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Audacity of Truth
Whiner-in-Chief:
"[W]hether the grumbling is about Republicans on Fox or bloggers in pajamas, there's a word for what the president and his aides are doing. That word is "whining." And nothing [...] does more damage to Obama's credibility or authority than the sense that a popular president is becoming the whiner-in-chief."
- John Nichols, Nation Magazine - 10/12/09
Michael Barone on the MSM’s ‘eavesdropping’ coverage
He nails the overhype and sensationalistic slant to the MSM’s reporting of the NSA ‘eavesdropping’ controversy:
“News stories” in the Times and other newspapers and many national newscasts have largely ignored this legal record. Instead, they are tinged with a note of hysteria and the suggestion that fundamental freedoms have been violated by the NSA intercepts.
Earlier this month, a Newsweek cover story depicted George W. Bush as living inside a bubble, isolated from knowledge of the real world. Many of the news stories about the NSA intercepts show that it is mainstream media that are living inside a bubble, carefully insulating themselves and their readers and viewers from knowledge of applicable law and recent historical precedent, determined to pursue an agenda of undermining the Bush administration regardless of any damage to national security.
[...]
The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, should not be interpreted in a way that makes it “a suicide pact.” The notion that terrorists’ privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact. The Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in the United States should not be stretched into a ban on interceptions of communications from America’s enemies abroad.
The mainstream media, inside their left-wing bubble, evidently thinks that there is not much in the way of danger. They should take a trip to Ground Zero, to the Sept. 11 memorial at the Pentagon, to Shanksville, Pa., where the heroes of United flight 93 prevented the terrorists from hitting their target in Washington.
Read the whole thing.
Hat tip: Betsy Newmark, a great blogger I’ll be guest blogging with (along with several other distinguished bloggers) at Right Wing News tomorrow.
Related Toldjah So posts:
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9 Responses to “Michael Barone on the MSM’s ‘eavesdropping’ coverage”
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The old enemy had an agent as the NSA history mentions: “Soviet intelligence had had an agent inside AFSA who had revealed the extent of U.S. penetration of Soviet cipher systems. This was William Weisband, who had been recruited by the KGB in 1934. During and after World War II, Weisband was involved in the U.S. COMINT efforts, working (as a native speaker of Russian) in the Russian section in ASA and, later, AFSA. Although in 1950 the FBI uncovered information alleging espionage activities by Weisband in the early 1940s, he was never charged with espionage – Weisband lost his job with AFSA and served a year in prison for contempt of a grand jury.”
Now today’s critics are praising themselves for the damage they do.
“The mainstream media, inside their left-wing bubble, evidently thinks that there is not much in the way of danger”
About a year ago, I had lunch at a restaurant near Washington Reagan Airport. The end of the runway was visible from the window, and I remembered that before Flight 93 was brought down, the hijackers had already dialed in the frequency for the radiobeacon (VOR) which is located at this airport–just across the river from the White House and the Capitol.
Pretty chilling.
“The notion that terrorists’ privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact”
A warrant requirement protects our privacy, not the terrorists.
We need to protect ourselves. If that means my child needs to identify herself at the airport, so be it. If it means my child needs to be seached, so be it. If that means my child needs to take her shoes off and her back pack off, so be it. To me, we are protecting this nation. God Bless America.
The Declaration of Independence states governments are instituted among men to secure inalienable rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). When the right to life conflicts with the right to be free from “unreasonable” search and seizure, it is useful to define reasonable. A common law definition of a reasonable man considers a person of ordinary intelligence and experience, but judges reject this ordinary man and prefer abstract legal arguments that befuddle ordinary citizens.
Before 19 terrorists boarded planes on September 11, 2001, the FBI seized the computer of an accomplice, but had no legal authority to examine its contents. If an agent with ordinary intelligence had searched the files and found information that might have thwarted the attack, Judges would apply an exclusionary rule and not issue warrants to arrest the hijackers before they entered any aircraft.
After the fact, representatives of ordinary citizens learned there had been an abundance of data, facts, and circumstances that clearly indicated motive and intent to cause mass destruction. Citizens criticized their elected officials for failing to follow the dots. Congress passed legislation empowering government to monitor conduct that threatens the safety of citizens.
Technology has made the communication of personal data routinely available to hackers, the business community, and agents of foreign governments. Laws may declare this conduct illegal, but they fail to protect privacy, just as laws against murder and robbery fail to prevent those offenses. Despite billions spent on data security, breaches are discovered daily. A person of ordinary intelligence and experience knows that an expectation of absolute privacy is unreasonable.
Select provisions of the Patriot Act directed government agents to monitor communications for threats to public safety. Potential threats were flagged, assembled and studied for patterns that could lead to preventive actions. Some have claimed that this broad search for threats constitutes an invasion of individual privacy.
They place the right to privacy above the right to life. If government agents illegally learn of a threat to life, they must not act on that information and the government agents should be punished. They want to stop collecting the dots (data mining), absent probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, particularly describing a specific identifiable threat. If no data is collected there is no way to know of an attack until it occurs.
If congress withdraws authority to monitor data, agents wanting to protect the public from violence must petition the courts for permission. It is unreasonable for citizens to elect 535 representatives to a congress that allows a divided Supreme Court impose an exclusionary rule to deliberately suppresses accurate information.
It should be possible to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens by examining the reasonableness of government agents on a case by case basis. When facts are in dispute, trust juries of ordinary people to return a fair verdict, based upon all the evidence, without exclusions. Fear that someone may violate a law in the future is a poor reason to invalidate a law that is designed to protect the inalienable rights of citizens.
>A warrant requirement protects our
>privacy, not the terrorists.
Allow me to quote myself:
The Left is merely ramping up paranoia, hoping that people fearful of government intrusion will vote the Big Government party into power in 2006 and 2008. The fact is that no one actually cares about your recipe exchanges with Aunt Sally, or how you complain about your boss and to whom. Unless your Aunt Sally is a known al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan, no one’s even listening.
If Osama bin Laden calls me up from his Baluchistan hideout, however, you can bet I want the Feds taking notes. Moreover, I want them tracking the call to its source and sending every JDAM and MOAB in our inventory.
andrew,
Edited. –ST We are talking about calls coming from known terrorists. This isn’t for criminal prosecution.
If you are accepting calls and money from known terrorists, I want the government investigating you to the nth degree and forget the nicities.
ST, I know that, and the point I was making is that andrew is trying to prosecute as a law enforcement issue a national security issue where you don’t go to the courts to remedy the matter, you call out the Marines, the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, and anyother military force we have to eliminate the threat.
“The fact is that no one actually cares about your recipe exchanges with Aunt Sally, or how you complain about your boss and to whom. Unless your Aunt Sally is a known al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan, no one’s even listening.”
warrants make sure of that. Mistakes happen. Horrible things have happened to people who it turns out were not bad people. Warrants are a check on that.
“ST, I know that, and the point I was making is that andrew is trying to prosecute as a law enforcement issue a national security issue where you don’t go to the courts to remedy the matter”
FISA warrants aren’t part of the criminal law or criminal procedure. you can’t use them for law enforcement.