I offer this especially to the Capitol Hill staffers and journalists who my stop by this site, and of course to you citizen journalists out there.
Knocking Down a Few Admin Lying Points
Re: Illegal Wiretaps
A couple of "through the looking glass" moments over the past couple of days on this were when Gonzales, in an interview I heard on NPR yesterday, said that the TSA doesn't need a warrant to search you at an airport, so, see, this "proves" warrantless searches are o.k. After I gathered up the bits from where my brain exploded I considered how long the howls of laughter at such an idiotic statement would have lasted in my first year law class back in the fall of '87 (we could be unkind sometimes), with this nutter comparing a person consenting to a bag search or "wanding" as a condition to boarding an airplane to illegal phone-taps.
please to continue
Of course, it
may be Gonzales' argument that by simply using a telephone in the territorial U.S.
we are all "consenting" to have our conversations monitored by the secret police without our knowledge or any Court authority. Is this so?
Exactly what is the problem, again?
Of course, the glaring (dancing, screaming, tripe-laden) flaw in their argument, not to mention disingenuous and steaming pile of sophistry, goes back to the "exingent circumstances" (a.k.a. "fleeing felon" or "hot pursuit") -ish argument: basically, that if they had to "take the time" to go through the FISA Court, the bad guys would "get away"; ignoring what's been pointed out about 3,589,028,715,957 times: that they can monitor-
away and then, within 3 days after the fact, get a FISA-compliant warrant. I've yet to hear Gonzales, Cheney, Hayden, or Bush address this. Am I missing something?
Last, and sort of tied-in with the previous point: has anyone besides me noticed the 180-degree turn that the apologists have made over the past 7-or-so days on the scope of this thing, especially as it relates to the justification for the illegal, warrantless, in-country communications monitoring? If I recall correctly, just two or three weeks ago, when this thing broke, apologists fanned-out across the airwaves to argue that because of new "data-mining" technology, software, wherein literally millions of calls could be monitored and, then, like and inverted pyramid, be narrowed-down, and narrowed-down to simply thousands or hundreds of calls to be really, really scrutinized, the "old laws" were simply impractical and unworkable (of course, having Congress pass "new laws", what Scalia always advocates, unless he doesn't like the "new laws", never really occured to them; a passing fancy, at most). Thus the need to blow-off the "old laws". Kind of like blowing off "Old Europe", except illegal, and not just stupid.
Funny thing, when it began to sink-into the public psyche, the notion that gov't agents were illegally monitoring or "data mining" thousands or millions of calls -- and poll numbers started showing 50+ % of Americans saying Congress should consider impeaching Bush if such illegalities were, indeed, occuring -- that argument (that "old laws" can't keep-up with the monitoring-and-data-mining- thousands-or-millions-of-calls technology) has been quickly tossed down the Memory Hole and the new "word on the street" is that there have been very few monitored calls and all of them have been between "known" Al Qaida operatives
and there compatriots in the U.S. Which, of course, beggers the question: so why not go through the FISA Court for a warrant?
Do not adjust your brain. There is nothing wrong with your logic. The "technical difficulties" lie (heh) totally on the Administration's side of the transmission.
Make no mistake, they're purposefully muddying the waters. Don't let them. There's a clear law. It's been egregiously and unapologetically violated. A high crime.
BenGoshi
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