More Government Fingers
June 23, 2006
Fellow blogger, Don Singleton, talks about the NY Times article that exposes another secrete plot by the U.S. government to strip your rights away. Sorry, I went into my “George Bush is evil” mode there for a second. You can tell people that the targets are people with suspected terror ties, but it doesn’t matter. A closed mind will remain that way, no matter what.
And who know, this program may stop things like this. I’m sure that $6 million was for his mom and dad.
Technorati Tags: War On Terror, al-Qaeda, New York Times, George W. Bush
Posted in Christopher Lee, George W. Bush, In The News, War On Terror
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June 23rd, 2006 at 12:39 pm
I’m open minded.
Please explain to me why it’s okay to look at the records of suspected terrorist without a warrant? Is it just that the warrant requirement is not necessary for any criminal?
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:00 pm
It may have been for his mom and dad. The important thing is what were Mom and Dad going to do with it.
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Don, why do you think it’s okay to circumvent warrant requirements?
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Meg, the NYT article admitted “The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.”, and the Bush administration has said all along that they were cooperating with other governments to choke off funds for the terrorists.
And the International Emergency Economic Powers Act gives the president what legal experts say is broad authority to “investigate, regulate or prohibit” foreign transactions in responding to “an unusual and extraordinary threat.”
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:26 pm
I am concerned about circumventing warrant requirements on domestic matters, however after seeing this I might even be willing to see some legislation that would make it easier to track domestic transers.
We are involved in a war, and I am not talking just about Iraq, which is one major battlefield in that war, but the war that the recent Hamas video said We will rule the nations, by Allah’s will, the USA will be conquered, Israel will be conquered, Rome and Britain will be conquered.. It is a war that will be going on for a long time, and because we are such an open society there will be more and more cells formed inside the USA that need to be tracked.
Being nice to them will not help. As the recent Pew poll showed 63% of all Britons had a favourable opinion of Muslims, down slightly from 67% in 2004, suggesting last year’s London bombings did not trigger a significant rise in prejudice, yet British Muslims represented a “notable exception” in Europe, with far more negative views of westerners than Islamic minorities elsewhere on the continent.
June 23rd, 2006 at 4:21 pm
You are right that we are at war Don. And the president can act under extraordinary circumstances. But, since terrorism in the US has been around since the very beginning (Tea anyone?), should the government be able to use powers reserved for extraordinary times until we have defeated something that has existed for hundreds of years? Where is the limit? Have you read 1984? Remember how the excuse for violating rights was a perpetual war?
June 23rd, 2006 at 5:11 pm
I certainly would not equate the Boston Tea Party, which only destroyed property of rich men in England, with people that fly airplanes into buildings, or strap on explosive vests to kill themselves and innocent men, women, and children, often of their own faith.
Yes I read 1984, and don’t see the current situation as being anything like that book. Big Brother is not listening to your phone calls, unless you are calling certain numbers overseas, and he is not privy to your bank transactions, unless you are sending money overseas.
June 23rd, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Don, I’m equating the Boston tea party and other things that occurred during the revolution with terrorism in general. Of course it’s not all like 9-11, but what does that have to do with anything? We are fighting a war on terror not on 9-11, right?
And of course what’s happening now is not nearly as bad as 1984, the question was whether you remember what the governments justification was in 1984, because that is exactly like today.
I’ll make the question clear this time, so you don’t get distracted tempted to start drawing false distinctions: How can we be expected to give up our liberties for a war that seemingly has no end?
June 23rd, 2006 at 11:47 pm
Who was “terrorised” when colonists dressed up like Indians and threw tea into the river? The fish, that did not like tea? The owner of the tea, who was over in England?
It is called a War on Terror, but it really is a war on Radical Islam, and terrorism is the tactic they are using, because they know that if the Muslim Army faced the American Army on the battlefield, we would crush them.
But they have no intention of stopping launching terrorist attacks; their goal is a world wide caliphate, and if you think your liberties are lost now, just think what it would be like to live as a dhimmi under Sharia Law . It is a lot worse than paying a jizya .
June 24th, 2006 at 4:31 am
Sarcasm alert.
This man was such a terrorist that he was given 5 years probation and had his citizenship revoked. I am scared now. He did evil things like take money out of a bank and sent it overseas but we do not know how much because he cashed checks for his friends. He avoided the 10K financial disclosure, oooh, scary for sure.
And we do not need a warrant to investigate this man because we have to act quickly to stop him. Yes, sir. Ranks right up there with Timothy McVeigh and nineteen hijackers who trained to fly airplanes into buildings and trained in terrorist camps in Afghanistan. End sarcasm.
To catch a guy like this, I am supposed to give up my freedom from government oversight? I am supposed to give up my privacy so this guy can get 5 years probation?
Baloney.
June 24th, 2006 at 5:59 am
The Knucklehead of the Day award
Today’s winner is the New York York Times and its Executive editor Bill Keller.
June 24th, 2006 at 8:53 am
It’s almost as if these papers want the U.S. to be attacked again. They keep telling everyone how the war is being fought under the guise of “public interest”. They find a way to track down these animals then all of a sudden some dumbass leaks it and they have to start all over again. You know, if the NY Times of today were around in the 40’s I bet they would have published the Navajo code.
June 24th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Don,
I’ll make the question clear this time, so you don’t get distracted or tempted to start drawing false distinctions: How can we be expected to give up our liberties for a war that seemingly has no end?
Indian Chris,
Do you seriously think that a paper in New York City wants America to be attacked again? Is that the best theory you can come up with? People want to see their fellow citizens murdered?
Dale, Great Point!
June 24th, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Meg, read the comment again. Almost. That doesn’t mean they do, it means they make it seem that way.
June 24th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Meg How can we be expected to give up our liberties for a war that seemingly has no end?
I would not propose giving up important liberties just because I thought that a war would be short.
However I do not see that you are being asked to give up important liberties, unless you are a trator to this country, and are conspiring to see it destroyed.
Note, I do not suggest you are a trator. I said that only if you were, would you need to fear your liberties were threatened.
The Terrorist Surveilance Program only listens into international phone calls involving suspected terrorists. If you are making domestic phone calls, even to terrorists, they are not going to be overheard, unless a court issued a warrent. If you do a wire transfer and send Greta some money, with both of you in this country, that transaction will not go through the SWIFT database.
June 24th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
Thomas Jefferson
What good are your rights when you and millions of others are dead?
Indian Chris
If the government’s able to get information, without a warrant, and are able to stop a terror attack with it… good. I don’t care how they get it, just that they do.
June 25th, 2006 at 7:00 am
Indian Chris, you are a danger to America and the principles this country was founded upon. Your personal standards for freedom are too low.
Freedom from government is what this country is all about. Not freedom to play video games or go to the movies.
The actions of the federal governmet to spy upon people who have done nothing wrong, are not suspected of a crime, and are only going about their daily lives is wrong. We have 200 years of history based upon the belief that governmental powers over people should be limited. Why would you want to change that now?
What if the actions of the government DO NOT stop a terror attack? Are you against those actions then?
The US government has held American citizens without trial, searched our homes, tapped our phone lines, purloined our financial information, kidnapped people and used torture to further its ends.
Exactly how many bullets have to be fired before you see a smoking gun?
Our role, the role of citizens, is to make darn sure that gun is not pointed at us and the trigger is not pulled.
And DonS, your litmus test for patriotism appears to be “give up your rights or you are a traitor”. The technique for determining if you were a witch was to immerse you in water. If you drowned, you were not a witch.
Perhaps your patriotism test is like that. (Give up all the things that make you an American to prove you’re an American?)
No one is opposed to surveilling the bad guys. But you have to prove somebody is bad, or at least suspect they are bad, before you surveill them. And you have to explain it all to a judge who is schooled and experienced in the law to prove to America that you are doing the right thing. What is so hard about this?
If all you want from life is a job, paycheck, kids, and a house, then you can have that in any abysmal foreign totalitarian country. If you want freedom FROM the government watching your every move, you must have standards that say ” I will not live my life with the government knowing what I buy, what I sell, who I meet with, who I talk to, where I go, and what I do.”
Inidan Chris and others: Are you so unimportant that keeping your private life private has no value to you? Is it okay with you that your local policeman knows what your wife bought at Victoria’s Secrets? Should the mayor of your town know that you gave $10,000 to your sister to pay for her breast implants? Whose business is it that your brother told his best friend that he wanted to study communism or socialism to learn what it was about? Whose business is it that your mother gave $500 to the Pakistan Islamic earthquake relief fund because she wanted to? Who needs to know that your older brother is in jail? Or perhaps that your sister was raped?
Think seriously about what you wish to keep private; and by private, I mean that you have control over who possesses this knowledge about you.
Why should the city, state, or federal government know these things about you if you are not a danger to society?
June 25th, 2006 at 9:27 am
Dale, a dirty bomb has just went off in Houston killing 2 million innocent men, women and children, but by God, the government isn’t tapping your phone. And that’s the important thing, isn’t it?
I’ve made it very clear in the past that if it comes down to saving millions of people or the Constitution of the United States, I’m picking the people. And the examples you gave about the mayor knowing about my sisters breast implants and such are just plain stupid and have absolutely no relevance. But if someone is making a lot of calls to Pakistan or sending a bunch of money to Syria I want the government to take a closer look at them. Which is exactly what they’re trying to do.
June 25th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Oddly, the Clinton administration found this type of program to be perfectly legal, though they didn’t use it because they felt it might bother in the international banking community.
June 25th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Dale, you said your litmus test for patriotism appears to be “give up your rights or you are a traitorâ€
Where did I say that???
I said However I do not see that you are being asked to give up important liberties, unless you are a traitor to this country, and are conspiring to see it destroyed.
Note, I do not suggest you are a traitor. I said that only if you were, would you need to fear your liberties were threatened.
Give up all the things that make you an American to prove you’re an American?
No it is more like accept the fact that an American citizen that has decided to betray his country may not be afforded all of the protections that you and I enjoy, but it is necessary so that you and I can continue to enjoy what it means to be an American, rather than living as a dhimmi under Sharia Law , paying a jizya just to be allowed to live.
June 26th, 2006 at 6:43 am
Sorry DonS , I misread your comment. My apology.
But to clarify, The loss of protections to the American you describe above would occur after going to the judge and getting a warrant that would curtail some of those protections. Is that correct? Not a blanket approach to sneak and peek into your life as decided by an agency,but only by judicial review.
June 26th, 2006 at 8:01 am
IC,
Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
This is a quote by Franklin, not Jefferson.
Also, you don’t understand the quote. The quote means that people shouldn’t give up rights for security. This quote is the opposite of what you think.
Don,
“However I do not see that you are being asked to give up important liberties, unless you are a traitor to this country, and are conspiring to see it destroyed.”
Okay, well at least you are saying that the warrant requirement is an important one, at least I think you are.
Do you really believe that the only people who have had their warrant liberty infringed are traitors to the country? What if I were to find something, or it were to come out that perfectly innocent people are being monitored without a warrant?
June 26th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Meg, I understand his quote very clearly and I disagree. I happen to think the lives of millions of people trumps your right to privacy. You may not agree, but that’s you.
June 26th, 2006 at 9:34 am
IC,
Of course I agree that the lives of millions of people trumps my right to privacy. However, that’s not the choice we are faced with. That’s what the quote is all about. Giving up privacy doesn’t save millions of people’s lives. If it did, you might have a better argument.
What about this, millions of people die each year, because they are too heavy. We could save millions of lives by only allowing people to sell healthy food. Should the government invade people’s private dinner table and stop allowing people to eat junk food? It would save millions of lives. Do you think your right to eat twinkies (or your poison of choise) is more important that millions of people’s lives?
June 26th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Meg and Dale
You both seem to want to go and get a warrent (presumably from FISA) before doing something. The President and the AG have both made it clear that it takes several weeks to put together all of the information required to request a FISA warrent. If someone that they have determined in a foreign country is a probable Al Qaeda contact calls someone in the US, or is called by someone in the US, they need to listen to that call NOW.
Your rights are not being affected at all, unless you are calling, or being called by someone from overseas that they have reason to believe is connected to Al Qaeda. If you call Aunt Mabel to see how her trip to Germany is going, they are not going to listen in on that call.
Meg
What if I were to find something, or it were to come out that perfectly innocent people are being monitored without a warrant?
Since you say IF, I presume that means you have not found something, or it has not come out that perfectly innocent people are being monitored without a warrent.
That is good. We know that perfectly evil people are being monitored, and that some perfectly outrageous plans to hurt innocent people in this country have been stopped, and those who would have the Terrorist Surveilance Program stopped (and therefore I presume would accept the deaths of the innocent people that were saved because the evil plots were intercepted), are left to say “but what if we found an innocent person was being monitored”
If you found that innocent people were being monitored, then I would suggest a balancing test: how many innocent people were monitored, and how much were they hurt by that monitoring, balanced with how many terrorist plots were foiled, and how many innocent people would have been killed if they had not been foiled, and how much are their deaths worth, compared to the hurt done by the monitoring of the innocents (that right now we are not even sure are being hurt).
Meg
I don’t happen to like twinkies, but it is true, I am morbily obese. However my weight is only affecting my life and my lifestyle. Millions of people are not being affected in any way, just because I am fat
Also even if they only sold “healthy food”, I still might be fat (if I ate too much of it)
June 26th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Dale, You are a great American. Seriously. I’m so glad there are people like you out there who are pointing out that the Emperor, in fact, has no clothes.
Don,
Millions of people are effected by our government allowing stores to sell junk. Why should our right of privacy to eat what we want rise above millions of lives?
Once the government has what it needs it does not take weeks to get a warrant. There are literally thousands of judges that can give one at any time. The governments’s problem is that they don’t usually have enough to get a warrant. You have to have more than a suspicion for a warrant, and it seems pretty clear they are monitoring calls just on suspicion.
Your balancing test is scary. As long as we claim “millions” of people will die if we aren’t searched illegally, how would the balance ever weigh in favor of privacy?
June 26th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
Meg my balancing test only applies if innocent people are being monitored (something you have not shown). And I was not the one to introduce the expression “millions of people”; that was you seeking to justify governmental interference in obesity.
It is true that if they have probable cause they can get a warrent easily, and they don’t have that probable cause. I have no problem with requiring probable cause to monitor domestic phone calls, or domestic money transfers.
The terrorist surveilance program and the SWIFT money transfer tracking involves international phone calls and international money transfers, and I am happy to have the government surveiling them, particularly when they just focus on transactions involving suspected terrorists
June 26th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
There are a lot of Administration lies out there about the FISA courts. it would take a long post to go thru them. I encourage you to read Glenn Greenwalds book: How Would a Patriot Act? It is only about $15 and will tell you what is wrong with warrantless suveillance and the Patriot Act.
IC , you are missing the point about surveillance. No one is saying that the information they collect on you has any relevance to terrorists. In fact it does not. They just keep it , in case they need to come for you someday.
We all need to stop thinking that this is all about terrorists. It is all about you and the governments knowledge of you.
Perhaps it is acceptable to you. Not to me.
You can be afraid if you want. But be afraid of all governments , not just the foreign ones.
June 26th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
By the way, the surveillance program monitors Americans , too. Thousands of them, many are muslims but many are not . They are all innocent until indicted and tried in court.
June 27th, 2006 at 8:31 am
IC Introduced “millions.”
What so you say to the obesity example? Or are you putting your right to privacy above the lives of millions?
Here are some innocent people who were monitered, http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06
June 27th, 2006 at 9:39 am
Meg, the government’s already got their fingers in our eating habits. Have you not been paying attention to the stories about them taking snack machines out of schools and such. Have you heard me complain?
June 27th, 2006 at 9:53 am
So then IC you agree that the government should be able to regulate what we eat; after all it kills millions each year?
June 27th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Dale said No one is saying that the information they collect on you has any relevance to terrorists. In fact it does not. They just keep it, in case they need to come for you someday.
And your proof for that is…..
By the way, the surveillance program monitors Americans , too. Thousands of them, many are muslims but many are not
Who are the others that are talking to the terrorists overseas? New York Time Reporters? Why do they waste the phone call? They tell the terrorists all our secrets just by printing them on the front page.
They are all innocent until indicted and tried in court.
And will all be convicted then?
June 27th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Meg What so you say to the obesity example? Or are you putting your right to privacy above the lives of millions?
On June 26th, 2006 at 11:33 am I said I don’t happen to like twinkies, but it is true, I am morbily obese. However my weight is only affecting my life and my lifestyle. Millions of people are not being affected in any way, just because I am fat. Also even if they only sold “healthy foodâ€, I still might be fat (if I ate too much of it)
If that does not answer your “obesity question” restate it.
I find the article about paying off a credit card to be very suspicious. The amount was not over $10K, which is where the government gets involved, and it is not clear that it involves international commerce (interstate, prehaps, but not international). I wonder if it was not the credit card company that raised the red flag because they were upset at not being able to charge the guy interest on the balance.
June 27th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
Here it is restated: Why is okay for the government to infringe liberties in the fight on terror, which may kill a few thousand people, but not okay for them to infringe liberties in to fight obesity, which WILL kill millions this year alone.
June 27th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
The War
on Terroragainst Islamofascism is protecting us from an outside threat that will kill people who have done nothing to put themselves at risk, other than living in this country.Obesity kills people who eat too much, fail to diet, and who get too little exercise (and that is coming from someone who is morbidly obese despite over 100 pounds (about half of which was excess water, but about half of which was fat).
The preamble to the Constitution states We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Fighting obesity does not fall under “promote the general welfare” LaRouche wrote, adding that, “Only sovereign government has the means to promote the conditions of the general welfare respecting all of the people and all of the land-area, both for the living and future generations,” and that thus, the existence of such sovereign nation-state republics is shown to be “the morally required condition of mankind.” This stands in opposition to those forms of oligarchical rule, in which the government is the private property of a ruling oligarchy, either a feudalistic, landed oligarchy, or a financier oligarchy of the sort that the British monarchy represents today. In such cases, governments exist to preserve the power and wealth of such oligarchies, and not to promote the general welfare of all citizens.
March 29th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
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