amen. Wrong is wrong, no matter who is wrong. For me justifications are just excuses.

What she said.

gekkogecko,

Your post above opens with an assessment of what U.S. law enforcement officials can and can’t do.

OK. With serious reservations about the assertion that if one disagrees with you one is delusional, I can accept that.

You follow this with a determination that I am not delusional.

Good. We agree about that.

We begin to part ways with the next assertion. Working on the assumption that “the cases where this is the situation are gradually being eroded”, would you please list the cases where searches and wiretaps have been executed on U.S. citizens without first securing a warrant from a Federal judge? You need not limit this list to only those instances were the justification is “fighting terrorism” unless you wish to. This would seem to be the kind of list that the ACLU would be aware of, but if there are alternative reputable (no fruitcake bloggers please) sources for this information, feel free to use them instead – or in addition to – any other list supporting your claim.

I have been wrong frequently enough in the past to know that I may be wrong about this, but I have the suspicion that – and let me repeat this to ensure that we are singing from the same score here - the list of the cases where searches and wiretaps have been executed on U.S. citizens without first securing a warrant from a Federal judge will be a rather short one - certainly in comparison to the size of the list of the searches which had been first blessed at the Federal bench. Further, when you have this list you may wish to check how many of these searches and wiretaps – or any evidence gathered from them - were subsequently ruled as admissible for a prosecution.

A list of six claimed unsavory attributes of the current administration follows.

OK. Your claims may be debated, and may be in a subsequent post, but let us take them as presented.

You conclude that because the current administration is (supposedly) guilty of the six listed attributes and behaviors, it follows then that federal prosecutors in Boise Idaho, Boston Massachusetts, Seattle, Washington, and throughout these United States are executing unconstitutional searches and seizures on American citizens.

Forgive me for asking, but why would a federal prosecutor in, say, Sacramento, California feel comfortable organizing an activity which she knows in advance will be thrown out of court, and at the same time receive a legal lashing from a Federal judge? Are we to believe that she would do so because an administration which she may not have voted for “manipulated intelligence information”, or “lied about and fabricated said intelligence information”?

I hope you’ll not take it too amiss if I say that I find this line of reasoning – particularly when wholly unsupported (although hopefully that is only a temporary situation) by any evidence, to be a trifle strained.

Every administration since JFK has used the NSA in this fashion, so what should we do with past Presidents Ford, Carter, Bush I and Clinton for doing the exact same thing???????

You can do whatever you want with the first 3. I'll handle Billy.

Gentlefolk,

Not only is it not wrong for a country to engage in intelligence gathering, not only is it necessary and normal, but it is a correct and proper activity of a democratic government. Intelligence gathering and espionage (obtaining secret or confidential information about a country, organization, or society without permission), by providing a national government with additional information on which to act, increases the security of the citizens.

There is no issue of Americans being superior, equal to, or inferior to citizens of any other country. The United States gathers intelligence – spies on if you prefer – the UK, which does the same to France, which does the same to Morocco, which gathers intelligence on Egypt which spies on Malaysia, whose agents attempt to find out what Australia is doing, which has a surveillance program on Indonesia, etc, etc, etc.

Here is a link to a list of over 70 countries with intelligence gathering agencies. Note the names of the first five entries in the list.

Who among us would have prohibited U.S. intelligence organizations from gathering information which could have prevented 9/11? Who among us would have prohibited British intelligence organizations from gathering the information which did prevent the bombings of the U.S. bound flights from the U.K.?

Without a doubt, the world would be a more dangerous place were it not for the intelligence gathering organs of the various sovereign nations uncovering the plans that each has for the other and in so doing preventing the more malicious plans.

this was on our news service today :-
Who’s listening in on the telephone? The latest figures on federal telephone bugging warrants show that 8969 have been issued in the three years to June 2005, with 2889 being granted in 2004-05. With some warrants covering more than 10 different telephone services and being in force for an average of more than seven weeks, that’s a lot of calls being monitored. And with 11 law enforcement agencies able to apply for interception warrants and a further five agencies able to access intercepted material, there’s also a lot of people listening.

The Aussie government listens to conversations from the USA, is that right? Every country has there own agency for listening to foriegn nations. I will say that is illiegal in the USA to listen to freindly nations communication. So we get Japan to listen to Taiwan and Taiwan to listen to the Aussies and so on. That is just the way the world works.

There was a interview shown here of a man who worked in an American owned facility here on Australian soil....and 'the voice changed blacked out man' (for fear of reprisals) informed the Aussies that that facility was a monitoring facility....it monitored all calls for keywords and sent all info collected back to the US...
"blacked out guy' also stated that most info was not passed onto Aussie officials....now that part, if true, i don't agree with......we are Allies afterall

But essentually i would say that everyone listens to everyone...

That is a gross mischaracterization of what I said.



I may be wrong here, but you seem to have taken my use of the word "cases" in the above post to be "court cases". If so, this is my fault for careless wording. In that part of the post, I should probably have written "examples", or "instances".



In these particular cases (and here, yes, these are legal cases), the actions of the federal prosecutors may be unconstitutional. We will have to see as they make their way through the court system. In the final analysis, whether or not something is unconstitutional depends on not on what the US Constitution actually says, but rather what the US supreme Court says it says.

Well, perhaps. Here is what you wrote.



Yes. No arguments there. The Legislature passes law, the Executive implements law, and the Judiciary interprets law. That is one of the reasons I’d like to see a more liberal Chief Executive, as the President nominates the Supreme Court Justices. The U.S. Constitution has never, thankfully, been carved in stone, but rather has been interpreted by seasoned jurists within the context of the United States of the time.

I was thinking perhaps that we might graph the value of the number unwarranted searches and wiretaps (the bad count) divided by the number of searches and wiretaps which had previously been approved by a federal judge (the good count) over time. If the results showed a positive trend line then we could conclude that you concerns were justified. If the trend line was flat or negative, then we could conclude that the situation was, if nothing else, less worrisome than might appear if one’s only source of information was a nearby newspaper.

To really get the goods on the current administration, what would be ideal would be to start the graph in 1997. That way, if there is a change in the slope of the graph from flat or negative to positive starting in 2000 (or thereabouts) and continuing to date, you would have a very strong indication indeed that the problem exists, and that it is unambiguously associated in time with the current occupants of the White House.

Gentlefolk,

On the general subject about the merit or value of foreign intelligence in shaping the decision making process of nations (influencing foreign policy), this item became available just today from the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“Recognizing there are significant gaps in the Intelligence Community’s Iran reporting, it goes on to recommend stepped up coverage of Iran, including enhancing human intelligence and Farsi-language capabilities and improving intelligence coordination and analysis to eliminate duplication.”

Also, on the role intelligence plays in protecting the border …

etc. etc. etc.

Would that be Pine Gap ?

they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither. ~ ben franklin