what it will demonstrate is that the Bush administration warrantless surveillance and data mining programs were ineffective at deterring the success of the terrorists.

The notion that reining in such a program in July would conceivably open up a gap that a terrorist group could manage to exploit within a matter of months is untenable.

For one thing, the return to imposing limits on wiretapping and surveillance in no way equates to the wholesale abandonment of wiretapping and surveillance. For another, any proposed terror attack would have to have most of its planning and elements in place prior to a July 2008 re-enactment of limits- and any such plan would undoubtedly have exploited one of the numerous gaps available once one resorts to alternative means of communication other than phone calls or text messages.

Once the agents and equipment are in place waiting for a final signal- and they would need to be, in order to pull off a large-scale terror act by November- all of the remaining information required to implement a plot can be placed within the text of a classified ad in the pages of a small-town Pennysaver magazine.

Anyway, since when does "suicide terror" even require a plot? There are all sorts of ways for a lone killer to kill hundreds of people, either in a single explosive outburst of violence, or more stealthily- especially if they welcome the outcome of their own death. I could lay out several methods in the span of about 30 minutes- none of which require "WMDs" or complicated, expensive technologies.

in the message above: for "placed", read "encoded"...

Actually, I think of it as more of an obligation.

If humans are nothing more than a sociobiological construction- just another animal, doing its thing- then nothing beats the predatory strategies of selective sociopathy, artfully and efficiently performed.

Any atheist humanists who concurrently posit the innate goodness of "biological evolutionary wisdom", or some such, are simply wimps, lying to themselves.

Either there's a divine purpose to human consciousness- (yeah, that would be "God", a universal consciousness with a perspective superior to petty human egos)- or it's all simply Power.

And if Power is the only thing that matters, only a masochist would be a "liberal", or care about "justice", or "ethics", or doing anything else except maximizing the advantage of their own DNA, and it's progeny and legacy.

Yeah, I'm a Christian. Some of you may want to read my back-catalog of letters, to see how closely it conforms with your image of what Christians are all about.

It all depends on what's being measured. That much should be a no-brainer, heh heh...

Honestly, I think that when it comes to the uniqueness of human beings, the real action is not in the material realms of biology or biochemistry. Evidently, human beings-as-organism have existed almost completely unchanged for some tens of thousands of years, in terms of the most important defining characteristics.

And humans are undeniably genetically similar to other living organisms on the planet- particularly the higher primates (although you must be joking if you can't tell the difference between Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens, notwithstanding the high percentage of genetic overlap.)

I've never heard anyone seriously argue that the leaps and bounds in human technology over the past few thousand years were associated with a concommitant genetic advance in the cortex of the brain.

But those leaps have provided us with a breadth of opportunities- and very real powers- unimaginable, and hence quite unobtainable, for other animals.

And that is unique.

Sure, baboons are quite genetically similar to us. And in a general sense, they share "tool using ability" with humans, they do pretty well at using a stick to get the ants out of an anthill...but will baboons ever find out what else sticks can be used for? How long is it going to take one to figure out more complex uses for sticks? If one ever does, will the knowledge be preserved and transmitted to the next generation? How?

As for humans being "equal" to other animals, the connotations of the word "equal" are always practical, conditional and relative. True in some ways, others not...and I think that anyone who argues for unconditional equality between humans and other animals has bitten off more than they can chew, intellectually speaking.

For instance- once that postulate is asserted, no lines can be drawn. A plague bacillus has as much right to exist as a human.

Otherwise- once one does start drawing lines, a process which favors some organisms over others, "equality" is out the window. Once you start stating preferences, you've returned to the world of anthropocentric evaluations- coupled with an expanding array of technological powers that confer considerable latitude to actually enforce those preferences, in point of fact. Powers unique in the animal kingdom, like "time-bound knowledge", which accomplishes purposes such as allowing technologies to be built on other technologies.

Also- consider that you simply can't negotiate with a plague bacillus, and come up with a proposal to "meet it halfway."

Think about it.