Can You Imagine…
By Mitch Berg
…if this had been suggested…:
Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.
…during the Bush administration?
June 21st, 2010 at 7:03 am
The same sorts of things were not only suggested, but carried out during the Bush administration. And I hope the public outcry is as strong now as it was then.
I don’t think political ideology has much to do about those sorts of clandestine activities like technical intelligence collection. It’s more of an administrative vs. legislative approach to things like security and proposals/actions like this one represent the real reason that we have a government with built-in checks and balances.
We, the people, now need to ensure that those checks and balances continue to work in this instance of civil liberties erosion as in the past.
June 21st, 2010 at 7:26 am
Leslie, I largely and completely agree.
But I’m not aware of Bush suggesting warrantless domestic surveillance of domestic communications.
June 21st, 2010 at 10:35 am
Folks called the previous president BusHitler for that sort of thing… President Obama tends to get a pass when his administration covers similar ground as the previous administration.
I wonder why that is.
June 21st, 2010 at 11:42 am
Napolitano said it is wrong to believe that if security is embraced, liberty is sacrificed.
She added, “We can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances. At the same time, there are situations where trade-offs are inevitable.”
Note that the Napolitano quote in the first paragraph is contradicted by what she says in the second paragraph.
June 21st, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I will trade warrentless domestic spying if it means I can take a bottle of water with me on an airplane. The idea that we can only stop terrorist attacks in the final minutes before they occur is stupid. They should be stopped months before they occur.
June 21st, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Related to the “if Bush had done this”….I still chuckle (and shake my head) over the small town librarians who shredded their records each night as they were sure President Bush was going to come into their libraries and see what books people had checked out.
June 21st, 2010 at 1:11 pm
I’m with you Leslie, it was wrong under Bush and it is just as wrong under Obama, and no, Obama doesn’t get a free pass.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/bush-spied/
You want to talk about stupid policies, I would cite the policy that has prevented gays serving in the military who have needed language skills – skills and intelligence clearance which could have prevented the backlog in translations of important messages that could have identified that 9/11 was the intended date of an attack.
June 21st, 2010 at 1:59 pm
So, don’t-ask-don’t-tell caused 9/11.
You are very gullible, Dog Gone.
June 21st, 2010 at 2:45 pm
No, not gullible. Just preoccupied looking up Pinal county on the map. That, and stuck on chanting points.
June 21st, 2010 at 2:55 pm
DG,
“Wired” is important, but not exactly CNN/NYTimes/WaPo/The Strib in terms of mainstream impact.
And while I’ve opposed DADT (I figured if the Brits and Israelis could deal with gays in the military, we could), it’s a bit stretchy to tie it to 9/11, especially since the bulk of the backlog was with civilian intelligence services that don’t bar gays.
June 21st, 2010 at 3:05 pm
If DG is correct that DADT is the cause of 9/11 then without a doubt Democratic President Bill Clinton is responsible for 9/11 – just using your kind of thinking here DG!
June 21st, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Had we known about the information that we didn’t know because of a shortage of translators, we might have avoided the incident.
We need more of these individuals in all areas, civilian and military.
Clinton screwed up with DADT, but it wasn’t his watch when 9/11 occurred.
June 21st, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Dog Gone, you are simply repeating liberal orthodoxy. You are not even attempting to make an argument and support it with evidence.
Here’s how it’s done:
The 9-11 commission report made 41 recommendations describing, in some detail, what the US should do to prevent another 9-11. Getting rid of don’t-ask-don’t-tell was not among them.