One must struggle to get past the sneering dismissal Max Boot makes of any and all civil liberties concerns people have with the Endless War Against Evil, er, Terror. Even after all his jabs at our “silliness,” he pauses to admit FISA was justified after J Edgar Hoover and Dick Nixon. Still, he says FISA is now archaic and should be “euthanized.” Let the President do anything he wants to (he is already, by the way) and hope whistle-blowers shall set us free again (ignoring this administration’s efforts, like Nixon’s, to seal all leaks but the ones they use for their own purposes).

Forget privacy, we need to spy more by Max Boot, Los Angeles Times

If civil liberties agitators, grandstanding politicians and self-righteous newspaper editorialists have their way, we will have to give up our most potent line of defense because of largely hypothetical concerns about privacy violations. …

All this concern with privacy would be touching if it weren’t so selective. With a few keystrokes, Google will display anything posted by or about you. … Such information is routinely gathered and sold by myriad marketing outfits. So it’s OK to violate your privacy to sell you something — but not to protect you from being blown up. [mjh: nonsense, Max — it’s bad enough when marketers do it, worse when it’s the government.]

HOW FAR DO the civil-liberties absolutists want to take their logic? [mjh: he continues with a specious straw man argument about Miranda warnings in Afganistan.] …

Much of this silliness can be traced to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which for the first time made judges the overseers of our spymasters. This was an understandable reaction to such abuses as the FBI’s wiretapping of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But FISA is a luxury we can no longer afford. …

This archaic law should be euthanized. Replace it with legislation that gives the president permission to order any surveillance deemed necessary….

So far there has been no suggestion that the NSA has done anything with disreputable motives. The administration has nothing to be ashamed of. The only scandal here is that some people favor unilateral disarmament in our struggle against the suicide bombers.

It is touching how much faith people have that our technology will stop determined lunatics who use box cutters and donkey carts, if only the whining civil libertarians would get out of the way. mjh

PS: I can’t read “Max Boot” without thinking what a great name it would be for a fascist: he meets all enemies of freedom with Max Boot. I wonder if he chose his name like Homer Simpson chose “Max Power.”

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. — Benjamin Franklin

Duhbya is the least articulate president — perhaps of all. In addition, his administration is the most secretive (closed-mouthed and closed-minded) of all. So, prepare to scratch your head trying to understand the official position on a common vs official vs unifying vs national language, also known as “English-Plus” to the Administration, as in “Duhbya is a double-plus-good leader!”

Our national language is BUllSHit. mjh

English as US’s ‘official language’ a semantic question: Gonzales – Yahoo! News

Further muddying a political debate on the country’s principal language that has arisen amid a wave of largely Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants, Gonzales said Bush “has never been supportive of English-only, or English as the official language.”

“But certainly we support the fact that English is the national language of the United States of America,” he told ABC’s “This Week” program.

Bush’s top legal advisor, Gonzales — himself the grandson of Mexican immigrants — was attempting to clear up seemingly conflicting White House positions on two competing US Senate bills that seek to establish in law the position of English as the country’s official language.

One bill would make English the US “national language”, replacing a previous draft making it the “official language”.

The second bill said the US government “shall preserve and enhance the role of English as the common and unifying language of America.” Both passed the Senate Thursday.

While Gonzales had indicated Bush — who himself speaks some Spanish — opposed the laws, on Friday Bush spokesman Tony Snow suggested his support.

“I think that both of these amendments are consistent” with Bush’s wishes, Snow said.

“This is really a question of semantics,” Gonzales said.

Union Leader – Laura K. Donohue: Beware the long arm of. . . the Pentagon? – Saturday, May. 20, 2006

For the first time since the Civil War, the United States has been designated a military theater of operations. The Department of Defense — which includes the NSA — is focusing its vast resources on the homeland. And it is taking an unprecedented role in domestic spying.

It may be legal. But it circumvents three decades of efforts by Congress to restrict government surveillance of Americans under the guise of national security. And it represents a profound shift in the role of the military operating inside the United States. What’s at stake here is the erosion of the principle, embedded in the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, that the U.S. military not be used for domestic law enforcement.

When the administration declared the United States to be a theater of military operations in 2002, it created a U.S. Northern Command, which set up intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas to analyze the domestic threat. But these are not the military’s only domestic intelligence efforts. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Pentagon controls “a substantial portion” of U.S. national intelligence assets, the traditional turf of the FBI and CIA. [mjh: Specifically, at least 80% of money spent on spying is in the Pentagon’s budget. Rumsfeld is our new J. Edgar Hoover.] …

These misguided military forays into domestic surveillance harken back to Vietnam War-era abuses. This time, they are the result of a much broader intelligence-gathering effort by the military on U.S. soil. President Bush said last week, ”We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.“ But a 2004 survey by the General Accounting Office found 199 data-mining operations that collect information ranging from credit-card statements to medical records. The Defense Department had five programs on intelligence and counterterrorism. …

In 2002, the Defense Department launched the granddaddy of all data-mining efforts, Total Information Awareness, to trawl through all government and commercial databases available worldwide. In 2003, concerned about privacy implications, Congress cut its funding. But many of the projects simply transferred to other Defense Department agencies. Two of the most important, the Information Awareness Prototype System and Genoa II, moved to NSA headquarters.

The Pentagon argues that its monitoring of U.S. citizens is legal. “Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on intelligence” agencies collecting information on Americans or disseminating it, says a memo by Robert Noonan, deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Military intelligence agents can receive any information “from anyone, any time,” Noonan wrote.

Throughout U.S. history, we have struggled to balance security concerns with the protection of individual rights, and a thick body of law regulates domestic law-enforcement agencies’ behavior. Congress should think twice before it lets the behemoth Defense Department into domestic law enforcement.

America the Fearful by Bob Herbert, New York Times

In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public’s fear is this president’s most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.

Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear – so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.

If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known. …

The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.

Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.

There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.

ABQjournal: Letters to the Editor

No U.S. Safeguards for Detainees

RE: “GITMO Visits Reveal Policy Gone Bad” commentary

The article is a travesty. Mahvish Khan is an absolute dupe of the Taliban and al-Qaida. The Guantanamo detainees are trained by al-Qaida to lie through their teeth to elicit sympathy for them and their cause.

The writer doesn’t show a shred of evidence about the veracity of their statements, yet she believes them implicitly, thereby damning the honorable soldiers who captured these terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, and the soldiers and sailors who treat these despicable people with respect and excellent treatment.

The American writer of this op-ed went in with a built-in bias and an agenda. There is absolutely no objectivity in the article. The detainees were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan and should be tried by military tribunals.

They are not U.S. citizens and are not entitled to the protections of the U.S. Constitution.

JACK MAHER
Albuquerque

Let us remember that we don’t necessarily know the truth about every single person we’ve imprisoned. It has to be conceivable that one in 400 is neither a liar nor guilty. These are not simply soldiers rounded up in the middle of battle. These are suspects and we all know how trustworthy our intelligence has been in larger matters.

Perhaps we have no obligation to treat these people as we would hope we would treat American citizens with the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair, speedy and open trial. But, they are where they are in part to be certain they can’t be touched by our judicial system. And, if our own standards of justice are so flexible, why should any American citizen expect any better treatment. Mr Maher could be declared an enemy combatant tonight and disappear. Surely he knows that.

Maher has the right to object to Mahvish Khan’s story, but he is very willing to accept the sketchy claims of an administration that seems incompetent and untrustworthy in many matters. mjh

mjh’s blog — I felt that my own country had taken a wrong turn

Guantanamo’s innocuous men By Mahvish Khan, Special to The Washington Post

Budget Cut Would Shutter EPA Libraries By Christopher Lee, Washington Post Staff Writer

Proposed budget cuts could cripple a nationwide system of Environmental Protection Agency libraries that government researchers and others depend on for hard-to-find technical information, library advocates say.

The $2 million cut sought by the White House would reduce the 35-year-old EPA Library Network’s budget by 80 percent and force many of its 10 regional libraries to close, according to the advocates and internal agency documents.

That, in turn, would dramatically reduce access to certain EPA reports, guidance and technical documents that are used by the agency’s scientific and enforcement staff as well as private businesses and citizens, they say. …

The public has a lot at stake in the future of these libraries, said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit advocacy group that obtained internal EPA documents on the proposed cuts.

“We view this as another example of the Bush administration marginalizing EPA research so that the agency scientists and other specialists can’t do their jobs,” Ruch said. “And then in the absence of information, plans by industries and others that have environmental implications go forward.”

A major thrust of the Bush Administration has been to abrogate the classic checks and balances of the Constitution — at the very time he has profound influence over Congress and the Supreme Court and the Media and the Public.

Ask yourself for a moment: what kind of Constitutional scholar is Bush? Stop laughing — whose idea is this? Someone is tweaking, amending and editing the Constitution and we don’t actually know who it is or what their motives are.

Much has been made of Bush never vetoing anything. These “signing statments” are essentially line-item vetoes; he’ll ignore what he chooses. Congress and the Court have no process for reviewing, objecting or over-riding these stealth vetoes.

Bush’s strange need to leave a paper trail everywhere is beginning to look like Nixon’s tapes. Hopefully, they will contribute to his undoing. They definitely will give History real substance to judge his administration by.

Had enough? mjh

Bush challenges hundreds of laws – The Boston Globe
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | April 30, 2006

WASHINGTON — President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ”whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ”to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ”execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional. …

Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws — many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.

Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush’s theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts.

Search Results (v2)
Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (2006); Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (2005); Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (2004); Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (2003); Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (2002); Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (2001)
For: “”statement on signing””