Condi Rice's tendency to, uh, stretch the truth aside, flying planes into buildings was not only predicted, but guarded against at the G8 meetings in Genoa.

I had forgotten about that..

Makes the Secret Service's lack of reaction at Booker elementary look even more strange.

They knew hijacked planes were a threat to POTUS and left him in that school for at least half an hour after they learned that hijacked planes were flying around the country striking high value targets.

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad." --- Aldous Huxley

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." -Franklin D. Roosevelt

Weren't the events of 9/11/2001 a political act?

This FISA/Amnesty for lawbreaking telecoms bill is simply the litmus test for me. How Democratic leaders respond to this will determine whether or not I ever give them support again. This thing really is THAT BIG! (BTW, many thanks for all the coverage on this blog) Simply put: it's retroactive legalization of outright and absolute law breaking. I mean, like, why should people pay taxes or wear seat-belts, or follow any other law if a precedent like this is being set. SHAME ON SENATOR REID!! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

I have called this (with apologies to Vaclav Havel) the Velvet Dictatorship for some years now. All of the forms of democracy are there, as long as you don't try and really change anything fundamental.

Dear Hume's Ghost - your post recalled this excerpt from "Whistleblowers: broken lives & organizational power" by C. Fred Alford (Cornell U. Press. 2001)

"What the scapegoat knows"

Let us call this whistleblower I am talking about the last man. Not Nietzche's last man, who wants nothing more than a comfortable existence, but George Orwell's last man in "1984", Winston Smith, who sacrifices everything for a little piece of "ownlife". Exposed and tortured by O'Brian, Simth is finally placed before a three-paneled mirror, the kind one finds in clothing stores so one can see if the suit fits. Pale, naked, looking like a skeleton, missing some teeth, Smith doesn't recognize himself for a moment. Says O'Brian, "If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct". The whistleblower is the last man, not just tortured, but exposed and sacrificed so that others might see what it costs to be an individual in this benighted world. ...

What if the autonomous individual exists, but the organization can not stand it, mobilizing vast resources in the service of the individual's destruction? ... Rather than assume that the individual exists, or does not, it may be more fruitful to focus on the ceremonies of his destruction. Consider the possibility that the individual destroyed is still ann individual. Indeed, the individual destroyed is the best archaeological evidence of the individual's clandestine presence in history.

To run up against the organization is to risk obliteration. In a totalitarian regime, nothing remains after one runs afoul of the organization. Before his arrest, Winston Smith's job was to alter the historical record so as to make it appear that dissidents had never been born. In a democratic society, the sacrificed individual remains. If we listen to him or her, we may learn something not just about individuality but about the forces that confront it. ...

How can we best learn from the last man? ... I think the whistleblower has as much to teach us about politics as about suffering. Or rather, it is the suffering of the whistleblower that connects these two terms. The story of the first scapegoat will tell us why [recounts Leviticus 16:21-22] ...

Think about how much the scapegoat must know. For may whistleblowers, this knowledge is like a mortal illness. ... They do not just know the sins of the tribe, they are afflicted with them. My plan has been to follow the scapegoat into the desert of his exile and there to study his affliction so that I might learn the sins of the tribe. ...

When I listen to whistleblowers, I feel awe at one who has stepped outside the skin of the world and lived to tell about it. ..Daniel Ellsberg.. said that his former friends and colleagues regarded him with neither admiration nor censure but with wonder, as though he were a space-walking astronaut who had cut his lifeline to the mother ship. What was this mother ship? Was it the academic-military-industrial complex, the system, the organization? Call it what you will, it is not so much a precise concept as an overwhelming feeling. ...

This [feeling] is so important ..because of what it tells us about the forces that hold society together and their consequences: the willingness of most people to do anything not to be sent space-walking....

To be a whistleblower is to step outside the Great Chain of Being, to join not just another religion, but another world. Sometimes this world is called the margins of society, but to the whistleblower it feels like outer space. ...

Being a whistleblower means stepping outside [society's transcendent moral] order. It is a momentous step. Most people, including the whistleblower, don't recognize it as such until the whistleblower has done it. The he or she knows what it is to go space-walking. ...

Modern society is marked by multiple centers of meaning, so that, for example, a whistleblower might turn to his or her religion to find meaning after being fired by General Motors for blowing the whistle. It's a good theory, but it does not work so well in real life. Meaning tends to follow power, and power works to discipline the whistleblower in ways that isolate him or her from alternative sources of meaning. Much may be learned by studying how this happens."

@ El Cid

But that was some stupid Stalinisto-American liberal commie surrender monkey district judge who don't know half of what those awesome chickenhawks from the NRO do.

Perhaps you've glossed over this part of your quote in your zeal to play judge, jury, and executioner?

The court also notes that based on the facts as alleged in plaintiffs’ complaint, AT&T is not entitled to qualified immunity with respect to plaintiffs’ constitutional claim

In short, all this is based on an allegation.

From Wired:

AT&T attorney Michael Kellogg (right, entering the courthouse) has taken the podium, and, not surprisingly, insists the case has to be dismissed. He says AT&T customers have no actual proof or direct knowledge that their communications were forwarded to the government without warrants.

"The government has said that whatever AT&T is doing with the government is a state secret," Kellogg says. He adds, "As a consequence, no evidence can come in whether the individuals' communications were ever accepted or whether we played any role in it." (Back at Wired, THREAT LEVEL's head just exploded --klp)

Notice what he doesn't say there - that AT&T is not doing what the plaintiffs allege. He's only saying that whatever AT&T is doing is a state secret.

That's not totally inconsistent with your contention, but it certainly isn't the most direct defense against allegations of lawless behavior, either.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/nsa-hearing-ope.html