2.06.2006

Spying

Whatever your feelings about President Bush's authorization of spying on American citizens, I think Jon Stewart made the best point of all. We've got plenty of information. We had the information that said there was going to be an attack on the World Trade Center. The problem isn't getting more information. The problem is sorting through and making sense of the information we've got. And I don't see them working on that problem at all.

Admittedly, wiretapping could lead to further corroboration of leads. For example, they might have caught wind of the plans for 9/11 and been able to verify or at least find other pointers to the possibility of an attack.

Still, I think they are focused in the wrong area.

Aside from the fact that there's no need for wiretaps without oversight. There's a perfectly functional, super-secret court already set up for the purpose, just waiting to validate warrants. I'm not sure why they refuse to use them. My guess is, they were probably just lazy, figured it wouldn't matter and/or they wouldn't get caught. And, now that they are caught, this administration is so fucking vain and weak, they can't possibly admit they are wrong, ever, ever, ever. (With the exception of the debacle surround hurricane Katrina's demolition of the Big Easy.)

I find it interesting that from a "moral leader" of a supposedly moral-centered administration, the only defense we hear is that it's "legal". Yes, but so is abortion, you rampant right-to-lifers. Funnily enough, this is the same argument that they chose to use to support their use of torture. Not that it was morally acceptable, but that it was "legal" under the Geneva Convention. So is prostitution in Amsterdam and Nevada. So's riverboat gambling. So was temperance. So was slavery. So is the oppression of political dissidents (in China and Cuba, not here).

If you have to fall back on the law to justify your actions, you should think twice about what you are doing. You need to ask yourself, not "Is it legal?", but "Is it right?" In this case, I don't think so. It violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law and the constitution. Anyone who argues differently is clearly missing the point of the founding of our whole freaking nation.

posted by risser at 12:23

Nobody has anything to say.