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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wonk who wrote (12395)	2/17/2006 9:24:25 AM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 541355

A very meaty post, the kind of comment I enjoy for its substance. I'll respond to it when I have time to do your piece justice.

To: wonk who wrote (12395)	2/17/2006 11:54:10 AM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 541355

thanks, ww. About as thorough a post as could be imagined and much more than the original op ed piece deserved. We could argue about her credibility all day and get nowhere because, I gather from c2s posts, he's dug in. I've clearly not found her credible in the past. However, I think the issue of Toensing's credibility is, at best, a sidebar issue. The real issue is the wisdom of warrantless surveillance. And the further real issue is how that gets worked through in terms of data mining. About which you know much more than the rest of us.

To: wonk who wrote (12395)	2/18/2006 8:49:26 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541355

Remember that I focused on the difficulties with FISA's effectiveness, not on justifying the Administration's actions, though I have preliminarily concluded that it knew that the legalities of the surveillance were quite dodgy, yet that it acted in good faith. Why else would a politically sophisticated administration inform Democratic congressmen of what it was doing unless it was? As a result, I believe that it is highly unlikely that any abuses resulted from the program. Given the precautions the Administration imposed on itself while conducting this program, and the inclusion of leading Democrats into the circle of those who were aware of it, I think it is going to be vey difficult to turn this episode into an impeachment or a major constitutional crisis. Don't get me wrong, the potential for unchecked abuse was there, and that is dangerous and troublesome, but I have yet to see any actual instances of it. Time will tell on that point, and I reserve the right to change my thinking should some abuses be demonstrated. The issue is how to conduct surveillance without infringing the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. No doubt. Absolutely correct, but only partially so because national security cannot be ignored as a genuine and substantial interest in balancing things. Actually, the dispute is at the core one about federalism and separation of powers, but I won't go there as that is beyond the scope of this discussion. Nonetheless, it is at the crossroads beween the 4th amendment and genuine national security interests that FISA breaks down, and I thought that Toensign did a pretty good job of delineating how that breakdown occurred both from a historical and a present-tense viewpoint. As to the "wall" and Toensigns's pejorative stories--I disagree with your views. She goes into extensive and clear detail on how the Patriot Act brought down the wall while illustrating very well how much damage it did. The wall was a Clinton/Reno creature. That 9/11 may have been prevented with Moussaoui's arrest had the wall not been in place is something I don't think too many people dispute anymore. I don't consider that pejorative at all. Your analysis of the timing procedures under FISA was great. However, you accuse her of not constructing a proper analogy, as follows: She hasn’t constructed an accurate analogy. Yet she’s a skilled, high-priced DC Attorney. Either an amateurish mistake or deliberate distortion. I'll let the thread decide. I disagree. I thought the following was exactly the analogy we all are looking for: The NSA undoubtedly has identified many foreign phone numbers associated with al Qaeda. If these numbers are monitored only from outside the U.S., as consistent with FISA requirements, the agency cannot determine with certainty the location of the persons who are calling them, including whether they are in the U.S. New technology enables the president, via NSA, to establish an early-warning system to alert us immediately when any person located in the U.S. places a call to, or receives a call from, one of the al Qaeda numbers. Do Mr. Gore and congressional critics want the NSA to be unable to locate a secret al Qaeda operative in the U.S.? If we had used this ability before 9/11, as the vice president has noted, we could have detected the presence of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego, more than a year before they crashed AA Flight 77 into the Pentagon. I think the above is the bottom line. An amended FISA has to account for the scenario she laid out in the quote. It doesn't, at least as far as I appreciate things. It also seems to be the basis for the Administration's actions.