Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
You got to be Kidding
I could give a rats if Bush is spying on supposedly tainted individuals. As long as he keeps me and my family safe all I can say is keep up the good work....
In other words, "go ahead and take my civil liberties...I wasn't using them anyway."
"Supposedly tainted individuals"...that's a strange choice of words. Would you care to be more specific? Because there really isn't a lot of difference between "supposedly tainted individuals" and "no n-----s on the streets after sundown."
(But- if an actual investigator could be more specific, all these new high-tech surveillance powers wouldn't be required. They'd get a warrant instead.)
Data mining doesn't target "tainted individuals"- or "supposedly tainted individuals"...it targets everyone. It can tell someone when your home can be burglarized or vandalized without fear of discovery. It can tell someone where you can be assaulted, kidnapped, or killed without discovery. It can make it easy to frame you for a crime.
My personal guess is that one of the top targets of such surveillance techniques would be some of the investigators themselves- particularly those who are looking into "sensitive areas" like government misconduct, corruption, collusion with drug traffickers, unauthorized weapons transfers, etc. The ones whose conscience and honesty might outweigh their "loyalty." Whistleblowing types.
In the hierarchy of a bureaucracy, nothing stops the people at the top from using such wide-ranging powers in ways that ordinary decent citizens find difficult to even imagine.
I realize that naifs like "bernbart" find it easy to reassure themselves that there's no danger, because government employees are so inherently incompetent. Bernbart needs to read some more history, and see how data collation worked for the Argentine junta, and the East German Stasi, and modern-day Communocapitalist China. It works all too well.
fbair1, there's no difference- NONE- between your position, and that of someone who supports the repeal of the Second Amendment or gun confiscation- because they don't own a firearm, don't know anyone who does, and the only time they ever hears about them being used, it's by criminals. And they sing the same lullabye to themselves- "As long as the all-powerful government keeps me and my family safe..."
Yes, I corrected your quote, which makes you sound like a little child talking about their Daddy- "As long as he keeps me and my family safe..." like Bush is Superman, or something...
While I'm on this topic, I'm sick and tired of so-called "patriots" who keep demanding evidence of how these newly granted powers have been abused. The point after the abuses start happening is no time to demand your rights back.
"Imagine a boot stamping on the human face- forever..." George Orwell
A generation of frustrated aspirations has led many citizens to separate themselves from the formal sytem of power and dwell in rigtheous isolation, comtemptuous of all traditional ways of connecting with governement. They no longer believe in elections as an effective lever of power for citizens. They mistrust the elaborate mchinery of governing. Many no longer believe that federal legislation ifself makes much difference; they have seen too many reform laws eviscerated by the powerful economic interest. Cut off from the real decisions, lacking the resources to compete with the insiders, citizens at the community level lose contact with the content of public issues they care about and, as a consequence, their politcal activism sometimes loses coherence and enery. To overcome this many have develped their own bluntly pratical strategies for how to do politics--rough and direct confrontions with power.
I fail to see how the NSA targeting a few thousand extremists dreaming of another 9/11 is any more intrusive than the IRS data mining virtually every financial transaction of every American to ensure Fido isn't being claimed as a dependent.
There's nothing 'historic' at all about Bush's supposed shredding of the constitution.
The Bush administration locked up 800 or so Al Qaeda in Gitmo without benefit of habeas corpus. On the other hand, the Roosevelt administration locked up 140,000 Japanese-Americans and 400,000 Wehrmacht and Waffen SS without benefit of habeas corpus, the latter apparently entitled to it according to the Boumedienne decision. And while the Gitmo prisoners received personal Korans for spiritual guidance, I'm sure those poor Wehrmacht and Waffen SS inmates didn't get so much as one copy of Mein Kampf to share.
You Salonistas wet dreaming about a Watergate II ought to remember one difference. Watergate was about snooping on the opposition party to win an election. Bushco 'constitution-shredding' is about snooping on foreign extremists to avert more 9/11s. Think a few more chess moves ahead and imagine what the blowback will be like if, during a prosecution of Bushco for constitution-shredding, a bunch of warrantless-wiretapping candidates and Gitmo alumni pull off another, bigger and better 9/11. Administering the blowback will be the most fun Republicans will have had since tar and feathers went out of style.
The Nazi solders of WWII were POWs and had legal status and rights, not "enemy combatants" held outside of the law with no rights. The Japanese internments durning WWII are an inexcusable blemish on the history of the US, but they were not tortured and were allowed to return home after hostilities had ceased.
Your comparisons are too weak to hold water, even if you are so sure about what the SS did and didn't get as prisoners of war.
And while you are busy dreaming of a bigger and better 9/11, everybody else is wondering what Bush is doing behind his veil of secrecy, he quite openly says he is not bound by laws and really could be up to anything. And what has come out through the cracks does not look very good. You might trust him, but I do not and I should not have to.
So, we have more important things to worry about then your fevered dreams of going all Gitmo on American progressives. Take your bad comparisons elsewhere.
There's nothing 'historic' at all about Bush's supposed shredding of the constitution
If Bush hasn't quite managed to shred the Constitution yet, it isn't for want of trying. He's explicitly demanded that he have the unchecked personal power to apprehend and detain American citizens, with no authority required other than his signature, or that of one of his "deputized agents."
Bushco 'constitution-shredding' is about snooping on foreign extremists to avert more 9/11s.
I'll repeat my challenge to those adhering to this explanation: lay out in detail exactly what the post-9/11 era surveillance-without-warrant powers would have been able to accomplish to prevent the attacks, that ordinary coordination of effort and an average 1990s computer-savvy level of technological competence prior to the present-day Permanent State of Emergency couldn't have accomplished just as easily.
I've long since grown impatient with the dismal, teevee-level depth of knowledge evinced by the general run of Bush apologists I've encountered. However, I'm not going to go back into my letter archive to hog bandwidth by cutting and pasting the posts laying out the evidence supporting my points. They can be easily perused by anyone, with minimal effort, in about an hour's time. You want to make an argument against my position, refer to them first, along with the references offered in support. I have better things to do than reprint my posts for people with their eyes squeezed shut.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
