Letters to the Editor
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Why Legal?
Glenn asks: "But the question still remains: what changes were made that convinced Comey and Ashcroft that the program was legal?"
I thought they arranged for some tame judge or other to oversee the program in total secrecy to give it the flavor of having passed a judicial test. It could even have been one of the Supremes.
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@prunes
Oh, I know their filters are not very good. I still can't believe I didn't have the FBI visiting my company in late 2001 during the anthrax crisis. We were exchanging DNA sequence information with a group in the UK on a protein that had remarkable homology to one of the anthrax toxins. The same week, one of my scientists, who was home to work out some family matters, emailed from Iran to ask if our cultures had sporulated yet. Of course, we were culturing material for control of plant pests, but that wasn't obvious from the email itself.
The poor filters for general gathering of information doesn't prevent them being very efficient at targeted eavesdropping. Using this information in the tradition of J. Edgar Hoover to suppress adversaries is what I, and a growing number of other posters, fear.
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Going, going...
This one's so far out of the park, Glenn, it's headed for low orbit. Facts backed up with outrage. Thank you for laying it all out like this. Frontline was pre-empted last night for a local news matter, but now I must catch it when it does air.
I'm contacting a few Congresspeople today, how about everyone else?
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In Schumer We Trust?
Seems like Chuck Schumer is the only one who's mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore.
For the love of God, why oh why is there no TV media coverage of this? Is it about suppressing revolution and keeping the consumers happy?
If the media isn't gonna do anything, my only hope is people like Schumer who can lead a charge.
It's so critical that someone in the government with power is thinking like Greenwald and has the power to actually get something done.
Otherwise, the cabal gets off scot free while I get busted for driving without my seat belt: the message is that if you're rich and powerful, you're above the law, and if you're an average Joe, you're not; which is fundamentally undemocratic.
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Glenn Reynolds almost achieves an Althousian level of semi-consciousness, then reverts to a Hinderakerian vegetative state
http://instapundit.com/archives2/005216.php
May 15, 2007
I'VE SAID BEFORE that Alberto Gonzales was managing to turn John Ashcroft into a *** http://althouse.blogspot.com/2007/05/i-thought-i-had-just-witnessed-effort.html *** retrospective hero. More evidence for that proposition.
UPDATE: John Hinderaker has *** http://powerlineblog.com/archives/017649.php *** reviewed the Comey testimony and says there's less to this story than generally reported: "It's an interesting story. But, based on what we know, it is not clear that there is anything discreditable anywhere in it."
- - posted at 07:52 PM by Glenn Reynolds -
Unanswerable?
"How is this not a major scandal on the level of the greatest presidential corruption and lawbreaking scandals in our country's history?"
This is an agonizing question for me as well. I don't not have an answer, except somehow I believe part of the answer lies within the tortured comments posted by Jake007.
-- sajwan
The fact that Rudy and Mitt both got loud applause last night when they declared themselves pro-torture and Mitt wanted to double the size of Guantanamo, makes me really depressed about the future of this country. Half the troops apparently think torture's hunky dory -- perhaps half the American populace does, too. Doubt that same group would object to "spying on terrists" without a warrant.
As I said in a post last week, even many extremely liberal pacifists (aka Quakers) are not particularly riled up about this stuff. I really think we're just all too comfortable -- a classic example of butter keeping the populace calm about the guns.
We simply can't give in and surrender to the forces of darkness that have taken over this country, but, man, it is an uphill battle. Today, I'm tired.
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What we see going on in Washington
is exactly the thing that makes the United States so hated by almost all people around the world. The corruption is very well known about by a lot of people in other countries because the media censorship is not as great in other countries as it is here in this country.We are equal to China in the control of media and most Americans are uninformed for the most part about many things.
This criminality is killing our country.
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I suspect the trail leads back to Karl Rove's "plan"
We know from the AG-firing scandal that the Dept. of Justice has become nothing less than a tool of Karl Rove’s, no different than his Blackberry.
I suspect that at some point so did the NSA program, a transformation that even Ashcroft and Comey found discomfiting. There was no way for them to tie something that Rove was doing with the program to “terrorist groups” and they knew if it ever became public, there would be criminal charges filed against them. Whatever Karl was doing was somehow shifted to an “entity” no longer under the jurisdiction of the Justice Dept. – some “special operation” run secretly out of the White House.
At this point there is no specific proof that eavesdropping powers were abused, but if they had not been, then there is no reason for Ashcroft and Comey to act the way they did. Even though they did not go along with this program they are still culpable to the extent they were not forthcoming about what was going on, hence their continued silence.
As Glenn pointed out, they were operating from the premise that Gonzalez and Card were thugs not to be trusted; they know something that they cannot divulge without implicating themselves, and they don’t put anything past the criminal thug who heads the Justice Dept.
If the true extent of this scandal is ever uncovered, I expect that this was part of Rove’s plan to make the Republican Party a permanent majority party, and involves crimes against members of both parties, as well as the media. This makes the Watergate scandal look like tea with the Queen.