...James Madison did: "No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare;" and "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
So if the time comes when our founding fathers tire of turning over in their graves and they rise up, the first thing they might do is castigate those who have betrayed their oath to uphold the Constitution. You see, when they wrote that document, they failed to include all the Monday morning excuses we're hearing about being afraid or about political pressures involving future elections.
The founding fathers risked everything, fighting a Revolutionary War, for the freedoms they wrote into that Constitution. So I doubt they'd have much patience for the various excuses and utilitarian reasoning bleating forth from today's pusillanimous politicians and pollsters who capitulated to the fear mongering of Bush's "Global War on Terror" so they could start their August vacation on time.
The latest constitutional right shredded in the name of fighting terrorism is the basic 4th Amendment one to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. Congress just voted, after having the living bejeebers scared out of them about the imminent threat of future terrorist attacks, to legalize Bush's warrantless and perpetually secret monitoring of Americans' telephone and e-mail communications. But don't worry: Alberto Gonzales and DNI McConnell will protect our rights by restricting the wiretaps to Al Qaeda and/or "a person abroad." The same congress who witnessed Gonzales' failure to explain or even remember what he's done in the last couple years just gave him carte blanche power to secretly wiretap us all.
Is either one of these people likely to put a halt to questionable wiretaps of anybody? Once a mountain of information is collected, nobody ever wants to destroy it. You never know when you might need it, or if some clever computer program might extract useful information.
The power of fear to manipulate people never ceases to amaze, as Herman Goering attested at the Nuremberg trials: "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
Two of the biggest disappointments contributing to this terribly panic-driven and mistaken vote came from two newly elected Minnesota Democrats: Senator Amy Klobuchar and First District Representative Tim Walz, who were railroaded into abandoning the oath they swore to only eight months ago to preserve and defend the Constitution.
It's hard to believe that Klobuchar and Walz, a former county prosecutor and schoolteacher respectively, are ignorant of the civil liberties abuses of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and its COINTELPRO program which entailed "black bag jobs" of peace groups, lawyers, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Nixon Administration enemies. Likewise, the Watergate and other illegal burglaries under the Nixon administration were also a natural extension of the permissive atmosphere fostered by Nixon under the rubric of "national security." The illegal actions and abuses of that era were unraveled by congressional committees who came up with the FISA law to protect us against such abuses.
As a former criminal prosecutor, Klobuchar especially must appreciate the importance of judicial oversight in balancing the rights of citizens with the need to protect security and stop criminal activity. I can't tell you the hours we criminal investigators spent carefully crossing the "T's" and dotting the "I's" on affidavits and court-authorized warrants for search and seizure in kinder, gentler, AND WISER days. Seeking judicial permission for wiretapping or searching injects judiciousness into the process itself and prevents mistakes and/or rash round-ups or renditions that net as many (or more) innocent people as "bad guys".
Amy Klobuchar's legal knowledge was something she campaigned on. Presumably she knows full well that authorities can monitor an agent of a foreign power or terrorist organization up to 72 hours under the pre-existing emergency exception already incorporated in the FISA. If small modifications to the law were necessary to ensure monitoring of foreign parties who just happen to have their communications routed through U.S. facilities, that should have been easy enough to accomplish without a wholesale gutting of the FISA as Bush demanded, to allow large scale monitoring of Americans calling overseas and to cover up his prior illegal monitoring.
How could the Democrats, who control both houses of Congress, fail to ensure that the FISA courts retain authority over individual warrants rather than having a generalized ex post facto review?
What was the rush? This was not a funding bill that might have stopped the functioning of the government if not passed immediately.
I heard Klobuchar's and Walz's rousing speeches accepting their party's respective nominations not much more than a year ago and I can tell you that they would not have gotten all that applause if they had told us that political expediency and a month-long recess would be more important to them then protecting the Constitution.