I rarely comment back to you because there is no way we are going to agree. I have no clue why you post here since you ignore all my points and just write what is in your head.

But regading your Hillary Clinton question I will answer: Yes, I would still be for the program. (1) It is not illegal because you don’t get warrants for war activities, (2) it is necessary to protect the people, so (3) being an over the top partisan just to risk people’s lives is a bit too small minded for my taste, and (4) Hillary would not be the one selecting the targets for surveillance. And neither would her administration. The program is set up to follow leads – not snoop on politicians. And it has sufficient review for a real whistleblower to come forward if a Clinton or Bush decided to misuse the program. Misuse = jail time in the Federal Government on a program like this.

You can’t order people to risk jail time. Not going to happen.

So, when you tear away all the liberal fantasies your point is silly. Absolutely silly.

It appears that the FBI commonly is directed by the DoJ lead US Attorney on a particular case. This becomes the steering of the “criminal complaint” and frankly the judgement of that lead Attorney seems to taint the investigation as information evolves to refer something to the US Attorney’s office.

I suspect the FBI has been in this mode too long. They cannot direct their own investigations anymore. They leave that to the US Attorney of the district where the probable crime occurred. In intelligence and counter-intelligence, they cannot do the job now.
I fear the Carter administration still influences the actions of the CIA, FBI, DoJ, and even NSA and we are doomed until those people are flushed out and turned out.

Perhaps we have some obligation to try to sift through what it means that our government is spying on us in violation of the law and the Constitution.

The response by real conservatives on this issue is on the money. But the authoritarian streak in the Republican Party backing Bush on this is counfounding.

Here’s the real questions at issue:

Would you think this was a good idea if Hillary Clinton were president?

Would you be defending the clear and unnecessary violation of the law?

Do you have complete confidence that she would never misuse this “inherent power” for any partisan reason?

This Republican administration has tried to cast this as a kind of abstract legal debate for some open-ended issue. The abstract legal debate was debated years ago, and Dubya violated the resulting law that was its conclusion.

Another interesting thing about this is that the public debate is being handled before any serious investigation regarding what exactly was done, specifically what has the Republican administration collected on the basis of Dubya’s decision to violate standing law?

They say the intercepts were known terrorist phone calls coming into the United States. Are we sure about that?

Dubya also said before the scandal broke that all wire-tapping of Americans required a warrant…that the rule “hadn’t changed”…while defending the Patriot Act.

When the State of Texas had a political dispute over Tom Delay-facilitated gerrymandering and Democratic politicians crossed the border to protest that actions being taken at the Republican-dominated Statehouse, Tom Delay used Federal assets to track them.

We’re talking Republicans here, who have been shown time and time again to be untrustworthy…some of whom are now under indictment, and for whom huge questions of deception cloud justifications for a major war from which there appears to be no clean exit.

I would suggest that upon investigation, we will find that Dubya’s violation of the law rendered little, if any new capability to the NSA, other than the evasion of legal oversight. It probably yielded no value added in terms of the effectiveness in the war on terror, and only makes sense within the context of Republican ideology seemed bent on providing dictatorial powers for the Executive Branch.

We will probably also find, upon investigation, that the nature of the NSA operations were not as limited as Dubya and his lawyers suggest.

As far as passing things from the DOD to the FBI, and back, there are still laws in place governing this, and the problem the FBI was experiencing, specifically being deluged with information, simply points out that the FBI is and was a Law Enforcement agency, not an intelligence agency. They were totally unequipped to process that sort of raw collected information in any organized fashion. And they probably still are.

It would explain why there was a wall put up between SOCOM talking to the FBI about possible leads in the US. If this was the crippling mentality prior to 9-11, then that could explain that one aspect of it.

My problem with Able Danger is it was gutted because a sister program on China influence in America apparently snagged some Clinton administration names, and in the name of political CYA our one outside chance to see 9-11 coming was torn apart.

Able Danger was working outside the NSA and using a new technology that sometimes can get around barriers and allow common sense to return to a blind bureaucracy. In that sense Able Danger was a lost opportunity to penetrate this agent, theoretical wall.