* An overreaching administration that is willing to at least haphazardly fight our enemies
* The opposition who refuses to even define our enemies or what it would mean to defeat them and considers not giving the administration an “out” more important than doing so.

Which do you think I should support?

“Really? I looked at the original link and post, and it was about the phone record surveillance program. I read your other comments and saw no mention of any other actions. Obviously I have missed it, could you point it out to me?”

I am sorry: I hadn’t realized that you were on a dessert island for the last six years and thus unable to understand the well known context in whihc this one particulalr program takes place.

“My understanding is that the justifications claimed stem primarily from legislation passed by Congress, essentially the same document that approved the invasion of Iraq (which was a declaration of war). You may not agree with that, but it is what the Bush Administration thinks and the basis of their claims for these kind of powers.”

No. The Bush Amdin claims that Article 2 gives them the power to do as they see fit with regard to matters of national security, at least. Reading some of the stuff they produce it sounds as if they want that notion to apply everywhere, and people in their administration have made the argument that the Executive cannot be overseen by the other branches outside of their duties, but I am not sure if anyone has gone on record with that broad of an argument in their official duties.

“Perhaps you could do a post on what you think such conditions should be and so create a basis for a non-empty oppositionism.”

I am not the one claiming extraordinary powers for the duration of the conflict and not defing the end point of the conflict. I think Bush’s moves are not required for success and in fact hinder our efforts so I feel no compulsion to give him an out. The point was merely to highlight the radical nature of his moves — no President has ever claimed the right to go as far for an unkowable amount of time.

“1. We will see how long SWIFT continues to cooperate in the face of this publicity, being already nervous about the operation.
2. The NY Times disagrees with your assessment on the effectiveness of the program. Are you saying that the NY Times is simultaneously “embarrassing the Administration” and shilling for it?
3. The NY Times also reports that there was quite a bit of oversight on the program. See (2).”

I am sorry, but SWIFT is going to stop obeying what appear to be legal warrants becasue they think exposure makes them look bad? And note that SWIFT had no problem with real security issues — they were only concerned about the ridiculously broad scope of the program and were fine with it once they had forced safeguards into the procedures.

The NYT article was ambivalent about the effectivness of the program and the LAT was even more so. Both articles made clear, however, that the Bush Admini was sucking up every piece of information it could out of those databases and was doing it with administrative letters which are secret and not subject to judicial review.

And, by the ay, the link is about the case in the illegal wiretapping, not the bank records.

You also say that we are arguing about looking at phone records. No, actually

Really? I looked at the original link and post, and it was about the phone record surveillance program. I read your other comments and saw no mention of any other actions. Obviously I have missed it, could you point it out to me?

As for this,

what are some of the justifications that Bush uses to claim legality for his actions

My understanding is that the justifications claimed stem primarily from legislation passed by Congress, essentially the same document that approved the invasion of Iraq (which was a declaration of war). You may not agree with that, but it is what the Bush Administration thinks and the basis of their claims for these kind of powers.

As for a clear condition of victory, we go right back to my original point. Let’s assume that Bush has been terribly derelict in specifying victory conditions against our current enemies (I think we agree that ‘war on terror’ is a ludicrious description of the current conflict). Perhaps you could do a post on what you think such conditions should be and so create a basis for a non-empty oppositionism.

My condition? The unconditional surrender and destruction of caliphascism, the ideology that is our current enemy.

As for the money transfer monitoring, three points:

1. We will see how long SWIFT continues to cooperate in the face of this publicity, being already nervous about the operation.
2. The NY Times disagrees with your assessment on the effectiveness of the program. Are you saying that the NY Times is simultaneously “embarrassing the Administration” and shilling for it?
3. The NY Times also reports that there was quite a bit of oversight on the program. See (2).

Fred: You are wavering. You now want to put people in groups based on skin color. What happened to individual rights? Am I now to be put into a group with slaveholders because their skin was white and so is mine? Some of my ancestor came after the War Between the States. Does that mean I am only partly in a group? Affirmative Discrimination is a racist attempt to get special treatment based on skin color. There’s no other way to put it.

You are being disnegenous. I gave you two reasons for thinking that this is different and much worse, and you ignored both. You also say that we are arguing about looking at phone records. No, actually, we are arguing about the President claiming for himself the power to hold people without trial or access to lawyers or anyone on the outside forever; we are arguing about the President claiming that he has the right to ignore any law he and he alone deems an impediment to his notion of what constitutes protectign national defense. Your attmept to minimize that is disengenous at best.

And as for this:
“yet willfully destroyed the effort by publishing. ”

My, God, man that’s an idiotic statement. The article did not destory the effectivness of a damn thing, unless you really are dumb enough to believe that the people who pulled off 9/11 and Blai and London and Madrid are so stupid that it never occured to them that their financial records would be searched for and monitored. Of course, any terorrist who believed that would be so stupid that I would have to question wether or not their brain was large enough to contain enough brain cells to handle complex tasks — like breathing.

The only thing the article did was embarees the Administration and its apologists becasue it showed, once again, that the Bush Amdinistraiton is spying on just about everyone without reasonable judicial oversight. Ebaressing Bush is hardly endareing the country.