This Call May Be Monitored ...

[Thom Little]

On Oct. 17, 2002, the head of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, made an eloquent plea to a joint House-Senate inquiry on intelligence for a sober national discussion about whether the line between liberty and security should be shifted after the 9/11 attacks, and if so, precisely how far. He reminded the lawmakers that the rules against his agency's spying on Americans, carefully written decades earlier, were based on protecting fundamental constitutional rights.

If they were to be changed, General Hayden said, "We need to get it right. We have to find the right balance between protecting our security and protecting our liberty." General Hayden spoke of having a "national dialogue" and added: "What I really need you to do is talk to your constituents and find out where the American people want that line between security and liberty to be."

General Hayden was right. The mass murders of 9/11 revealed deadly gaps in United States intelligence that needed to be closed. Most of those involved failure of performance, not legal barriers. Nevertheless, Americans expected some reasonable and carefully measured trade-offs between security and civil liberties. They trusted their elected leaders to follow long-established democratic and legal principles and to make any changes in the light of day. But President Bush had other ideas. He secretly and recklessly expanded the government's powers in dangerous and unnecessary ways that eroded civil liberties and may also have violated the law.

.......

Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.




http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/opinion/18sun1.html

[TheGunslinger]

1. .

Between Gonzales, Chertoff, Yoo and Ashcroft, this administration has completely and utterly shredded any respect of the US Constitution, US Laws and International Law to which the US is a signatory.

[aquart]

3. Yes.

[Turbineguy]

2. This General Hayden

sounds like he swore an oath to defend the Constitution and not the republican party.

Indeed the 9/11 attacks can be put down to mostly incompetence.

[DELUSIONAL]

4. Is NYT a valid news source? anymore?

Any more when I see that NYT is the source -- I switch to another source.

They are sounding a bit sanctimonious and pompous --

NYT is part of the problem -- and now they have BECOME the problem.