Ironically today's bizarre rant in the New York Post provided the best argument to date for checks and balances on domestic spying. Former intelligence officer Ralph Peters demonstated today, through his own paranoid hysteria, why we need checks on executive power.
If the wiretaps were limited simply to foreign callers that would be questionable enough however we would not have anywhere near the concern we now have. The reason we don't want the executive to have unlimited discretion is because the "enemy" suddenly start expanding.
If the McCarthy's and Hoover's restricted themselves to known enemies and threats they would be rather limited. However the enemy lists start growing in their own brainsets and shortly everybody is the enemy. The most famous example would be Hoover's tap on Martin Luther King. It was the self-induced paranoia that found everyone a threat. In Peter's oped he quickly expands his list of who his "enemies" are to include whistleblowers and of course Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi. Ironically, he seems to have no problem when conservatives such as Bob Barr object to the same thing.
It is Peter's, who identifies himself as an intelligence agent, that shows the greatest reason why unchecked wiretaps are so bad. If Peters, a trained intelligence agent, can not distinguish between Osama Bin Laden and Nancy Pelosi, then why should we grant unlimited power to the rest of the intelligence community.