They Walk Among Us
Wired describes the curious situation of the Patriot Act. What does it prohibit? Government can’t exactly tell you. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the government has classified the way in which it intends to interpret certain provisions. You can’t know how government intends to implement it. Wyden says:
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”
What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can’t precisely explain without disclosing classified information. But one component of the Patriot Act in particular gives him immense pause: the so-called “business-records provision,” which empowers the FBI to get businesses, medical offices, banks and other organizations to turn over any “tangible things” it deems relevant to a security investigation.
“It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming,” Wyden says. “I know a fair amount about how it’s interpreted, and I am going to keep pushing, as I have, to get more information about how the Patriot Act is being interpreted declassified. I think the public has a right to public debate about it.”
What exactly is “it”? Whatever it is, government needs it. MSNBC reports that “minutes before a midnight deadline, President Barack Obama signed into law a four-year extension of post-Sept. 11 powers to search records and conduct roving wiretaps in pursuit of terrorists. … With Obama in France, the White House said the president used an autopen machine that holds a pen and signs his actual signature. It is only used with proper authorization of the president.”
Congress bumped up against the deadline mainly because of the stubborn resistance from a single senator, Republican freshman Rand Paul of Kentucky, who saw the terrorist-hunting powers as an abuse of privacy rights. …
The measure would add four years to the legal life of roving wiretaps — those authorized for a person rather than a communications line or device — of court-ordered searches of business records and of surveillance of non-American “lone wolf” suspects without confirmed ties to terrorist groups. …
The Obama administration says that without the three authorities the FBI might not be able to obtain information on terrorist plotting inside the U.S. and that a terrorist who communicates using different cell phones and email accounts could escape timely surveillance. …
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor Wednesday. In unusually personal criticism of a fellow senator, he warned that Paul, by blocking swift passage of the bill, “is threatening to take away the best tools we have for stopping them.”
Is Harry Reid correct in saying that the government needs these tools? How would we know? What government can do — and what they the interpret the act as allowing — is classified. Wyden wants to uncover the “secret interpretation of the law” while protecting “sources and methods”. Part of the problem Wyden may encounter is that any non-trivial disclosure of legal interpretation will allow the public to deduce a great deal about the sources and methods. In other words, if the government told us what it thought it could legally do the public could figure out how they were doing it. Wired suggests that “geolocation information” from cellphones might be an area that Patriot Act thinks ought to be accessible to government and points out that Wyden has sponsored a bill that would provide legal protections for such information. (Readers of “No Way In” may find this a familiar theme.)
But that is speculation.
While some members of the public may have been comforted by President Obama’s announced intention to fight the War on Terror as if it were a law enforcement problem, some probably realized from the beginning that bringing operations traditionally associated with war under the law-enforcement roof might hold certain dangers. The passage of the Patriot Act ought to have been a calculated risk. To rely upon it for prosecuting terrorism and institutionalize its provisions may bring more peril. Treating terrorists like criminals changes the way society treats suspects. The intention to bring KSM or OBL to trial would inevitably create the need for interpretations which would blur the distinction between the way enemies and civilian suspects are treated. Since one-size (the law enforcement size) had to fit all, you had to enlarge the shoe to fit the biggest feet.
If declaring that “America will never be at war with [this or that]” in practice means that you are in a low-intensity conflict with everyone then its benefits may be doubtful. A policy designed for the seating of supposed allies may mean that someone has to stand. The abolition of war and its replacement by concepts like R2P, kinetic military action, law enforcement and intelligence operations can ultimately backfire on Western society. Abolishing the bright line between activities of peace and belligerence may not be all its cracked up to be. For one thing, wars traditionally end. When do the activities which have now replaced it terminate? Or do they just go on and on?
Say what?
“No Way In” print edition at Amazon
An e-mail from an Instapundit reader about Jose Guerena raid in Tucson fits with this theme:
UPDATE: Reader Tim Moreau writes:
You know what? I would think that anyone busting down the door of a man’s home with a platoon of light infantry would be prepared for anything. But it seems these black-nylon kill squads are only prepared for one thing: absolute and immediate submission. What, your surprised by our raid? Confused? Startled? Sorry, you’ll have to be killed to protect us.
That’s just a peachy picture of a patriotic free nation, now aint it?
The law is now whatever our overlords in the government say it is. Emperor Buraq says so. Shut up and listen you bitter clinging right wing terrorists!
I’m very glad Wretchard made this post. I’ve tried to tell certain types that they should worry less about the Kremlins and more about all those vast e-surveillance server farm complexes dotting the Maryland and Virginia countryside around D.C. that the WaPost special report recently discussed (y’know, the ones where your GPS stops working within 500 meters).
Let’s just say they seem to extensive to spy on men in caves and in Moscow and Beijing alone.
The higher a persons security clearance-the more they support the Patriot Act.
That is because they get to see the results in terms of American fundamental interests.
The Patriot Act is essential to our strategy of-
1/ Bringing our treasure and troops home from AfPak and Iraq–while preserving American interests and security
2/ Ending the handouts of American taxpayers money to economic parasites such as Pakistan, Israel and Egypt
– and instead investing those $ billions to further American interests
It is interesting that those in the current administration, who where once vehemently opposed to the Patriot Act, now support it — as they now have access to its results.
These results should be made public as soon as prudently possible.
We need to also address our key national security vulnerability–our national debt and job deficit.
Clearly someone has talked some sense to the White House as they now reaffirm our relationships.
1/ With our key historic and future ally– the UK.
2/ Our key coalition for Intelligence gathering–ECHELON
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_%28signals_intelligence%29
3/ Our key military coalition–NATO –initiated by America and England over 60 years ago and with a refreshed commitment and mission declared at the NATO summit last November.
This new NATO strategy is designed to further American interests through 2060–now it is all about execution–which is now in action.
A state of conflict almost always lessens the freedom of a public. It makes blackouts, censorship, rationing etc necessary. But these are accepted as temporary “for the duration”. Even during the Cold War it was possible to broadly distinguish between friend and foe and nobody ever pretended it was law enforcement problem.
This made it possible to create a bimodal system. One system for “friend” and another for “foe”. All attempts at “humanitarian” conflict rely on this kind of differential treatment. Civilian vs combatant, uniformed enemy vs spy, etc.
The worst thing about the Western treatment of terrorism is that it has has accepted its terms. And those terms are that terrorists are just militant civilians, no different from any of us; perhaps better. They are just Joes with a beef. So Al-Qaeda are no longer spies, they are to be afforded all the protections of Geneva, etc. Now, they are no longer even combatants. They are criminals to be Mirandized. All these protections have been extended by people who think of themselves as enlighted and humane, etc.
But the effect of “civilianizing” terrorim will inevitably be to treat civilians like terrorists. They are no longer “the other” — no, no that would be too bigoted — they are now “the us”. The first consequence of turning a bimodal distribution into a unimodal one is that the resulting mean is suboptimal for both. What emerges is too soft for terrorism and too hard for civilians. But what to do when they are both processed by the same conceptual system?
Consider air travel security. Ideally people should be treated differently. But since that means treating people who fit a certain profile more strictly than others, and that has been disallowed by the political system, everyone is treated equally shabbily. Not shabbily enough to stop a real terrorist, but far too intrusively for a 6 year old on her way to Disneyland.
Now apply the same concept more generally and you will get generally the same result. What a great advance in Civil Liberties! What a vast improvement in social behavior! Look, no more wars! Just everyone surveilled and strip searched and fingerprinted and …
Worst of all, there is no “for the duration”. Everything, including the Libyan operation and what used to be called the War on Terror, is indefinite. This concept has basic flaws. In a Third World country the process of turning war into policework normally leads to a Junta. And it will all be done in the name of tolerance, nondiscrimination and pacifism.
The fundamental idea that “Ignorance of the Law is no excuse” just got eradicated. (Not that that’s a bad thing)
If our laws are secret, how in the hell are we supposed to follow them?
If you are a member of the ruling elite, then the rest of us are potential revolutionaries. Can somebody draw the line between revolutionary and terrorist? Please. Cite precedence, international law and domestic law, bet your life on the outcome.
Well, we’re not cleared for an understanding of that distinction. Sooooo, if you criticize the current regime, based on your ethnicity, the depth of your particular regional accent, your ownership of a number of ugly weapons, military experience, and the passion of your arguments, (with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy) you may be a terrorist.
So be careful answering your phone and front door.
I have to say, I agree with this post. Under Obasmus the Patriot Act may just become exactly the threat to civil liberties that the liberals were always howling about under Bush.
Here’s the thing, Bush had to act fast, as is typically the case. Under the gun we can put up with a lot, as far as we trust the system. But that was TEN YEARS AGO now, and a pile of laws which are themselves secret are entirely inappropriate. I’d say the appropriate period passed within months if not weeks of 9/11. I have no reason to obey a secret law. None. Such things in no way comport with constitutional, democratic government.
Along those same lines, Gitmo was a cute idea, but it is a travesty that it has gone on this long. The prisoners should have mostly been shot by now, or turned loose, but in any case tried under some system or another. We might want to continue it, but very few prisoners should be kept there indefinitely, and none without some formal tribunal.
Where are the liberals when you need them?
For that matter, where are the conservatives when you need them?
This falls back on W’s long ago writings WRT playing defense stateside vs going after the malefactors.
To play defense is to massively sacrifice our civil liberties.
Look at the farce that is the TSA.
As long as the opfor can push-pull us we’ll be back on our heels.
—–
The reason no one can go on the record is that to do so exposes our methods and means.
It also is a fact that Sun Tzu was right: a long war destroys societies.
Bush should NEVER have adopted the Long War scheme. Such thinking shifts all of the advantages to the opfor.
Crazy is as crazy does.
Unfortunately, our laws are not just unknown but unknowable.
The question always is –who is watching the watchers?
Jonathan Pollard an American traitor who the Russian settlers in the Holy Land praise as a hero–he cost many US assets lives in the USSR and $ billions in redoing US codes.
Under the Patriot Act Pollard would have been captured in days–an hopefully executed.
The fact is that there is no privacy anymore if you have a phone, a bank account, credit cards, a car, a gun, a mental health history, etc, etc.
In the past it was paper records
Now it is Oracle relational data bases, Cisco, Google, Face Book etc –all of whose executives have some security clearance, are in turn monitored, no doubt, by the NSA.
The Hall of Mirrors is nothing new it is just much more effective now.
Most of the national security community say that we should do end dual citizenship for all who have access to classified information
–NOFORN and up and that dual citizens should be NOFORN
–it makes sense–don’t you believe?
“an offense known to the law.”
“No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”
What separates a “secret interpretation” of a law, revealed later, from an Ex Post Facto Law? How can anyone know that an act prohibited by a “secret interpretation,” is, “an offense known to the law?
Robert I’m sure judges will be found who will rule this, and any other act of caprice by the government, legal.
Certain type of activities the gov. always wanted to implement, but could not in the pre-911 times. After 911 it could and it did. No wonder the “theories” about gov. involvement in 911 proliferate.
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says…” Ron Wyden (D)33
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.” Thomas Jefferson
Wretchard, your use of “Mirandized” is a reminder that a process analogous to the civilianizing of terrorism took place 40-odd years ago in criminal law. In the bad old days we assumed that the law was meant to protect taxpayers from lowlifes, and we enforced it bimodally. Later, when we decided it was wrong for cops to distinguish between citizens and hoodlums, Miranda and related developments betokened a shift to the unimodal approach.
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says…” Ron Wyden (D)
Secret law is arbitrary law. Arbitrary law is totalitarian law. Totalitarian law derives from a “single assembly” which (like a single God encompassed in the Christian Trinity) can encompass three branches: Executive, Legislative and Judicial. The three branches of our Federal Government now function as a self-serving “single assembly” which cries out for another balancing force – the States – the tenth amendment.
“There is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; because the very definition of a republic is “an empire of laws, and not of men… A single assembly, possessed of all the powers of government, would make arbitrary laws for their own interest, execute all laws arbitrarily for their own interest, and adjudge all controversies in their own favor.” John Adams
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch4s5.html
Folks, it’s been nice chatting with you. If the new laws allow a person to post from a prison cell, maybe we’ll be able to keep in touch after the show trials.
Next, expect the administration of the guy with the red nose and orange fright wig (but he really truly is an EVIL clown…) to ban private ownership of all weapons. Definition of what constitutes a weapon will be situational. Yep, a pillow or a bowl of soup can be a deadly weapon in the hands of an angry citizen. Hillarious has already fessed up that she’s been “negotiating” with some U.N. bureaucrats to work out terms of a treaty to hand over control of U.S. citizen’s gun rights to the United Nations.
Doesn’t that just make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Think of all those little third-world thugs in $1500-dollar Seville Row suits, molesting the hotel staff, and lighting their Habana Especiales with hundred dollar bills earned by pimping out the children of their peasants back home. Same guys who were so helpful in Rwanda, Darfur, Lebanon, Indonesia, Iraq, Sreberniça, et cetera ad infinitum.
The only hope is that these ass-brains are really as effing estupido as their foreign policy indicates.
That means they’ve never learned from, say, old episodes of Mr. Wizard that you can create a dandy explosion with a candle, a cup of sifted flour, and a soda straw. Talk about yer “self-rising” whole wheat…
Pray.
‘But the effect of “civilianizing” terrorim will inevitably be to treat civilians like terrorists. They are no longer “the other” — no, no that would be too bigoted — they are now “the us”.’ Yes, now every Texas lawmaker who voted against TSA is a potential terrorist.
Victor is wrong to say all Israelis are Russians but quite a few are part of the ‘Russosphere’ — I imagine we’ll be reading some story very soon trying to alarm us about what a leap the Russkies have made in their electronic capabilities thanks to our best friends in the Mideast. Frank Gaffney and the other staunchly pro-Israel members of D.C.’s anti-Russia lobby will pretend it never happened, as they always do.
But Victor’s main point — that Cisco, Google, and Facebook, if they were not exactly started by Uncle Sam, have certainly been long since folded into the apparat with no need for warrants — is worth shouting from the rooftops, even if the point was most famously made by vrag no. 1 Julian Assange. Less famously, it was made by Gene Hackman’s character in Jerry Bruckheimer’s Enemy of the State.
It’s why poor Sergey Brin declined to meet with Medvedev when the Russian prez came to Silicon Valley in 2010 — Sergey didn’t want to have to fill out a long boring contact report to his other set of bosses. It’s why Putin made a reference in his last state of Russia speech to social networks being based overseas (cough cough Google spying on Russians). It’s why even Eric Schmidt who bragged far too much about Google’s status as an American ‘national champion’ admitted the other day facial recognition tech would be creepy.
Too bad Schmidt didn’t think such restraining thoughts before he got pushed out with a golden parachute for his Big Brother pose.
What will happen of course is that agencies that are supposedly in place to go after law breakers,killers, terrorists, and violent criminals will be used to take down political opponents of the ruling class. The IRS, all of Homeland security, will chase after the bugaboos of the left.
If I remember correctly Sulla posted new laws too high on the wall to be read. If you violated that high posted law or didn’t see who was newly proscribed to bad.
A blow back is that people with will get more secretive and speak less. Agencies will talk to each other less for fear of a take down in competition for power and money. Political motivated violence will rise. After all if you are going to get into trouble for speaking you might as well get into trouble for taking down an enemy.
There is nothing akin to Islam in the West which has such cohesion (at least for now), or which is spread so widely to wage terror/Jihad. I have said it here before, but I’ll repeat it. Unless we quarantine Muslims and Islam from the West, we are doomed by Islam, it’s terror methods, and the degrading measures which we will be required to env
Force to attempt to defend against it.
Islam is like a destructive enzyme which dismantles the sinews of civilizations such as ours. It has converted many other vibrant nations to wastelands and slavery. The world’s 1.3 billion Muslim captives attests to that fact. Every patch where Muslims reside in the West is a starting point for Jihad. Each one a node in the web of terror. Eventually, as they did with Pakistan in India, the Muslims gradually demand that fresh territory is permanently converted and claimed for Islam. From the moment Pakistan was established, Islam began to wage war to claim Kashmir, and that war will continue. Sadly, when partition occurred, the Indians failed to expell all Muslims from India, and so Muslims remain there, and will eventually demand more territory in those regions they have subverted effectively.
More recently in Kosovo and in Lebanon, the Muslims have successfully driven infidels before them in various terror wars. They now possess both territories for Islam – they will never be restored to their former condition, (In Lebanon’s case, non-Muslms were the majority a mere 40 years ago – I think Muslims now constitute 2/3 of the current population). The ethnic cleansing by Islam continues in all Muslim lands. Egypt is finishing its long Jihad against is 20,000,000 Copts – and Islam is c
Ansing Turkey, Indonesia, and the entire ME and N. Africa.
For most, the process of Islamization appears so slow that the drastic measure of expelling Muslims seems unthinkable. But just look to see how compromised our civilization is now due to this invasive enemy doctrine. If we knew no Muslims were boarding our planes, or residing in our cities, the actions taken to fight Islamic terror would cease to be necessary. It sounds simple, bit it’s true.
After 9/11, Muslims should have been placed on the defensive for the atrocities of Islam rather than coddled. Instead we took great pains to not single them out, ostensibly out of fear of “radicalizing” them. Even now, when easily 99.9% of all government so-called anti-terror intrusion is conducted against those of us who will never conduct acts of terror, Muslims still become outraged whenever they feel themselves singled out. Ironic that when we are all treated like terrorists, not a single so-called “infidel” has reacted by becoming “rdicalized”, but the Muslims threaten to dose perpetually.
Unless you (try to) play a friendly game of chess with an Ashkenaz PhD of Statistics, you can’t really know what the rooskies want out of Israel, sighs me, disconsolably. but it’s the field of cybersecurity, in which Israel is a great deal ahead of USA –or so i’m told (i’d never know in a thousand years).
This post by Wretchard makes the important point that “one thing leads to another” when Government takes away freedoms or intrudes into our lives for “temporary emergencies” or for other well intentioned reasons. Exhibit A – the Gun Registry in Canada.
In Canada we have gun control where gun owners are licensed and are checked for a criminal background. Nothing too exceptional or unreasonable about that. Then, one Liberal government as an election gimmick to capture the votes of urban dwellers, decided that licensing and background checks weren’t enough and they created an additional separate, entirely superfluous Gun Registry. Now, licensed gun owners had to also register all their firearms. Not registering all your firearms was against the law, even though only already licensed, background-checked gun owners were the only people who could register.
Once the Gun Registry was established, Canadian Police started to treat registered gun owners as suspicious individuals – simply because they owned a firearm. Incidents arose where gun owners were stigmatized by police as being unstable people who were dangerous to the public, or dangerous even to criminals simply because they used a gun to warn off vandals from their property. Now, Canadian police routinely treat licensed gun owners as second class Canadian citizens. This has caused a massive loss of respect by the Canadian public for the Canadian police, particularly outside the big cities.
Fortunately, now that we have a Conservative majority government the Gun Registry will soon be abolished. But the attitudes of police and their antagonism toward gun owners will doubtless persist, and diminished respect for the police by the public will also continue.
“One thing leads to another.”
Victor @ 4:
And you know this how? Yeah, thought so. All I can say is horsehockey.
Th elite in DC want to keep their power & kewl perks so they can lord it over the rest of us.
I’m with Morton @20 – the only reason we have a Patriot Act is because our government is afraid to name the enemy outright and in trying to strike some PC middle path it undermines the freedoms it is charged to protect.
Wretchard at”5. makes the observation that the West has decided that Muslims are “just like us”, “just Joes with a beef”. It recently occurred to me that if our elites insist that they are “just like us” then we should treat them the same as we would treat those in the west who conducted themselves in a like manner. We should truly reach out to the Muslim world in a different way. we should have the same minimum expectations of them as we would of Western countries. That is we should expect them to show minimal acceptance of the norms of civilization such as maybe NO tolerance for beheadings, NO calls for the annihilation of Infidels, NO naming streets and plazas for terrorists, true religious freedom, No religious cleansing, unconditional acceptance of the state of Israel. Rather than Israel’s 1967 borders, these items should be starting points in discussions with all Muslim countries before they get any aid or recognition from the West. If we are going to pretend they are civilized people then we should have the same expectations of them as we have of other civilized peoples.
But then, if they made any of the aforementioned concessions they would no longer be Muslims. We are back to square one, unless of course we want to accept that the enemy is Islam not some subset of Islam. Islam has no problem with calling us the enemy.
The long war model worked against the Soviets. Of course that was neigh on to 20 years ago (’88 with the exchange of defense ministers – Cap Weinberger in our case)
Morton D,
We are liquifying their culture with pron:
Defeated By Pornography
and
Jewish Porn Sweeps The Arab World
Such a strategy takes time. If we can hold them off long enough.
Uh. A lot of what is going on today is due to the militarization of police. Well as long as it was only the dopers everything was jake. But suppose they stop going after the dopers? Who is on the target list instead?
Didn’t any of you law an order fools read Neimoller?
First they came for…..
And where does most dope crime happen? In private. So you have to shred the 4th to get at them. “We smelled pot…” now works better than “open sesame”.
You fools.
And gun prohibitions? Always get a lot of play when you have substance prohibitions in force. Why? Well extra legal enforcement is required. Remember 1933!
You fools.
Democracy is an amateur activity. It demands personal autonomy and leisure to study problems. It also depends on the mutual respect of social equals. Ideally every Jeffersonian Yoeman is both a democrat and his own free aristocrat. It requires disinterested, that is to say self interested, opinions being exchanged in a marketplace of ideas. Gradations of power and status lead to an inverse of the Agency Problem in which the observer has to skeptically consider that others are really acting on behalf of third parties. In a true democracy all are social equals and all are respectable. There is something disreputable about people who act for money on someone’s behalf. Ideally in our dreams we would want to be in Huey Long’s Utopia of “Every Man a King.” Aristocrats among themselves like to pretend that they are all equals, the Spartan homoi or Sames, and true Democrats. Queen Elizabeth once refused to see a Dancing Master perform that Sir Walter Raleigh brought to amuse her, because the man did it for money.
When we have to parse each encounter with the government to determine who they are really serving then it ceases to be a tool of a democracy. When we have to discount the opinions of fellow commentators who are seen as promoting the interests of governments or a camora then the utility of the internt as a market is reduced. We have agents present and I wish they were not dancing in the Club.
“So let me get this straight, you want to know all about us, where we are at, what we say on the telephone, on the internet, our medical records, what we buy, and so to make up for that you are writing and passing laws in secret that we are not allowed to know about let alone what is written in them….Hey Fred can I borrow your body grinder I’ve got to put some points on some metal fence posts.”
“Or do they just go on and on?”
And therein lies the beauty in leftist totalitarian eyes. With the law enforcement approach, it never ends.
W: “The first consequence of turning a bimodal distribution into a unimodal one is that the resulting mean is suboptimal for both. What emerges is too soft for terrorism and too hard for civilians. But what to do when they are both processed by the same conceptual system?”
Exactly. And as noted above by many, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” There is no (easy) way out of the loop.
No doubt in the dark suburban hills of Maryland the server farms are humming. In their digital looms, algorithms are shuttling back and forth over all the threads at BC and everywhere else, building up some image of actionable sedition. At which point, dozens of Keystone SWATters will spill out of their vans and mill around somebody’s front door.
As noted above also, under such totalitarian conditions, free expression does not completely disappear but it enters another mode. Irony, parable, indirection, private codes, hints and fragments.
I say no more.
I agree with the thread that intimates that when you have elevated the enemy to the position of undocumented freedom fighter you have inversely de-elevated the average citizen and taxpayer to a position below pawn and into the vast well of suspicion that makes us guilty first sans habeas corpus.
The politicization of government has well matured since the days of Nixon and a State Department, CIA, and a National Security Agency devoted to the Party of Democrats does not bode well. But the Obama administration has raised the ante and its effects are felt here in California, it will not be enough to staunchly support the one party system, you too must support the Communist unions.
We have, in effect, a system where party A (the government) has made arrangements with party B (the labor unions) to defraud and to enslave party C (you and I).
That said, I think that the “classified” aspects of these laws give cover to the agency and what they are allowed to do in the pursuit of justice, or for that matter, their own personal vendettas. But it is clear that every agency that surrounds these laws in a wall of silence are for one party rule and are anti-democracy institutions.
Such surveillance can only find so much covert action, but it can certainly be pointed towards the loudest voices that irritate the wielders of such weapons. Any dandy lion standing above the manicured lawn is going to be clipped.
Hacking away at the Gordian knot with my not very sharp sword; Why not declare victory and come home? Now that UBL is dead, why not?
If the American body politic feels the need to murder more 3rd world goatherders, use PGM’s. Bomb them from 20,000 feet. Since one goatherder is pretty much the same as the next goatherder targeting isn’t as big an issue as it’s made out to be.
I doubt that it will make much practical difference but it might be worth a try. The Socialists claim that the nutters are attacking us because we offended them. When you point out that our offense is existing, Socialists get a funny look and prattle on about religion of peace and the brotherhood of humanity.
So lets have an experiment. Keep working on “Star wars”. What we have now works but it could be better. That will take care of direct attacks delivered by ICBM. Indirect attacks can and must be prevented by police work. The military isn’t much use against a 400 Kt. warhead hidden in an Ice Cream truck.
When the nutters keep attacking, maybe the Liberals will wake up. I doubt it but if they do, a unified America is unstoppable. If Liberals had stood shoulder to shoulder with Conservatives after 911, this war would have been won years ago.
32/oMan – under such totalitarian conditions, free expression does not completely disappear but it enters another mode. Irony, parable, indirection, private codes, hints and fragments.
Don’t forget humor and satire – “What forbids us to tell the truth, laughingly?”–Horace, Satires, I.24
Tharkun @35: Excellent citation! We could also point to the Fool in Shakespeare, and to the court jesters on which that type was based. “Truth in jest.” …A book could be written on the purgative and corrective properties of humor. Wait, about a thousand books have been…
This reeks of odd timing by 0bama and his “auto-pen.” This Business-Medical record search thing could be very useful to certain politicians who want to remain in office. 0bama could dig up dirt on any of his political foes and it would be legal yet secret.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/121428/
(snip)
IRS To Small Businesses: We Want Your QuickBooks.
Many accountants are worried this could lead to fishing expeditions” to find problems beyond the scope of the requested information, said Danny Snow, a certified public accountant in Memphis who is active in the American Institute of CPAs, or AICPA. “It’s not like what the IRS asks of large companies.”
(end snip)
“gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says….When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”
GOING to have? Where has everybody BEEN? This has been going on for decades!
Creeping tyranny!
The worst thing about the Western treatment of terrorism is that it has has accepted its terms. And those terms are that terrorists are just militant civilians, no different from any of us; perhaps better….. Everything, including the Libyan operation and what used to be called the War on Terror, is indefinite. – Wretchard
I actually think that this in part “cold war” hangover. Between WWII and 1989, due to Nuclear Weapons, a consensus developed that it was better to fight a series of perpetual, continuous “low intensity conflicts” over decisive all-out war. Now with the “War on Terror” we have the “War on Nobody – War on Everybody”. If there is no single enemy, then the enemy is everywhere. We have to fight everywhere, including on Mainstreet, USA.
American leaders have not faced, or been willing to face the possible fact that all-out war is the only way to end this war. Subtract Iran and Syria from the equation, while committing to a policy of no-holds-bar energy development in the USA, and the “Islamic” problem will fade back into 7th century backwaters. We don’t have to kill every Muslim, or subdue every radical Islamic state to stop the Islamic terrorism, just as when faced with a dozen bad guys in a back alley, you don’t need to beat the entire gang. Just take down the leader decisively, and maybe his #2, and the rest will find something more useful to do. When the Persians, Arabs, and rest of the Muslims figure out that #1 Israel is not a negotiable item, and they won’t be driven into the sea, and #2, messing with the USA will destroy everything and anything that had meaning in your life, they’ll start focusing on THEIR lives and THEIR governments. They can join American prosperity and freedom, or allow Mullah’s and religious thought policy keep them in chains and starvation. They will certainly, however, leave the USA alone.
America has declared enemies arrayed against us who are killing Americans, and have committed to kill many more. We need to fight to win. Screw Afghanistan and Iraq; redeploy our military resources to the war front, and let them win and come home. Take out Iran – HARD – “back to the stone age” hard, bounce Syria around a little bit, take out Pakistan’s nukes in any way we need to, and negotiate the rest.
Now, before folks call me nuts, understand that Iran can’t be negotiated with, can’t be influenced, can’t be dissuaded from their myth of world domination in the name of Islam. One could argue that North Korea is a nuclear capable threat, but the norks are a regional power with apparently limited ambitions. They are a manageable threat. Same applies to Pakistan for the moment.
Iran is a threat forever, to the USA today, to our kids and grandkids. There may be some fine Persian people, but none of them are influencing national and military policy in Iran. It’s a monolith there. I have no doubt, no doubt at all, if Iran achieves a nuclear weapon it will use it if for no other reason that to establish Middle East hegemony. With the extensive international terrorism network, I cannot believe that Iran would not hit the USA with a “fingerprintless” nuclear weapon. If one detonates in Los Angeles, and Iran claims to have 150 more deployed across the USA, what would the President’s military decision be? Or, perhaps they don’t detonate it – they just name the location, demonstrating their capability to fulfill their threat. Iran is building nukes it fully intends to deploy and use.
Even with the former USSR, there were at least had sane people on the other side of the table who appreciated life and death, understood the cost of all-out war, and understood the impact that aggressive actions towards America would have on the USSR, when the USA responded.
Yes, the Saudi’s are over-stuffed PITA’s, the Pakis are the lifeline of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Egypt may be a problem, Libya is like an annoying butt-pimple, Russian and China are over-the-horizon threats, Chavez in Venezuela needs to be dealt with eventually, and the norks are the norks, but this pales in comparison to what the Iranians have meant to Islamic radicalism and treats to America.
If we don’t play the game to win, i.e. if we don’t define the enemy and prosecute the war fully to victory, then yes, our liberty will be lost one law at a time. One more thing – after we destroy Iran, we don’t rebuild it. Europe can pick up that tab. Russian can do it, but not the USA. Let the Iranian’s starve. The world can observe watch the cost of war against the USA. If we have to take on the Saudi’s for example, every damn oil field remains property of the USA forever.
That’s war 7th century Islamic style. That’s war that the Muslims will understand.
40. Old Salt,
If it was possible to keep oil at or below $60 a bbl for 5 or 10 years the whole ME would go broke. The Saudis need $70 a bbl and the Iranians $85 to $90 a bbl to support their populations. Maybe more now with a food crisis in the offing.
Old Salt, great post.
It seems to me that the Patriot act, in it’s new improved version, is just yet another attempt by the Hard Left to con and scam the American People into relinquishing their rights to the Nanny Police State, or to some foreign enemy. In the last few years, we have been bombarded by an onslaught of a long list of leftist cons to damage America, among them Obamacare, the TooBigTooFail Bank bailouts, R2P, START II, Motor Voter, Global Warming, Mediscare, and now this. It’s time to tell our representatives enough is enough. Go back to our fundamental values and rights and clean the house of everything else. It’s very sad that our Republican Leadership is again not leading on a key issue and is again not protecting our rights, so maybe it’s time to clean them out too.
“Leftist cons” –well put, that’s exactly what has walled off the power emanating from the Constitution.
Do I have to say it again?
Our primary threat is college educated muslims… the ones in the West.
Typically, they’ve received their education at OUR EXPENSE.
It’s in college that muslims become jihadis. It’s the same old, same old, time and again.
Instead of radical military measures…
Just stop educating muslims in the West — at the college level.
Such individuals make no substantive contribution to the West, And they are typically rejected/ blocked from using their expensively trained skills back home.
c.f. The Egyptian protesters: dominated by college educated — and frustrated — attorney-want-to-bees who do not have the grease to get on board the regime gravy train.
Qtb, himself, re-orientor of the MB, is a shining example of the bitter fruit of the poisoned tree of islam.
We are not being attacked by 50 something muslims — except in soft warfare.
However, twenty something male muslims in our colleges are a dire threat.
They learn our language and society — yet despise it. If not radicalized as Freshmen — they are by the time they go jihad.
——
We bombed Germany and Japan to shut down ordnance production.
Suicide-murderers are ordnance — not soldiers.
And their factories in the West are our colleges.
ONLY Westernized jihadis are the primary threat.
No attempt should be made to blend in muslims within our society. Should such an event ever occur, the nation would be in extreme peril.
Muslims will NOT co-exist with kafir. That’s the story of islam.
Beyond a low threshold, muslim minorities are able to thwart anyone leaving the cult.
Britain and other nations have turned a blind eye to islamic reprisals. It’s the worst possible policy.
If bright muslims are educated in their homeland — never perfecting their English — it’s all good.
They might actually use their brains to benefit their fellow man.
But coming to America is a mistake for all concerned.
It is not fair that criminals can break the law but law enforcers cannot. The Patriot Act levels the playing field. If the law is a secret than the criminals can’t break it and sny means used to capture and kill them can’t be proved illegal. That’s good enough for government work.
Oops –the judiciary doesn’t actually have an army. Damn! I guess the founders never envisioned a judge telling an agency that such-and-such had to come thru the court, and the agency answering back “No, we are just gonna DO it”.
Funny, ain’t it –where’s Lawfare when ya actually NEED it?
As in, not to play around with tertiary emanations from tortured interpretations, but from the actual wet-ink text of the Constitution?