Wall Street Journal:
It was instantly clear after Sept. 11, 2001, that our security agencies knew little about al Qaeda's inner workings, could not detect its operatives' entry into the country, nor predict where it might strike next.
John C. Yoo News - The New York Times
Freep - Report: Bush program extended beyond wiretapping
Yoo Torture Memo Says Fourth Amendment Doesn't Apply in War on ...
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Yoo's explainations are the same debunked ones from before. What is worse is that he is sticking to them after they were debunked. Classic felon
To construe the executive's war making prerogatives include domestic spying is completely in defiance of the clearly stated 4th amendment.
http://www
Well, thanks John. That explains it.
Yes it does. Guilty as charged.
A couple points need to be made here.
The President of the United States, even in times of war is not a Monarch. He is accountable to Congress and he remains accountable to the people. He is responsible for administering the laws passed by Congress.
If they wanted changes to FISA they should have asked for them.
Second, it is obvious that both Cheney and Bush held Congress and the Democrats in contempt. And made it abundantly clear that they considered both greater threats to National Security than al Qaida. National Security being defined as a permanent Republican Majority.
Anyone who thinks they did not use this wire tapping program for partisan political purposes is a fool. And has ignored everything that occurred over the past 8 years of their rule.
Third, this program was a waste of resources. intelligence is a zero sum game. Money and resources used to pursue worthless information is taken away from the programs which are effective.
Every time they read or reviewed my emails or phone calls they were wasting time and money. They should have focused on the enemy. Who WERE NOT within the USA.
Remember these are the same fools who fired Arabic translators because of their sexual orientation.
The revelations are inevitably going to get worse. Much worse.
And this is what the Wall Street Journal has come to under NewsCorps. Talk about tarnishing a trademark.
An intelligent defense for an indefensible act. He claims to know a great deal about the Constitution and then asserts that the only way to protect us was to violate that same constitution! His first defense shoots down the rest when he claims we knew nothing about how they got here or their inner workings. Investigation has shown that authorities were repeatedly warned yet did nothing. The actions after 9/11, including those of this gentleman, were not only in violation of our constitution but were tantamount to closing the barn door after the horses had already escaped.
Absolutely correct. I can't add a thing to that comment. Thank you.
I can:
FOURTH AMENDMENT [U.S. Constitution] - 'The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.'
1. Unless the reason why is because you believed it was legal, then you're admitting to a crime.
2. If you subverted American ideals out of fear of another terrorist attack, then the terrorists have won, and they've specifically won because you and the Bush admin capitulated.
Fighting for his life to keep from being fired at Cal, disbarred, and put in jail.
That's it in a Yoo-shell.
This is just Yoo trying to change the subject from one on which he will surely cause him to be disbarred or imprisoned, his involvement in the Bush-Cheney Conspiracy to render our Federal Anti-Torture Laws moot.
The fact that he is still trying to explain away the warrantless wiretaps just shows how consistent he is in his warped thinking.
To move on, American need a full accounting of the crimes of the Bush-Cheney criminals in a congressional commission of inquiry and prosecutions in a Federal Court. To that end
SIGN THE PETITION
calling for
a congressional commission of inquiry
and prosecution for Bush's Torturers
at ANGRYVOTER
http://ANG
.
Poor guy, didn't even do enough to receive a pres. merit badge from bush like tenet or franks.
Dubya was handing those medals out like bottle caps.
The medals were being handed out like bottle caps.
Medals of Freedom for EVERYONE that subverted America's freedom.
FTA: "Unlike, say, Soviet spies working under diplomatic cover, terrorists are hard to identify. Yet they are vastly more dangerous. "
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Gotta call BS on that one, professor. Vastly more dangerous? Really? Than spies from enemy empire? Good thing you caught them all with your wiretaps!
Thats the way they do it in Korea, especially North Korea. If a goverment wants to violate someone human rights they get a specialist to tell them how.
The column begins with a concept that no one has argued required a warrant - military surveillance of the command and control ops of an enemy on foreign soil (bin Laden's Afghan HQ). It then immediately says that justified taps of civilians in the US for whom there was no basis in fact to believe were tied to terrorism or support of our enemies. This is a complete straw man argument and ludicrous on its face. And the article just gets worse from there.
What Yoo, on balance, shows is precisely what his memos do - he takes the panic driven impulses of people in fear, creates false equivalencies with prior emergencies, and then justifies the worst possible course of conduct on the flimsy grounds that since other Presidents got away with it (by also likely violating the law) it no longer is a violation of law. While it recognizes the truth that in time of panic the President can do much with impunity because sources of constraint are cowed, converting that into a legal course of action, or even a legitimate goal of government, is a step too far for a country that in theory respects the rule of law.
Well said.
I would add that a complete investigation into illegal wiretaps is warranted as well as the torture memos and the subsequent actions "legalized" by those memos. We know that International law was broken by the torture, and Constitutional rights were broken with the wiretaps. Time for a Nuremberg type trial for the last administration's wrongdoing.
If these programs had revealed any al Qaida presence within the USA they would have been hollering that fact to the roof tops.
They haven't.
They did not care about security and would leak anything that gave them a partisan political advantage.
So we know by their own actions just how ineffective these programs were.
This is pure hypocrisy. Go balls to the wall, no stone unturned, price is no matter....
We have many, many predators among us right here. We have corporations preying on us like we are USDA approved Predator Feed. And ....we are.
Now how come it never became urgent to move heaven and hell to stop the 100s of Thousands of good 'Mericans from being targeted and killed by other 'Mericans? Hell Bush himself was more of a threat to his own people than the terrrrists could ever be. Why weren't we waterboarding and wiretapping him?
THis is all bogeyman stuff. Make an outside enemy seem deadly and wicked enough that you can do ANYTHING in the fight against them.
But these folks absolutely ignore what is really killing Americans. They create this HUGE harrumphing and stamping of feet about a nationless band of desert guerillas.
There is never a need for warrantless wiretapping as the warrants may be obtained afterward. So, the argument that it is for national security is bogus.
Yoo was just a Yes Man for the Cheney /Bush administration; nothing more, nothing less.
He twisted the law until they got what they wanted.
If he's guilty, a lot more people are guilty as well.
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First Posted: 07-15-09 10:24 PM | Updated: 07-15-09 10:28 PM