It's been a bit too long since I last posted and a lot has happened in the meantime. Most notably, this business with the NSA spying on calls by U.S. citizens without warrants. I haven't had time to really read all about the issue, but even if I did much of this would be beyond my expertise. On the surface of it all though, it seems very troubling.
I'm not an expert on FISA or on the full legal history of executive power, but this seems like an overstep. What's more, the White House seems almost excited about the possibility of picking this fight on what seems like one of the most important issues in our country: the trade-off between security and liberty.
What the Bush administration has shown over the past five years however, is nothing that would let me think that this is harmless. This is an administration that has sought executive power without end and in the wake of 9/11 has had that authority unchecked and unchallenged. It seems only inevitable that some of that hubris would backfire and would ultimately prove to be beyond basic standards of reasonableness.
It seems that these extra-judicial, post-facto warrants (or even total lack of warrants) fall into this category of the Bush administration declaring itself king and seeing what it can get away with. This is a fundamental affront to our freedoms as American citizens and to our basic liberties.
Some have argued that there is nothing wrong with these (illegal) searches because they target such and such terrorist or more infamously on Fox News and other conservative talking shops, "a guy whose phone number is in Zarqawi's cell phone". Any student of the law, or any citizen who has ever taken an interest in the rule of law that governs American society knows this to be a faulty argument from the very beginning. To argue "I'm OK with the government potentially spying on innocent people because they have nothing to hide" is the first, second and third step towards fascism. If we are to live up to the ideals that support American patriotism the rule of law must be maintained and civil liberties must not be surrendered.
Another argument in support of the FISA-less wire taps suggests our new threat from terrorism requires new powers for the president and if the legislature can't keep up in responding to the looming, never-ending threat, then the president is free to do just about anything he wants in the arena of foreign policy. This is nonsense. When is "war time"? What is war these days? When will this war ever end? The answers are not clear and the Bush administration has taken that as an invitation to gobble up as much of the constitution as possible.
Meanwhile the president and his spokesman are insisting that these powers to make dubious wire taps were authorized by, of all things, the authorization to go to war with Iraq. Considering that these wire taps were happening well before that vote occurred, this is a blatantly flawed argument. But then again, that hasn't stopped this administration before.
I don't know. There is clearly a lot we don't know about here and probably a lot that has not come out yet. The radical Hamiltonians in the White House right now seem to have forgotten Ben Franklin's famous quip:
Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
It seems those in the White House who are defending this abuse of basic constitutional rights have forgotten how quickly our liberty can disappear in the face of overzealous "defenders of security". For too long the White House has suggested that those who oppose its version of necessary security are weak on protecting America. They forget, or perhaps refuse to see, that protecting America means protecting our basic civil liberties first and foremost.
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