Please! I INVITE comment on this!
05/10/06
The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly!
James Brown intro fading out...
O'Reilly: Ok, um, is the government spying on you? The USA Today newspaper has a big article today uh, perfectly timed to ruin the nomination of Gen Michael Hayden to run the CIA. I mean it's pretty funny, my colleagues in the press, and what, I might've run this article too, so I'm not excoriating USA today, but it's so obvious you know, that uh, these leaks are timed to damage political opponents we all know that. So it's we are going to talk about the merits of this, are you being spied on, is the government trying to listen to your conversations on the telephone, all of that.
You know I take this with a healthy dose of skepticism myself because I don't know anybody, I've never gotten an email, or a phone call from any American anywhere at any time that says the government's intruding on their privacy ever. And believe me I get emails all day long from everybody everywhere, thousands of `em, and not one person has ever said to me: "The government's snooping around violating my uh, privacy, and I've never read that anywhere, never seen any American make that accusation ever anywhere at anytime. Period. And Lis Wiehl will talk about it...
Wiehl: How would you know? You'd, you would have no idea because, if you're being spied on, hey, that's the whole point of being spied on, you don't know.
O'Reilly: Okay, alright. That's, that's not a bad point. I wouldn't know if somebody was listening to my conversations. I wouldn't know that. So that's not a bad point. But, if someone was arrested, or they were dragged in for questioning, based upon somebody eavesdropping then you would know. Got it? Got it?
Wiehl: Except you say: "I would've relied on other information." You don't give up the eavesdropping information.
O'Reilly: Still on the paper! It's still, and there hasn't been anything, we haven't found anything not one thing in the whole war on terror, the whole post-9/11 period of any American, under the Patriot Act or anywhere else, having their privacy violated. And if you know of any you find'em Lis, but you don't."
O'Reilly: Minneapolis Minnesota Les is in the No-Spin Zone. What's going on Les?
Les: Hey how are you doing Bill?
O'Reilly: Good.
Les: Hey first of all, I want to talk about the wiretapping issue um, I agree with your point that, you know, that government needs to do their job and whatever it takes to defend us but, I think is with corporations so ingrained in Washington what's to stop them when there's no checks and balances from using the wiretapping to spy on say Exxon, or spy on some other company or something like that ...
O'Reilly: Well ... what's to stop them is you go to jail. I mean there's a case in Los Angeles right now where a private detective Anthony Pelicano, uh, who was hired by a bunch of Hollywood stars to spy on their wives and husbands and do all that stuff did wiretap, and they found out. And now this guy's facing hard time, I mean he's going away for a long, long, time. So that's what I'm saying. If there's evidence of anybody misusing any privacy of any person, I am gonna be the first one, first one, to come down on whoever does that. But, you just cannot operate in this hysterical climate, where everyday the press is another ridiculous challenge to something that is just logical. Yeah, we want to know if call patterns are going into an area that we feel there is a terrorist cell operating, I mean anybody would do that. Anybody in the spy business would do that.