The President sends his New Year Greetings

In San Antonio, Texas, at a photo-op with wounded troops from the Iraq campaign (who otherwise don’t officially exist) the President staunchly defended the recently disclosed practice of wire-tapping, eavesdropping, listening in and otherwise God knows what associated with domestic telephone calls. Unsurprisingly, the President insisted that it was only international calls to the United States from known Al Qaeda operatives, and that “real Americans” had nothin’ to worry about, unless they were gettin’ qollect calls from Qaeda!
This would be somewhat reassuring to crusty gadflies (like m’self) who are coming to mistrust this Government’s stated desire to heed, protect, or even acknowledge the existence of our basic liberties– something about holding American citizens for years and years in camera (and ex cathedra) without due process of law might just do that– if there were some means of verifying the President’s assurances (which right now, there is not).
That said, given the incredibly relaxed procedures associated with… (before clicking — a warning about the link– its to the Justice Department, which, like the rest of the Government, presumably has illegally inserted “cookies” to monitor the web activities of everyone unwary enough to surf in…) of course, if you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably been monitored so long that the Government is running out of bandwidth to track you!– FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)– which even permits nunc pro tunc warrant applications for after-the-fact sanitizing of wiretaps and the like if “exigent circumstances” didn’t permit a pre-wiretap warrant application… one wonders why the need to evade FISA? The judges on the secret court responsible for issuing warrants almost never turn down the Government’s requests (as far as we know)… and surely, if there were an issue about it, surely the Government could… as noted… do the surveillance, interception or whatever, and argue about its legality later in a higher court, as there is an appeals process for denied warrant requests. Frankly, no one would fault a Government taking every step possible to both protect us and try to ensure that Constitutional protections are maintained…
Certainly, a Government committed to its multiple duties of protecting us from our foreign enemies and protecting us from its own overreaching would have no problem doing that… Releasing the details of its warrant requests to a highly secretive court, all of whose judges have super, ultra-top secret security clearances, hardly “tips off the enemy” now does it?
Unless, of course, the enemy isn’t Al Qaeda at all, but much closer to home…
No, no… that’s just crazy talk. One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to take out my tin-foil hat until at least February…
What can we say? This President models himself after (warning: the White House web site– see above re: cookies…) St. Ronald of Santa Barbara. Well, St. Ron famously told us the terms of his dealings with the Evil Empire TM in the course of his negotiations over arms control: Trust, but verify. As unsatisfactory as it is, I would nonetheless accept the conclusions of an independent investigation by the courts set up for that purpose under FISA, or possibly by something allegedly non-partisan like the Senate Intelligence Committee… if the Government cooperated, for a change, and could demonstrate to the satisfaction of anyone outside the Bush Administration (and the paid right wing punditocracy and blogosphere) that, in fact, the eavesdropping program really was narrowly tailored toward A.Q., and not John Q. Public, or, say, political enemies
I assume that the usual pattern will apply: staunch denials by the White House (and support by the paid right wing punditocracy and blogosphere) followed by defections in the Congressional delegation realizing that they are up for reelection and the President isn’t, followed by some level of some kind of half-assed highly partisan investigation, concluding that while some mistakes were made, nothing serious was done, and the American people can know that we have gone (as of today anyway) 1572 working days without a major terrorist incident on American soil…
Happy New Year, everybody!

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