“The thought also applies to the current situation within the CIA re: the threat of prosecutions for doing one’s job in a manner considered politically incorrect by the Powers That Be”

Yes, I’m quite sure the prospect of being prosecuted for torturing people might deter CIA members from torturing people. Not prosecuting criminals because that might deter crime isn’t really policy at the Justice Department.

“For CIA resignations, search for ‘cia resignations’. Lots of hits. Material for a whole article there.”

You’ve made the only intelligence suggestion on this board. I just went into yahoo and typed “CIA resignations” – the first fifty hits are almost all from 2004 (with a couple 2006 and 2005), and the only thing even close to Bill’s article here was a random guy on Yahoo Answers asking “Should CIA leaders resign en masse?” because they’re being threatened with “oversight” (CIA answering to the government? Anything but that!) Not a thing about mass resignations since Obama took office, let alone anything written by actual CIA members. Which makes it that much funnier that the Pajamahideen insist on continuing to get their news from Billy Whittle alone and furiously demand PROOF from detractors when their own beliefs can be disproven by something as simple as a Yahoo search.

Bill has written some great essays, and even though I agree with parts of it, i don’t agree with this one wholeheartedly. That said, I don’t know why he’s bothering with Mary. She is way out of touch with reality.

And being locked up is not the same as torture. It does, however, beat a summary execution on the battlefield.

And not having transparency (i.e. putting everything in public, including information about the information sources and methods utilized to interdict terrorists) is not the same as having inadequate checks and balances. It is, instead, prudence that does away with the folly of 20th-century conventional wisdom that gave us an emasculated CIA and the Gorelick Wall.

And many of those “innocent” people we have released from Gitmo have RETURNED to active terrorism afterwards.

We do know for a fact that there have been innocent people locked up at Gitmo.

Funny, I don’t remember saying “crushed our rights” or “ruined our nation,” however regarding rights being infringed by the PATRIOT Act, evidence has in fact already been provided right here. But people like you are apparently so blind, or dismiss it so quickly out of hand, that you say “zero evidence”. And you accuse me of rambling, ranting, raving, and foaming.

@waltj: “Excuse me for asking, Hans, but what planet are you from?”

Apparently the planet of beings with eyesight, which is not in the galaxy of deniers. Not theoretical, not what-if. See above.

Regarding the freedom to speak, I’ll remind you that anyone who even questioned the actions of W’s administration after 9/11 was in fact subject to “the vilest forms of personal invective and attack”, to borrow your words, as being anti-American, non-patriotic, and supporting the enemy. The attackers apparently had no idea of the principles this country was founded on.

My point to Bill is simply that just because he has not heard of something, except once which he dismisses, is not (even close to) proof that it does not exist. I could make the claim that I have never seen anyone killed by a gun, therefore guns are not deadly. This is simply foolish logic.

So, seeing how popular GWB was with the scribbling and chattering classes, we could count on them to hide any rights violations under the Patriot Act, right? Excuse me for asking, Hans, but what planet are you from? You clearly don’t spend much time in this part of the galaxy. On the contrary, if those violations you infer had in fact occurred, the press, CAIR, the ACLU, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the UN would have trumpeting it in six-inch headlines from every newspaper, as the lead story in TV news shows, as the theme for a series of box-office flops, and in endless Congressional investigations, especially post-2006 elections. But as usual, the left has nothing but theoretical, “what if?” cases to present. But I will grant you this: I’m a lot more worried now, that we have a president who seems to have a Nixonian enemies list, than I was under W’s administration, where, despite the vilest forms of personal invective and attack against it, freedom of speech was never abridged or restricted.

Seems like absence of evidence is simply NOT evidence. All the people ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth about how the Patriot Act has “crushed our rights” or, more amusingly, “ruined out nation” provide absolutely zero evidence to back this up. Which is amusing, because the ones who consider themselves most ‘logical’ in their attempts to do so make the obvious fallacy of expecting the defenders of it to prove a negative.

Sorry guys, you have to give examples and not just ramblings.

In any event, we’ve seen what the lack of an effective Intelligence immune system results in.