacks, giving the administration myriad opportunities to request all the "modernization" it required, subject to thorough public debate. But even this manufactured urgency, it seems, was not enough. On the eve of the legislature's August recess, House Democrats had worked out a compromise bill with Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, which preserved a modicum of judicial oversight over the expanded surveillance powers it granted. But the White House pronounced this unsatisfactory, threatening a veto and demanding still broader powers. If Democrats did not yield completely before Congress adjourned, Bush said, they would "put our national security at risk."

The bill the president signed Sunday, however, goes far beyond the limited reform that all sides had agreed were urgently needed. Because so much of the world's telecommunication infrastructure is located in the United States, even e-mails and phone calls between parties who are both overseas routinely pass through giant "switches" here. The rejected compromise bill would have clarified that interception of such traffic would count as unrestricted foreign surveillance, even if it were conducted domestically with a narrowly-tailored provision:

[A] court order is not required for the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not located within the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.
The parallel language of the final bill is notably broader:
Nothing in the definition of electronic surveillance under section 101(f) shall be construed to encompass surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States.
The crucial difference is in the treatment of surveillance "directed at" an overseas party when one end of the conversation is, or may be, located in the United States. The original compromise bill would have licensed broad warrants for such surveillance, requiring only that intelligence specify a "foreign power" as the target of an investigation, without naming the particular people, places, or devices to be monitored. But it would at least have required a warrant, approved in advance by a FISA judge, and established oversight in the form of regular audits by the Department of Justice's Inspector General.
The bill that ultimately passed requires only the approval of the director of national intelligence and the attorney general. Now, the attorney general has 120 days to submit for review "procedures by which the Government determines that acquisitions conducted pursuant to section 105B do not constitute electronic surveillance"—procedures the court is instructed to sign off on unless that determination is "clearly erroneous." And these guidelines need only ensure that the communication being monitored "concerns persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Telecom companies will have to comply with information requests under any program so authorized, though they'll be granted immunity from any civil suits arising from their cooperation. And while this stopgap bill sunsets in six months, authorizations and directives pursuant to the act (which may be granted for up to a year) remain in effect until expiration, "and shall not be deemed to constitute electronic surveillance*

Yet the effect of this amendment may be even broader than is immediately apparent. Amidst controversy over apparent contradictions in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' testimony before Congress regarding NSA surveillance, officials confirmed that, as many had long suspected, the so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Program" is only part of a far broader series of surveillance initiatives, about which little is known for certain. There is reason to suspect, however, that they may include a vast system of "vacuum cleaner" filtering of international traffic. NSA whistleblower Russell Tice spoke to Reason last year about his agency's surveillance, and while he could not confirm any details about classified programs, he described how one might hypothetically work:

If you wanted to, you could suck in an awful lot of information. The biggest constraint you're going to have is the computing power you need to do it. You need to have some huge computers to crunch that kind of stuff. More than likely you're talking about picking it up in a digital format and analyzing it depending on how the program is written depending on whether it's audio or digital recognition you're talking about, the computing power is phenomenal for that sort of thing. Especially if you're talking about mass volumes, if you're talking about hundreds of thousands of, say, telephone communications or something like that, calls of people just like you and me, like we're talking now. Then you have things like, and this is where language specialists come in, linguists who specialize in things like accents and inflections and speech patterns and all those things that come into play. Or looking for key phrases or combinations of key words within a block of speech. It becomes, when you add in all the variables, astronomical.
That would be consistent with reports by an AT&T technician of a secret room in the company's San Francisco office, where NSA computers sifted through each byte of traffic flowing over the wires. An analysis by the Center for National Security Studies argues that the language of the FISA reform has been carefully tailored to exempt not just conventional eavesdropping but also mass-scale computerized traffic analysis from judicial scrutiny.
When the NSA program of warrantless wiretaps initially came to light, Bush's lawyers argued that the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which empowered the president to hunt down the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, had implicitly licensed this eavesdropping as well. So we know that this administration is not above claiming that a law authorizes sweeping new surveillance programs, even when the legislators who voted on the law had no knowledge such programs existed. The speed with which this FISA amendment passed guarantees that legislators cannot have had time to consider carefully precisely how much latitude their wording can be construed to grant an executive who has consistently exhibited a disturbing zeal for squeezing the maximum amount of power from every carelessly placed comma.

But then, that was almost certainly the point. Ingenious as the White House has proven at recreating the expedient panic of 2001, however, it is not September 12 anymore. Along with a chance to more cooly appraise the terrorist threat, the intervening years have provided ample evidence of how little this administration can be trusted with its existing powers, let alone new ones. When lawmakers return to Washington this coming September, they might try a bit harder to recall the year as well as the month.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/121797.html

[red states rule]

FISA: Don’t Mend It, End It
The Left’s deafening silence won’t obscure that judges shouldn’t be managing our national security.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

We should all breathe a sigh of relief that sanity prevailed when Congress enacted emergency legislation over the weekend to address a national-security crisis: the hamstringing of our intelligence community’s ability to eavesdrop on agents of foreign powers situated overseas and bent on killing Americans.

I would keep the cork on the champagne bottle, though — and not just because this eleventh-hour fix of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will lapse in six months, nor because it is absurd that we should ever have been arguing over anything so silly in the first place.

We should be horrified by this crisis because of what caused it: FISA and judges.

We should be equally affronted by the hypocrisy of congressional Democrats and the leftwing commentariat. It’s not national security or the “rule of law” they care about. It’s politics — plain, simple, and brass-knuckled. The calculation: If George W. Bush can be hurt a polling point or two (yes, there’s still room to go down) by posturing over law-breaking, it’s okay to roll the dice with our lives.

For nearly two years since the New York Times blew the NSA’s warrantless-surveillance program, the Left has transfigured itself into a whirling dervish of indignation over President Bush’s imperious trampling of “the rule of law.” Why? Because he failed to comply with the letter of FISA, which purports in certain instances to require the chief executive — the only elected official in the United States responsible for protecting our nation from foreign threats — to seek permission from a federal judge before monitoring international enemy communications into or out of the United States.

But the president, at least, had an excuse. Actually, not a mere excuse but a trump card. We call it the American Constitution. It empowers the chief executive to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreign threats. Even the FISA Court of Review, the highest, most specialized judicial tribunal ever to consider FISA, has acknowledged this. So did the Clinton administration when FISA was amended in 1994. In the United States, the “rule of law” first and foremost is the Constitution.

The president’s constitutional authority is inviolable — it cannot be reduced by mere legislation. When Congress passes a statute, like FISA, that purports to reduce the president’s constitutional authority, it is Congress, not the president, that is trampling the rule of law. A president who ignores such a statute is not a law-breaker; he is a defender of the highest law. He is executing the responsibility vested in his office by the Framers who, as Alexander Hamilton observed in The Federalist No. 73, worried deeply about “the propensity of the legislative department to intrude upon the rights, and to absorb the powers, of the other departments.”

But let’s leave that aside for a moment. Whether you agree or disagree with what I just argued, it is incontestable that, under our Constitution, the president has a role — a plenary role, according to the Supreme Court — in the gathering of intelligence against foreign entities for national-security purposes.

The courts, to the contrary, have no such role. The Framers did not give them one, and the Supreme Court has acknowledged that they are institutionally incompetent to be brought into the intelligence-gathering equation, much less to manage it.

It is thus not the Constitution that has inserted judges into the intelligence-gathering business. If the Constitution were being honored, they’d be out of it. They are in the equation for one reason and one reason alone: Congress unwisely (and, I believe, unconstitutionally) interposed them when it enacted FISA.

WHERE’S THE HUE AND CRY OVER JUDICIAL FISA VIOLATIONS?
So, what caused our present national-security crisis? A judge on the FISA court outrageously ignored the FISA statute. And it’s not the first time. And, whenever it happens, the purpose is to vest our enemies with more “rights,” not to protect our nation from those trying to slaughter us.

Understand this point. It’s crucial. The president has a right to ignore the FISA statute if it conflicts with the higher duties that are assigned to him by the Constitution. The president has an obligation to safeguard the American people against foreign attack — including strikes ordered by al Qaeda supervisors overseas, who give direction to terrorists embedded here, as they did in the run-up to 9/11. You can argue that he has overstepped his authority. You cannot credibly argue that he is without a colorable basis for doing so.

By contrast, the judiciary has no such authority. None. The FISA court has no constitutional responsibility to manage intelligence-collection. The Framers would be spinning in their graves over the mere suggestion of something so preposterous. If the court has a proper role — an enormous if — that role absolutely cannot be any broader than what Congress has prescribed in FISA. It could very well be less. If, as I contend, Congress overstepped its bounds in enacting FISA, the role of the courts could be either nonexistent or something less than FISA designed. It can, however, in no event be greater than what is laid out in FISA.

Why is this critical? Because we’ve now learned that a FISA-court judge caused the ongoing crisis by ruling that foreign-to-foreign communications — contacts between an agent of a foreign power and another person when both are situated outside the United States — are within the ambit of FISA. There is no way a federal judge following the letter of the FISA statute could possibly have come to that conclusion.

When Congress enacted FISA in 1978, its purpose was to curtail the ability of the president to conduct domestic spying against Americans, as President Nixon had done. It was an exercise in overkill — but that’s an argument for another day. The point for present purposes is that Congress intentionally excluded foreign-to-foreign communications.

It did this by writing an exacting definition of the “electronic surveillance” for intelligence collection purposes that FISA claims to regulate. There are thus four categories of FISA-regulated communications. For simplicity’s sake, I will avoid the distinctions between “radio” and “wire” communications; they are not pertinent to my simpler point, which is that foreign-to-foreign contacts palpably fall outside FISA’s framework. The four types of communications FISA regulates are the following:

(a) those involving a particular, known American citizen or permanent resident alien who is in the United States and has intentionally been targeted for monitoring, no matter whether the interception takes place inside or outside the United States;

(b) those involving someone inside the United States, even if that person has not been intentionally targeted, if the interception occurs within the United States;

(c) those in which all parties to the communication are located within the United States; and

(d) those rare contacts which are neither radio nor wire communications, “in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes.”

That’s it. If a communication does not fit into one of those categories, FISA has no application and the executive branch — even under Congress’s constitutionally dubious construct — is not required to seek judicial permission.

Clearly, none of those categories touches foreign-to-foreign communications. They all relate to contacts in which at least one party is in the United States. Indeed, even the last category — which relates to very few types of contacts because it excludes both wire and radio communications — implicitly requires a U.S. nexus because it speaks of “a warrant [being] required for law enforcement purposes.” A warrant is never required for law enforcement purposes outside the United States. The federal courts have no jurisdiction over locations outside our country, and, as the Supreme Court has firmly held, law enforcement is not bound by the Fourth Amendment when dealing with aliens outside our borders.

So how could a FISA-court judge have come to the conclusion that foreign-to-foreign communications implicate FISA and required judicial sanction? Only by making it up. That is, only by violating the terms of FISA in favor of what the judge subjectively believed FISA should cover. The happenstance that a foreign-to-foreign communication passes through American telecom networks is irrelevant. In enacting FISA, Congress plainly considered communications that pass through the United States. Take a look, especially, at category (b), above. It concluded that those would only be the court’s concern if at least one end of the communication was inside the United States. If it’s foreign-to-foreign, it’s none of the FISA court’s business.

So where is the outrage? Where are the Democrats calling for impeachment hearings against the FISA judge for blatant lawlessness? Where are the media and the liberal academics complaining that the FISA court is disregarding FISA?

IT’S ALL POSTURING … AND DANGEROUS
They were sure loud enough when the culprit was the president. But, again, when President Bush ignored FISA, he had a plausible (I would say a convincing) reason for doing so.

To the contrary, a FISA-court judge has no constitutional portfolio to fall back on. As the Supreme Court explained in 1948, intelligence gathering involves “decisions of a kind for which the Judiciary has neither aptitude, facilities nor responsibility and which has long been held to belong in the domain of political power not subject to judicial intrusion or inquiry.” The judiciary doesn’t belong in this thicket at all. If, however, the judges are in it, their authority can go not an inch further than what Congress defined in FISA.

Of course, we hear none of the theatrical rebukes that thundered against the White House. FISA has been blatantly violated, but the Left is not complaining because vindicating “the rule of law” has never been the purpose of its high-minded defense of FISA. It’s a game, and it has always, for every minute, been all about politics. If it doesn’t hurt Bush, who cares?

We should all care. The FISA court has conducted itself lawlessly since the 9/11 attacks and no one — not Congress, not the administration (at least since Attorney General Ashcroft stepped down) seems to give a hoot. Worried about the imperial presidency, are you? How about the imperial judiciary?

The FISA court scoffed at the Patriot Act after Congress enacted it expressly to dismantle the infamous “wall” — the impediment to intelligence sharing which quite likely prevented the FBI from thwarting the suicide hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Yes, the Patriot Act was the subject of great debate. Yet, the one part of it about which there seemed to be genuine bipartisan consensus was the need to knock down the wall. No one would defend the indefensible. No one, that is, except the FISA court. The FISA judges, in breathtaking arrogance, did not merely defend it; they tried to re-erect it against the express, unambiguous direction of Congress. They were put back in their place only when overruled by the FISA Court of Review — the only decision that court has ever rendered (and the one the Left hates to talk about because it concedes that the president maintains constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches).

Now, the FISA-court judges are at it again, violating statutes and making up their own surveillance regime as they go along — just like the president has been accused of doing. The only difference, of course, is that the president, who has constitutional duties to uphold and is accountable to American voters, fashioned an NSA program that was designed to protect American lives; the judges, who have no constitutional duty in this field and are insulated from the voters whose lives are at stake, somehow always manage to confer more rights on foreign enemies of the United States while leaving the American people more vulnerable.

FISA doesn’t need a fix. It needs a decent burial. Like the wall, it’s a bad idea that keeps proving itself to be a worse idea. We shouldn’t need another 9/11 before we open our eyes to the undeniable.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDFmNzVkZGNlNDNiYWNkZGZlZDdkODJkY2VkZjM3ZmY=

[diuretic]

Glad to see you addressed the point of the article.

There was a point to it? Oh, that you are losing your rights to government hand over fist? True, nothing to laugh about, I agree. All that stuff about not living on your knees? Just bullshit really isn't it? You've let your government scare the shit out of you and now you're willingly bending over to take it. You're becoming a nation of supplicants to all powerful government, it's pretty sad.

[red states rule]

There was a point to it? Oh, that you are losing your rights to government hand over fist? True, nothing to laugh about, I agree. All that stuff about not living on your knees? Just bullshit really isn't it? You've let your government scare the shit out of you and now you're willingly bending over to take it. You're becoming a nation of supplicants to all powerful government, it's pretty sad.

You are losing your "rights" if you are a terrorist - but then, when did they have any rights in the first place?

[diuretic]

You are losing your "rights" if you are a terrorist - but then, when did they have any rights in the first place?

A variation of the "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" argument?

Sad. Bush pisses over you and you ask if it's raining. Sad.

I just hate to see people losing their liberties. Your nation is retreating from its principles because of the spectre of "terrorism".


Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once

[red states rule]

A variation of the "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" argument?

Sad. Bush pisses over you and you ask if it's raining. Sad.

I just hate to see people losing their liberties. Your nation is retreating from its principles because of the spectre of "terrorism".

This is why Dems are at record low approval numbers (lower then Pres Bush) they are not doing what they can to capture terrorists and stop their activities

[diuretic]

The Dems have shown themselves to be gutless. That's why their approval stinks.

[red states rule]

The Dems have shown themselves to be gutless. That's why their approval stinks.

That and, wanting higher taxes, government run health care, government oversight of CEO pay, attacking nearly every US corporation, appeasement and surrender to terrorists,and increasing pork and spending,

Other then that Dems have done a pretty good job

[diuretic]

Those were the policies that got them elected in majority in Congress.

[red states rule]

Those were the policies that got them elected in majority in Congress.

No. Dems said they would do the opposite of the list

They have broken nearly every promise they made

[red states rule]

Democrats Bushitlerized?
James Lewis

Wow! Democrats voting for warrantless wiretapping? The Senate voted 60 to 28 for the bill that just passed. The House went for it by 214 to 177. In both votes it was Democrats who put the wiretapping bill over the top. President Bush signed it yesterday.

So the Dems have made warrantless wiretapping work by Federal legislation, not just by the inherent powers of the President. This wildly contradicts what they have been telling the faithful back home.

What's going on?

For at least a year the media gunned for George W. Bush's hide for supposedly violating the privacy of Americans. Which is completely corkscrewed, of course, because those wiretaps are for overseas phone calls with AQ goons, who are not protected by US law.

Are the netroots going ape? They should be. Their own politicians are now legitimizing old Bushitler. Everything the Left has raged about like so many Holy Rollers now turns out to be a sham.

So what is really going on?

Eli Lake in the NY Sun gives a pretty good reason for the earthquake.

"... intelligence gleaned from last month's British "doctors plot" of car bombers suggests that a Qaeda cell is on the loose in the American homeland. ...

E-mail addresses for American individuals were found on the same password-protected e-mail chains used by the United Kingdom plotters to communicate with Qaeda handlers in Europe, a counterterrorism official told The New York Sun yesterday. The American and German intelligence community now believe the secure e-mail chains used in the United Kingdom plot have provided a window into an operational Qaeda network in several countries.

"Because of the London and Glasgow plot, we now know communications have been made from Al Qaeda to operatives in the United States," the counterterrorism official said on condition of anonymity. "This plot helps to connect a lot of stuff. ..."
This is serious news for saner folks. But it's exactly what the Left has been denying at the top of their voices ever since 1993, when the first Twin Towers truck-bombing took place --- courtesy of New York City's friendly local Qaeda cell. The Left has been asking "What terror threat?" for all these years, while masked thugs with AK 47's were showing us their intentions on TV.

Well, on Friday the Democrats got it. At least privately. Obviously they're trying to cover it up by blaming on a few Blue Dog defectors. But that doesn't explain the lopsided vote in the Democrat Senate. Harry Reid could have blocked the vote in the Senate with a filibuster. But he didn't, because Hillary and the gang finally figured out who would get blamed if we have another 9/11.

It looks like the Dems will happily undermine America's defense, but not if they're going to be caught in the crosshairs when the next balloon goes up.

Let's all hope the Kossicles are foaming at the mouth, out there in cyberspace.


Welcome to reality, kids.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/08/democrats_bushitlerized.html

[diuretic]

The terrorists really are winning aren't they? As I said, sad.

[red states rule]

The terrorists really are winning aren't they? As I said, sad.

Libs like to think they are - its makes their push for surrender much easier

[diuretic]

Libs like to think they are - its makes their push for surrender much easier

Surrender to whom? That doesn't make sense.

[red states rule]

Surrender to whom? That doesn't make sense.

Surrender to the terrorists in Iraq. Dems must have the US fail in Iraq - they have invested their politcal future in the US military losing in Iraq

[red states rule]

A Dem recently told the truth


Clyburn, in an interview with the washingtonpost.com video program PostTalk, said Democrats might be wise to wait for the Petraeus report, scheduled to be delivered in September, before charting next steps in their year-long struggle with President Bush over the direction of U.S. strategy

Clyburn noted that Petraeus carries significant weight among the 47 members of the Blue Dog caucus in the House, a group of moderate to conservative Democrats. Without their support, he said, Democratic leaders would find it virtually impossible to pass legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal.

"I think there would be enough support in that group to want to stay the course and if the Republicans were to stay united as they have been, then it would be a problem for us," Clyburn said.

[diuretic]

Surrender to the terrorists in Iraq. Dems must have the US fail in Iraq - they have invested their politcal future in the US military losing in Iraq

Okay we're off to Iraq again. The US won't "surrender" in Iraq because there's no-one to surrender to. But think about it for a second or two. If the US pulls out of Iraq, what will be the implications for the average American? Forget the interests of the oil companies and the other associated companies such as Halliburton and the security companies. I'd be interested to read your ideas on that.

The Democrats are all over the place when it comes to Iraq. Most of them supported Bush on it so they can wear the opprobrium. In truth though the Dems don't need to be specific over Iraq, it's Bush's doing and Bush's problem. Of course he will simply tough it out ("tough it out" - an irony when one considers for him what's at stake is his pride while in Iraq people are dying) and then - if there isn't a false flag event and he and Cheney decide there's going to be a state of emergency so they have to stay on - he will walk away and dump it into the lap of the next president.

[red states rule]

Okay we're off to Iraq again. The US won't "surrender" in Iraq because there's no-one to surrender to. But think about it for a second or two. If the US pulls out of Iraq, what will be the implications for the average American? Forget the interests of the oil companies and the other associated companies such as Halliburton and the security companies. I'd be interested to read your ideas on that.

The Democrats are all over the place when it comes to Iraq. Most of them supported Bush on it so they can wear the opprobrium. In truth though the Dems don't need to be specific over Iraq, it's Bush's doing and Bush's problem. Of course he will simply tough it out ("tough it out" - an irony when one considers for him what's at stake is his pride while in Iraq people are dying) and then - if there isn't a false flag event and he and Cheney decide there's going to be a state of emergency so they have to stay on - he will walk away and dump it into the lap of the next president.

Dems have admitted they do not want to hear any good news about Iraq. Dems have wlaked out on the briefings when they could no longer stand hearing how the US is making progress

Yes we are back to Iraq again - that is where the we are taking on the terrorists on the battlefield

[Gaffer]

Anyone that thinks the dems are going to change anything if they get the white house needs to think again. A dem president is not going to change any laws already in place. They will add to them. Because they will eventually use those laws to control the populace.

The law is created, then a department to enforce that law.The department is allowed to grow. If the department appears to no longer be needed, it is absorbed into another department. The law gets retitled and changed, but the law remains.

[red states rule]

Anyone that thinks the dems are going to change anything if they get the white house needs to think again. A dem president is not going to change any laws already in place. They will add to them. Because they will eventually use those laws to control the populace.

The law is created, then a department to enforce that law.The department is allowed to grow. If the department appears to no longer be needed, it is absorbed into another department. The law gets retitled and changed, but the law remains.

Dems will change one thing - they will make surrender the offfical US policy when it comes to the war on terror