''Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?''

[Octafish]

4. If Rehnquist and Scalia hadn't fixed the Florida problem there wouldn't have been any war on terra.

I know you know, whatchamacallit. Here's one guy who wishes no one remembered:

'All right, you've covered your ass.'' -- George W Bush to CIA briefer, Aug. 2001.
From WaPo's review of Suskind's book:

Tenet and his loyalists also settle a few scores with the White House here. The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now." Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."

SOURCE: The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light

President Gore would have listened to Richard Clark and done something before bin Laden. Where would all the military contractors and lobbyists be today? Collecting unemployment, I hope. The warmongers and traitors who used the attacks of 9-11 to make war on Iraq would probably still be free as they would never have had the chance to lie America into war.