Where Will The Line Be Drawn?
September 22nd, 2006 | by Ken Grandlund |As each day dawns, it feels like we are moving ever more into an alternate universe of science-fiction proportions. News last night that torture is on the brink of being legalized in the United States of America means that secret CIA prisons abroad will no longer be necessary. If the proposed legislation passes through Congress and reaches the desk of George W. Bush, it will also mean an end to the practice of allowing an accused defendant to see all evidence against them. It will allow the executive branch to redefine terms of international treaties to suit whatever ends they deem necessary. The result of these actions will mean a loss of American prestige among the nations of the world. It will mean a loss of the moral authority that has kept America in the upper echelons of world governments. It will mean a loss of an ideal that no matter what others did to us, we would always try to operate at a higher level and within the accepted bounds of humane action.
During the reign of George W. Bush, America has also seen the following:
- the power of eminent domain given to governments for reasons beyond that of the public good. The Kelo decision now lets government seize land just to sell it to corporate interests.
- a downsizing of vital government services that were designed to aid Americans in times of severe disaster or catastrophe.
-a government that can eavesdrop on all communications between common citizens.
-an espousal of the concept of pre-emptive war under the guise of self-preservation.
-a severely reduced national military capability and readiness.
-a major reduction in veteran services and benefits while the number of vets injured or traumatized grows dramatically.
-a ballooning federal deficit that has put our country at the mercy of foreign nations whose own interests may not coincide with paying for America’s follies.
-cuts to education and increased costs for student loans, causing a drop in the overall education of future American citizens.
-cuts to funding for programs for the poor to pay for the Iraq War and finance tax cuts for the rich.
-a serious reduction in the reliability and sanctity of the vote.
-a pattern of denouncing science and distortion to suit political policy goals.
-an increase in religious fundamentalism in politics.
So much of what we’ve seen goes against all that America has historically stood for. So I must ask those who support this president and his policies, in the wake of condoning and, in some cases, embracing the practice of torture, Where Will The Line Be Drawn?
At what point will you finally decide that enough is enough?
Or will you simply stand by as every last facet of what America is supposed to stand for fades away forever?
Please tell me. Or have you already surrendered to the notion that in the name of ‘terror’ that no sacrifice is too great to make, no liberty too precious to protect, no moral too fundamental that it cannot be changed?
[tag]torture, moral+authority, war+on+terror, Bush, loss+of+freedom[/tag]
23 Responses to “Where Will The Line Be Drawn?”
By christopher Radulich on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
I think it is pretty apparent that we have surrendered in the war on terror.We now support gulags, torure, and holding people indefinetly with no trials or charges. How can we say we are the good guys when we do these things. I guess we no longer believe in the words of the declaration of independence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
By Austin on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Ken- Great post. When the laundry list gets this long it’s time to do a load, no?
I have a post going up in a few moments about the detainee deal that goes into detail about why I think it is so bad. It’s one thing to say that it allows torture, but it’s importang, I feel, to understand how a compromise with the president yields terrible law. Every “concession” by the White House made it stronger.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Ken,
You don’t say this but it is implied, I think. Bush bears no responsibility whatsoever for the Kelo decision, nor do any of the Justices that he has placed on the Supreme Court. The Justices that voted for Kelo were the Liberal Justices. No Concervative on the court at the time would touch that with a ten foot pole. Listing this as one of the negatives under Bush’s reign, while technically true, appears to make him responsible and not mentioning who is actually to blame for the opinion seems biased. You might as easily include, as a positive event under Bush’s reign the near universal backlash at the state and local levels AGAINST the Kelo decision. Bush is as responsible for the one just as much as he is responsible for the other, which is to say, not at all.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Ken,
This is a distortion. Even as reported, the President cannot wiretap communications between common citizens both of whom are within the United States without a warrant. You know as well as I that the communications are international calls, one end of which is outside of the United States and, as reported, those are hardly calls between “common citizens” but are calls to or from phone numbers of suspected Al Qaeda agents…hardly common citizens of the USA. From the article you linked:
Again, your description seems misleading and biased.
By ken grandlund on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Fine Craig, toss that one out.
Even without the Kelo decision included, the lengths to which Bush supporters will go to purport that this administration continues to make America a better place amazes me to no end. It reminds me of the parent who refuses to acknowledge that their child actually is a criminal when shown the video tape of them robbing the convenience store, finds the gun in the kids room, and notes the pile of money in the drawer. Only in this case it’s not just a 7-11 that gets the hit, it’s the whole damn country, our reputation, and any sense of morality in the world that we’ve worked so hard to achieve over the last two centuries.
By ken grandlund on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Well Craig, maybe I should have offered this link to support my claim about eavesdropping an all communications.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Ken,
Even that link doesn’t support your claim of the Government eavesdropping, which implies listening in, on conversations between common citizens. The Governement is collecting phone records, not listening in on conversations.
Sorry, but your statement as given isn’t supported by any evidence that you’ve supplied so far.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
From the new linked article:
By ken grandlund on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Craig,
Your faith in the government far exceeds my own. I have no such comfort in the words from this administration that they do not actually listen to conversations they have no warrant to listen to. Ask yourself whether massive datamining is necessary and vital in tracking terrorist activities…have you ever said the word “bomb” or “terrorist” or “bin Laden” in a phone call? If the data mining flags that call and then listening occurs, is that not a warrantless search of your own private communications?
As you continue to debate the necessity and propriety of this and other items mentioned in the post, it seem to me that your answer to the pertinent question at hand is, “nowhere.”
By tos on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
If John Kerry was datamining I’ll bet the Times would be defending it like they did whenClinton was using the same program w/o warrants. The Times stated “It is a Neccessity”
I am sure all the dems would be agreeing with it as well. Where if he was using it we would still be defending it. That’s the difference. Although hypothetical I needed to to make my point.
By ken grandlund on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Had I known about data mining under Clinton I’d have been just as angered. The big difference (to me) is the scope of the program under Bush to include nearly all communications.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Ken,
The words I quoted were not from some Administration shill, as far as I can tell, they are being reported as fact, presumably from the same sources who violated their non-disclosure contracts to significantly weaken the national security of their nation in order to leak this program in the first place. Exactly no one in the article or any other article that I’ve seen, claims that the administration or the CIA or anyone else, for that matter, is eavesdropping on common citizens. You welcome to your opinion but your assertion is not stated as an opinion; it is stated as fact…a fact that is, so far, unsupported by any facts.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
This story is about collection of records, long after the phone calls involved have been made. It is not possible for the government to listen in on such conversations by the time the data is collected so it is irrelevant whether I’ve ever said those words in a conversation over the phone. According to this and all other reports, for strictly within-the-borders phone calls, warrant’s are obtained in all cases.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
And, yes, if I’m talking to someone in Afghanistan or the mountains of Pakistan on a phone whose number has shown up on some captured terrorist’s PDA, my government had better be listening in to every word that is said, whether with or without a warrant. Terrorists in the mountains of Pakistan do not have a fourth amendment right to be plotting with US citizens to commit terrorist acts against Americans.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
I wrote above:
To this I should have added
By ken grandlund on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Craig-
Comment 1- Well where did the leaked information come from if not from someone within the administration who had knowledge of it? You assume they had a non-disclosure agreement, but did they? I don’t know- perhaps they did. Many corporations have them too to keep employees from disclosing evidence of wrongdoing- is it okay to violate an agreement designed to hide illegal or harmful activity? And if so, is it still worth it do speak out regardless of the personal consequences if doing so protects a majority of people from said wrongdoing? An interesting question.
Comment 2- According to the report, warrants were NOT obtained for the datamining program. I quote from the article:
“Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.”
Comment 3 & 4-Clearly, or so I thought, I was not referring to calls you would make to countries abroad, since that is clearly not the scope of the datamining program. I was referring to calls you might make to a friend, family member, or acquaintance. You are attempting to throw this part of the debate off course with a red herring.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Ken,
My comment 1 referred to a quote in your USA Today article on data-mining. The leakers are simply described as “people with direct knowledge of the arrangement”.
(a) That could be a WH official but if it were, I would expect the leaker to be described as “a senior administration official” because that’s the way reporters add to the credibility of their reporting when no names are given.
(b) “People with direct knowledge” could be intelligence officers in the NSA that carry out the program but I would expect them to be described as “current or past intelligence agents who agree to speak off the record…” and they’re not. In any case, NSA officers are not administration people. They are in most cases, long time employees and not, in any case, appointees. Also if an NSA officer is leaking the datamining program, it is because he or she disagrees with the program; why would he or she leak the program but deny that, under the program, the NSA is listening in to conversations? Why would he or she specifically assert that no domestic-only phone calls were being eavesdropped on. It makes no sense.
(c) “People with direct knowledge” could be people in one or more of the various phone agencies whose records are being collected and mined. It could be anyone.
However, my point is that you cannot use the USA Today article in support of your assertion that the president is eavesdropping on common citizens since the only assertion made in the report directly contradicts your assertion and exactly no one in that article even attempts to say that people are being eavesdropped on under this particular program.
Conclusion: The USA Today article does not support your contention.
Your originally linked article we’ve already discussed and discarded since the program therein described is hardly correctly characterized by the president eavesdropping on common citizens. It was after my challenge to this article’s relevance to your contention that you pointed me to the USA Today article because the NY Times article did not support your contention. If you were satisfied that the Times article DID support your contention, you would not have bothered pointing me to the USA Today article.
Conclusion: Neither article supports your contention that the president is eavesdropping on common citizens.
Your contention is unsupported.
I was assuming that this was leaked by someone in one of the intelligence agencies. Surely no one is given any kind of security clearance without signing one. It’s possible that, if the leaker is from one or more of the phone companies that they have no such agreement so I can’t say for sure. I concede that point.
Well in private corporations, there are whistleblower shield laws to protect leakers from retaliation. In the government, there is a process whereby leakers can make known illegal activities to Congress but keep intelligence itself secret. The leaker is protected from retaliation and intelligence secrets are preserved.
But I’ve already demonstrated that, not only in the USA Today article that you linked to regarding data-mining, but also in the NY Times article detailing the NSA electronic Surveillance program, in both articles, it is specifically denied that purely domestic phone calls are intercepted without a warrant or it is specifically reported that purely domestic phone calls are never intercepted without a warrant.
You’ve asserted, in your post and subsequent comments, that the President, without a warrant, eavesdrops on the conversations of common citizens and you are talking about conversations within the borders of the country. You have no support for that contention.
Again, you are free to believe it is happening and to say that you believe that it is happening. You are not free to make a factual assertion that it is happening without specific supporting evidence. Your opinion is not the same as an independently verifiable fact.
By ken grandlund on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
Craig- Yes, you figured out the numbering I was using.
“You’ve asserted, in your post and subsequent comments, that the President, without a warrant, eavesdrops on the conversations of common citizens and you are talking about conversations within the borders of the country. “
Actually Craig, in the initial post, I asserted only that these things have come to pass under the Bush administration, and that as the leader of that administration, he is responsible for their happening. Whether or not I have the proof to justify those beliefs does not change my opinion, and it is that, my opinion.So I concede that it is not independently verifiable at this point in time. However, that does not mean it is not happening either.
As our esteemed Secretary of Defense has said (and I was reminded from another comment in another post), “There’s another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.”
Of course he was referring to the infamous WMD’s in Iraq, but the concept holds here as well.
If that contention is good enough to go to war for, it is good enough for me to hold these opinions as factual, regardless of whether the conclusive proof is apparent at this time. However, unlike Rummy, if future facts bear me wrong, I will gladly admit my error of thought.
Now, instead of trying to pick apart every piece of ‘evidence’ I have presented, how about an answer to the prime question of this post now? At what point would you draw the line at this administrations rather unprecedented consolidation of power and control in their quest to ‘keep America safe?’
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
As described the range of techniques used are a slap; a belly slap; a shake; sleep deprivation, perhaps including uncomfortable positioning, cold air and water dousing and loud, obnoxious music; and waterboarding, these forming a continuum from lightest to most serious techniques.
Apparently, of these techniques, no one has not broken under waterboarding — no one has lasted more than 30 seconds, in fact — and some have broken before getting to waterboarding. One high level AQ person broke from nothing more than being taken to Khalid Sheik Mohammad’s cell after he (KSM) had been broken and that was enough to get him to talk. If no one is able to withstand more than 30 seconds of waterboarding which, as described, does not endanger the person of drowning, does not get water in his lungs, does not cause oxygen deprivation caused brain damage and causes no permanent physical damage whatsoever, I see no reason to ever go beyond these mentioned techniques even in the infamous ticking nuclear bomb situation.
That’s where I would draw the line. I would not, for example, sanction breaking bones or closed fist beatings, or causing injury to kidneys or major organs. I would not sanction cutting, pulling fingernails or toenails, burning, piercing, crushing, poking eyes out or anything else of this nature.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 22, 2006 | Reply
To continue, since my above comment addressed only the issue of coercive interrogation techniques and the post addresses many more issues, I will say that many of the issues that you raise nail the administration to the wall.
For example, cuts to veterans, even if it’s just cuts in the growth of spending and closing VA hospitals seems to be a bad idea when we have soldiers in two wars becoming casualties and getting Post-Traumatic Stress syndrome and other health problems.
Tax cuts at a time of war are always a questionable tactic. I can understand them, given the economic situation following the bubble burst and the economic problems that 9/11 caused and, arguably they have helped the economy and have arguably upped tax receipts. Still, we’re in two very expensive wars and cutting services to medicare etc?
I voted for Bush in 2000 because I vote for Republicans for most major offices. At the time, I had had enough of the Clintons and Gore seemed like a much less personable Clinton, a guy that kissing his wife was a selling point. I was never terribly impressed with Bush either but he got my vote.
2004, he ran against a guy that was not much changed by 9/11. Sorry, but no human being could be not much changed by 9/11. Either he was lying or I wanted nothing to do with him. What I viewed as his appalling behavior after returning from Vietnam followed up by his smug “reporting for duty” salute rancled me. It seemed like the height of hypocrisy and his approach to counterterrorism sounded like a return to Clinton’s “lob a missile at an aspirin factory” approach. I wasn’t interested.
I’ve never been a big fan of a lot of his policies but I did and still do agree with the attack on Afghanistan (although we should have finished the job there; if we’d have devoted the resources to Afghanistan that we did to Iraq, Afghanistan would be a peacefull place by now) and, although premature, with the attack on Iraq. I may have agreed with Kerry’s “wrong war, wrong time” assessment but I had no confidence that a President Kerry would stay in Iraq and I am convinced that we need to stay in Iraq until Iraq is a self-sustaining country. I think Bush has made a lot of mistakes but I wasn’t willing to bank on Kerry.
One final note on Bush and the consolidation of power. I believe that we are in a time of national emergency. Although we’ve gone five years without a successful attack, it hasn’t been for want of trying as the recent plot to blow up up to ten passenger planes over the Atlantic would seem to show and as the AQ leaders themselves have promised. I take these people seriously. I don’t believe, necessarily, that they will successfully detonate a nuclear bomb in America but I do think that if they can obtain one they will try. I don’t believe that they will destroy America; I don’t think they have that power. However, I do believe that thousands of more deaths are within their reach if they succeed and I plan not to let them succeed if we can do anything about it so I am a firm believer in the inherent power of the President, whoever that may be, to take extraordinary steps to prevent a future devatating attack on US soil. He’s the Commander in Chief and, darn it, signals intelligence is his job to gather however he needs to do it. If that means forgoing warrants to prevent another homeland attack, I’m all for it. On the other hand, that doesn’t go for normal law enforcement, which I see as something entirely different.
I am very, very angry at whoever has been leaking all of these intelligence gathering programs. They are traitors in my book, pure and simple, who have placed taking down the President above the security of their nation. You all can argue with me until you are blue in the face but there are legal and secure whistle-blower avenues for disclosing what one thinks are governmental misbehavior and none of them involve talking to the press about what our nation is doing, details and all, to defend against a war-time enemy. If they get these people, they should rot in prison.
Since I don’t have any control over who serves in Congress, other than voting for two state Senators and the Representatives from my district, I have little interest in the Congressional races in other places. I am sickened by the whole “best congresscritter money can buy” scandals that have come out, Democrat and Republican, Pork and earmarks need to be dealt with, and many other things. I’m far from enamored with most of the current crop of Congresspersons and if I could vote for or against all of them, there’d be some changes made but I can’t so I’ll make my decision in November based upon my own Sens and Reps and their performance.
That should be a sufficiently detailed answer for now.
By ken grandlund on Sep 23, 2006 | Reply
Thanks Craig, that was indeed a sufficient answer. And as usual, while we don’t always agree, I appreciate our conversations quite a bit.
By Craig R. Harmon on Sep 23, 2006 | Reply
You’re welcome, Ken. Sorry for the hard time over the Kelo and eavesdropping thing but I get burned when I read news articles where opinions are reported as facts. Same on blogs. I understand your distrust of the government, particularly when the ‘other guys’ are in control of the two political branches. Anyone who’s lived through Watergate has to always wonder what the Government is doing. The various leaks, my opinion of which I’ve already mentioned, only tend to exacerbate the problem.
Anyway, it’s always a pleasure.
By spook sniffer on Sep 23, 2006 | Reply
“I am sure all the dems would be agreeing with it as well.”
Pathetic. The “us vs. them” argument continues to be advanced in public discussion.
Sorry, but “dems” are just as bad as “republicans” these days.
When you can admit you have a problem, you’re halfway to solving it…