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.