NSA Had Domestic Call Monitoring Before 9/11? 479
MarkusQ writes "Bloomberg is reporting that, according to documents filed in the breach of privacy suit on behalf of Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA asked AT&T to set up its domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Could it be that they were intending to monitor domestic calls (and internet traffic) all along, and the 'Global War on Terror' was just a convenient excuse when they got caught?" From the article: "...an unnamed former employee of the AT&T unit provided them with evidence that the NSA approached the carrier with the proposed plan. Afran said he has seen the worker's log book and independently confirmed the source's participation in the project. He declined to identify the employee."
Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:0, Insightful)
Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the so-called "War on Terror" is just an excuse! Before the illegal
invasion of Iraq, no terrorist groups were based there, but look now! This
was widely expected to happen. So the current Administration has increased, not
reduced, the risk of Americans to be victims of terrorists.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:3, Insightful)
Illegal? (Score:1, Insightful)
Illegal according to what law? You know that when they are attacking other countries they are not required to obey the laws in that country.
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:3, Insightful)
"See the NSA already started to take the civil liberties away and they wanted more so they planned out 9/11."
MIHOP == Made IT Happen On Purpose.
As if, a president so incompentent as to do nothing when the security agencies started seeing red isn't enough. He has to part of a criminal cabal to do it their damned selves.
Re:No surprise here (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who believe in "The land of the Free" have dipped to deep into the kool-aid.
When you give you president dictatorial powers and have no oversight and no way of getting rid of a president during his term, you have put yourself at risk. Add to that the ever increasing polarization of the politics in this country and you'll understand that there are no difference between a one-party state and a two-party state.
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:2, Insightful)
The dogs were carefully watching the henhouse but the weasels still got in. So what good are they?
Re:Legal and Constitutional (Score:3, Insightful)
Evidently, every law abiding citizen in the United States.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Could it be? (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of gasping about how they *planned to do this horrible thing* even *before* 9/11 like a little school girl you should go out and work on the political side that made this even possible. Instead of railing against Bush for using the tools at his disposal you should work on modifying those tools.
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a sense, there is no such thing as a strong piece of evidence. Only a strong pattern of evidence. It bugs me when people talk about "confirmation bias" as if it is some kind of logical fallacy. It's not. At least in part it is not: it's the inevitable consequence of living in a world of uncertainty and contradictory evidence.
The thing about the MIHOP people is that they start with the strong belief that Bush is evil. Given that, it's easy to believe he knew about 9/11 but let it happen so that he could use it as an excuse for all the evil things he wanted to do. Things that would strike the neutral observer as ordinary incompetence become part of a sinister plan. The same thing happened a few years ago with the Republicans who were sure that Clinton arranged murders and other outrageous pieces of skullduggery.
The thing is, if this particular piece of information is confirmed, it will actually provide strong support one of the MIHOP standpoints central assumptions: the Bush Administration needed an excuse to justify things it wanted to do. Maybe not enough for the mythical unbiased observer to buy the whole MIHOP package, but enough to buy several signigifant pieces of it.
Re:Illegal? (Score:1, Insightful)
According to the UN? Which resolution, show it to me. Meanwhile, here are all the UN resolutions Iraq defied and blatantly ignored that got them rightfully invaded. [whitehouse.gov]
What Kofi Annan says is pretty meaningless since he has no real power, and notice no resolutions ever passed that called the invasion illegal. Considering the other atrocities and corruption that have go on his watch, I wouldn't look to him as for any sort of authority.
Re:No surprise here (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to disagree with that argument: In recent memory, government worked fairly well (not great, but relatively sane) when 2 parties held control of a branch of government (Reagan vs Democratic Congress, Clinton vs Republican Congress), and sucked when a single party controlled all branches of government (George W Bush, Carter). The reason for this phenomenon seems pretty obvious to me: When one party controls all branches of government, the Constitutional checks and balances are ineffective because everyone with the power to stop a branch of government is part of the same organization. In other words, there's really one-party rule going on, even if it's officially a two-party system.
That can lead to a lot of the polarization you're worried about. If one side can't be heard except by screaming as loudly as possible in public, that's exactly what they're going to do, and the other side will start screaming to drown out the screaming of the group not in power. Hence a shrill political debate, and increased polarization as politicians take more extreme positions in order to get noticed.
Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Herman Goering Said.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Illegal? (Score:4, Insightful)
now do some work and search for america vetoing the war was illegal, maybe you should also read up on different cultures to find out what is going on in the world around you
freedom to keep silent (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not about the terrorists, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Illegal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe it's 2006 and there are still people who believe that in 2003:
1. Iraq posed a threat to the coalition
2. Iraq had functional weapons of mass destruction
3. Iraq had anything to do with Al Qaeda, terrorists or terror suspects
Of all the evil this war has caused, I think the worst is the new American Culture of Willful Ignorance that its backers have advocated since before the opening shots were fired.
Re:LoL. Can you people even remember last week? (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's OK if he just adds to the pile?
When I saw the headline I myself thought that meant the program was enacted during the Clinton administration, but with the date of February 2001 it seems Bush had been in office for less than a month and already his administration is trying to expand executive power, with no other excuse beyond the one that has become so clear in the years sense: his belief that the executive always had this power.
"Clinton did it too" is not a valid excuse.
Re:No surprise here (Score:5, Insightful)
The flaw is even worse than you think, because it can't be remedied through "proper" voting. No matter what your political affiliation, you have no choice but re-electing a caste of professional politicians, which differ only on superficial and relatively inconsequential issues like a constitutional amendment explicitly banning gay flag-burning.
Vote for minor party? Only if you want to throw away your vote, for the complete lack of enforcement of gerrymandering laws means even the most incompetent of incumbents win over 90% of the time. Even the recent supreme court ruling tacitly condoned it by only complaining about instances of potential racial gerrymandering. Apparently, cheating is fine, as long as you aren't a bigot when you do it.
Spread the word? Anything you say can be countered by a bombardment of disinformation and distractions that prevent effective dissent. One would think that the alternative media/internet get around this, and it can--but they're going to change that. Plans for complete regulation of the internet are already in the works under the guise of "tiered-service". As John Devorak says, we're in the golden age of the internet--enjoy it while it lasts, because it's soon to end.
-Grym
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Insightful)
The Taliban and Bin Laden aided into power by the US and allies to fight a proxy war.
When someone considered a bad guy cops it, people usually say "what goes around comes around" or "you reap what you sow".
Isreal - put into power by US and allies.
Am I making my point ?
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
In some parts of the world, leaders lead from a position of moral authority, not from the threat of force.
uh, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, since this is
Anyway, 'terrorism' (both domestic and Islamic) weren't a significant problem before 9-11 and they aren't a significant problem today, despite what the 6 o'clock news wants you to believe. Murder takes the lives of many more people (as in several orders of magnitude) per year. Suicide takes 4x more than murder, and car accidents take over 5x more. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and smoking-related respitory diseases together claim over 200x the lives that murder claims (which is itself claims several orders of magnitude more lives than terrorism.)
In terms of human lives, terrorism in America isn't even a blip on the radar. It certainly doesn't justify the expenditure of trillions of dollars on wars and "Homeland Security", nor does it justify the wholesale slaughter of our freedoms and even if it did a domestic call tracking program would do jack shit. Despite what the pundits want you to believe, there is no vast centralized network of terrorists. They have no need to keep in constant contact with each other over long distances, and ruthlessly and indiscriminately monitoring law-abiding American citizens (incidentally, none of the 9-11 terrorists were American citizens) will give us nothing but another step towards a police state.
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fascinating. You have a blanket label for anyone who thinks Bush is evil. I don't think "purpose" has any bearing on the definition of evil. Incompetence raised to a high enough level is, in many ways, indistinguishable from deliberate intent. You don't have to be Darth Vader to personify evil. The most evil people I know tend to be ideologues who feel their dogma is more important than the means to institutionalize it. They are both zealous and incompetent leading to evil in deed if not in character. At a certain point it's hard to tell the difference. Evil is as evil does, to paraphrase an old truism. A little evil mixed with a lot of incompetence, shaken, not stirred, makes a disastrous cocktail regardless of intent.
But it's convenient to have a one-dimensional bucket to dump anyone disagreeing. A label and put down all rolled into one. Like labeling any exit strategy for Iraq as "cut and run" when most people are smart enough to realize no one is really suggesting that.
If Bush supporters represent the brightest and best this country has to offer, or even the biggest fraction of the whole, we're really fucked.
Re:uh, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if there was some vast terrorist conspiracy random spying wouldn't be much use anyway. Indeed it might even be counter productive, were such an entity to exist they could create floods of bogus communications.
Re:LoL. Can you people even remember last week? (Score:2, Insightful)
Who is "he", and how is maintaining the status quo "adding to the pile"?
It seems to me that our monitoring programs have actually shrunk in the last six years or so due to the massive increase in data that there is to monitor. When we were debating Echelon in the '90s, why do you think the NSA wasn't already doing it? Do you think the NSA funded all that Linux performance and scalability work they did out of the kindness of their hearts?
The reason we're finding out about this now instead of ten years ago is that for the first time since, well, pretty much ever, the vast majority of journalists and government employees don't like the current administration, and are working extra hard to dig up dirt.
Mathematically, it does not work. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the answer is "no". Any system will have "false positives", "false negatives", "true positives" and "true negatives".
The "false negatives" mean you miss a plot. As long as the false negative rate is above a certain percentage of the actual plots, it will work.
More problematic is the "false positive" rate. This is when a non-plot is identified as a plot. Innocent people are investigated. This takes time / money / effort.
Given that there is an upper limit on the time / money / effort available, the government will waste resources chasing false leads.
People who do not understand that will look at the extreme rarity of "terrorist attacks" in the US (try to name 5 attacks in the US in the last 100 years without using Google) and conclude that the time / money / effort spent was successful.
However, looking at the budget, you will see that our government is BORROWING the money.
We are going bankrupt in an attempt to chase down a threat that kills fewer people every year than car accidents.
And we are surrending the Rights that our forefathers were willing to give THEIR lives for.
Re:Illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly the one we invoke when, for example, claim the right to navigate certain waters. Or the rights of our uniformed soldiers to certain standards of treatment when captured by the enemy. The same international law that says we can retaliate when our territory is violated, but then enter another country's territory in hot pursuit. The same international law that says it's a crime for a country to harbor terrorist organizations and facilitate their financial and other dealings.
Exactly what body is going to prosecute, convict, and punish a superpower like the United States of America?
International law is for small states violating it partly enforced by the UN security council.
But for states large and small, it is enforced by mutual exchange and recognition of rights. I do not molest your ships on the high seas or press their crews into servitude, and you don't do mine. I don't parade your soliders stripped naked through the streets, nor do I subject them to summary executions. Likewise, you do not do those things to my soliders.
The entire phrase of "international law" is a trite thing. Let's not kid ourselves, international norms and laws only apply to weak countries.
There is some truth in what you say. The same can be said domestically: if a man is rich enough, he is beyond laws that bind poor men. But there are limits. Even the United States depends on the mutual recognition of its rights by other countries. And while we have for many years spent far more money on defense than the rest of the world put together, yet it is not within an order of magnitude of what we would need to enforce our will on the rest of the world.
Don't be to proud of the technological terror we have created. Right now, we can't even really handle Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. North Korea, in our present circumstances, is completely beyond our ability to handle useing "superpower" tools. Absent Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly Iran on the horizon, it might be possible. Military officers I've talked to think that the biggest issue in a military solution, the presence of artillery batteries so close to Seoul, could be managed with our military technology. But we can't do that and Iraq at the same time.
In reality military might only takes you so far in the world. There are other dimensions on which a country can be a superpower, particularly political and economic, that are key to sustaining military superpower status. We have lost our political standing in the world, and our position of economic leadership is very shaky.
Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:2, Insightful)
Rather, it is about two types of intel: that which helps in stealing elections, and business intel. All this infinite talk of incompetence of the Bushies seems to ignore all the money that has been made ($50 billion in war profiteering and another estimated $50 billion or so in humanitarian disaster profiteering and graft and fraud regarding "homeland security" dating back to the profit from the destruction of the WTC).
Ok so it was really effective then, too (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Annan's "moral authority" is neither. (Score:3, Insightful)
And it's exactly Kofi Annan's willingness to treat despots and terrorists with the same deference that he reserves for the elected governments of democracies that strips him of any moral authority. It's his completely luke-warm, moreally rudderless handling of stunning UN-facilitated corruption in things like the Iraq oil-for-food program that indicate what a moral relativist he is. It's not "moral authority," it's classic, ineffectual political correctness writ larger than any warm-and-fuzzy campus activist could ever hope.
Re:Of course! (Score:4, Insightful)
It never ceases to amaze me. There are those that rightly point out Saddam and Bin Laden were assisted by the USA in its covert gaming of the international political spheres, from Gerald Ford through Carter and Reagan and Clinton. Its a policy that started with Eisenhower. And often these are the same people that put George Bush number one on their list of presidential demons for setting up a truely representational government in full daylight for all the world to see exactly what is going on.
It is their abject fear of such upfront actions that drives those covert and stupid mistakes. Would they could put one and one together.
Also speaking of wire-tapping phones, am I the only one here who remembers the late 90's here on Slashdot and all the paranoia over Clinton's Eschelon program? Those posts were classic, and the replies with phrases set to trip off the system were hilarious. Now we have not only duplicate articles saying we've never heard of monitoring calls before, but now we are shocked, SHOCKED, to find out it was going on before 9/11.
These people crack me up.
Re:Egg on James Bamford's face (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Egg on James Bamford's face (Score:4, Insightful)
- Any similarities to NKVD recruiting blanket all operators in some telephone exchanges in the 30-es and having a call record copy of all calls are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along.
- Any similarities to another character that used to say "Who is not with us is against us" with a thick southern accent are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along (before modding that as a flamebait, ask any Russian speaker for an English translation of Koba perls of wisdom. And fear the result).
- Any similarities between the Guantanamo military tribunal formula and the military tribunals under chapter 58 of the USSR criminal codex are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along (before modding that as a flamebait, read the relevant article and compare the required standards of evidence, right of attorney and defence and number of criteria for magistrate selection in both)
- Any similarities between al Qaeda and the fictional enemy of the state all encompassing organisation The Trust are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along.
- Any similarities between the names of Gulag, Gulagantanamo and Guantanamo are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along.
- Any similarities...
As one great American thinker of the beginning of this century used to say: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.b>Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
As it was the congress who signed in to the geneva convention, approved it, and made neccessary connections with your own law, invading iraq was illegal according to u.s.'s own laws too.
These COCKSUCKERS DONT WANT TO PROTECT (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LoL. Can you people even remember last week? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, it is arguable that our freedoms have always been under attack both from within and without, that is by domestic terrorist, non-domestic terrorist, and corrupt government officials. All these persons wish to limit out freedoms for various reasons, but in the end to maximize personal power.
There were probably dozens of programs on the table that would not fly pre-9/11. For example, number of reports indicate that Bush and others worked out a plan to invade Iraq, even before bush was elected. What 9/11 acheived, to the terrorists delight, was create a political climate in which the protections fo the constitution could be roled back, and Bush could be the closest thing to a dictator that we ever had. Remember, he is claiming the right to do anything to prisoners, even without the consent of congress. The way he is treating prisoners seems very much like the spanish inquisition.
And the terrosists are happy. The operations in Iraw are giving them first hand experience in how to dispatch the US. All of our tricks and technology are continously thwarted not only by terrorist ingenuity, but American selfishness. Whose idea was it to use a civilian unarmored transport as a military carrier, when a military carrier was available, and then hack armour on the military carrier which makes it so unstable as to put the gunman at extreme risk. Iraq has shown the terrorist our vunerabilities. Instead of fixes the vunerabilities, the admistration has gone to full blown security through obscurity and threatened the media. There again we have a freedom being threatened that government wishes they could control.
In the end we have officials that are greedy and want to cut coners. Most of the time we can keep them in check, and for the most part we are keeping them in check. Lay who only wants white people to have a vote is in deep trouble. The problem is we now have an opening, due to a president that truly believes big governement is answer, just look a the budget, the added department of homeland security, the added security forces,. and the people cannot be trusted.
More Intelligence is Dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though we of course had more than enough info and spying programs to catch and stop them. The FBI tried to stop the hijackers [google.com] in flight school, but the FBI refused to act. One FBI whistleblower has been gagged [google.com] for years because she's tried to tell too much about how badly broken is our counterterrorism system. Amidst mountains of intelligence, Bush has been unable to even find Bin Laden for longer than it took FDR and Truman to beat Germany and Japan in WWII.
We don't need more mountains of intelligence, especially spying on every American's every transaction. We need regime change to one that will actually protect us, the way we elected them and pay them to do. Every threat we've faced - terrorists, recession, hurricane, and smaller - has been bungled or worse by the Bush regime. Giving them more power is like giving the school bully a gun. They'll just pistol whip everyone to make stealing our lunch money that much more efficient.
Re:So What Do We Do Now? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a very good question.
Some weird stuff has happened in this country over the last 10 years, the strangest of them all is that the Republican Party now is entirely controlled by a gang of socialist thugs. I don't know how that happened, but the Republican party is now the party that stands for big government spending:
I don't have any other way to describe this than good old, Soviet-style, socialism and cronyism. If this had been the current administration only, I would have been able to understand it as a fluke, but it is not. It is almost every single republican senator and representative. They have all joined the party, and they are all behaving like good, old socialist thugs. How on earth did the Repulican party become a socialist institution? Someone needs to write a book about this transformation.
What can we do about it? I am not sure. We have the right to vote. It seems every non-republican politician today, even lunatics like Howard Dean, are more capitalists and more "Republican" than any current RINO in DC. I guess the answer is that we have to vote non-republican in the future. At least until normality has been restored in the Republican party.
It seems that if you are someone who likes lower taxes, smaller government, less socialism, you have no choice but to vote non-Republican. It is just plain weird. Even a vote for the Democrats would be a vote for lower taxes and smaller government. Utterly strange.
So, yeah, vote. And only vote for the republicans if you think that Stalin was a good idea.
Re:uh, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
So if your argument is that we should be putting more resources behind those things, I'd have to disagree. First of all, most of those deaths are caused by lifestyles in which we are fully aware of the consequences. Sure, not everyone gets diabetes because they eat poorly, or cancer becasue they smoke - but when you weed out those that do, your numbers become significantly smaller.
MOST cases of diabetes are not caused by lifestyle, just as smoke induced lung cancer is large, however it is nowheres near the #1 cause of cancer.... so based on that your argument is vastly flawed. if you were right by chance "signifigantly smaller" is still MUCH larger than the cost of terrorists. the fact is we will never rid terrorists, there have always been and always be people who will do these acts against those that they do not understand...just because there hasnt been an attack since 9/11 isnt cause of the money bush spent bla bla bla, you cannot make that corolation, thats like saying my house has not been attacked since i got my new computer... it must be the computer keeping me safe.
Yes, the number of people killed pales in comparison to the number of people who die on our highways, but people are dying on our highways because they're being stupid drivers, while people who die from a terrorist attack were ostensibly doing nothing wrong... they were killed because of their religion or their nationality, or as collateral damage from the killings of people for their religious beliefs or nationality.
this is so stupid i do not know where to begin.... people are dying on our highways because they are being stupid... did you really just type that?? the number of deaths of the driver who is stupid comes no where close to the people who die due to someone else driving stupid.... by your logic if i was drunk and hit you and killed you... its your fault for being there you must be stupid. come on buddy think before you type something. how does this post get modded with a 4???
Re:uh, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The loss of life is secondary to the terrorist, whose primary goal is to strike "terror" into the hearts and minds of his victems, which aren't just the people he kills, but the entire nation (or religion, or whatever) that he's attacking. The attack isn't just meant to kill someone (like murder), but disrupt travel, destroy infrastructure...
In that case, the government's best response would be to remind everyone that however horrible 9/11 was, a typical citizen has a much greater chance of being killed by lightning than terrorists. Then remind them that it is our patriotic duty to deny the terrorists the fear and panic they crave.
Instead it helps the terrorists out by creating a color coded index of how terrified we should be and keeping it 'yellow alert' or higher. Then it disrupts air travel with the war on nail clippers. Not yet satisfied we go to war with a country that wasn't involved and fail to allocate resources to clean up natural disasters. As a result fuel prices skyrocket and disrupt travel and shipping. As well, we create a whole new generation of terrorists.
Since that's just not enough, it repeatedly reminds us to be terrified of another 9/11 style attack.
Meanwhile, the new wiretap requirements for ISPs and the FCC working hard against the public good is doing a fine job of tearing up our communications infrastructure.
Since state and local governments have rights in the U.S., destroying roads and water infrastructure has been left to the state and local level.
I DO agree that we must stop terrorism in the U.S. now, so the sooner we ship Bush and Congress to Cuba the better.
Re:Illegal? (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess you do not get out much, do you?
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming the cause is what we are being told, the appropriate reaction would have been:
As it stands, we still have some liberties left. We can still indulge in public protest (as long as we do it in "free speech zones" and nowhere near a funeral and have a permit), we still have our homes (well, unless the state wants them for higher taxes), we still have free speech (unless we want to broadcast it, in which case we have free speech minus seven words, if we're rich.) And we still have the right to regulate intrastate commerce on a state-by-state basis. Of course, the USSC has defined "interstate commerce" to be "anything that *could* be interstate commerce if you took it over the state borders", so this is mostly an exercise in "hope the feds don't have a different opinion", but states can at least try to make state law on goods and services.
As for the perjorative "MIHOP"... Even though it really does look like the twin tower buildings were dropped using standard demolition techniques, and even though building seven fell, hours later, without ever being hit by an aircraft and also looked like it was dropped in exactly the same manner as the two towers, and even though there are no signs that the Pentagon was hit by anything as large as an airliner, and even though airline fuel doesn't burn hot enough to soften steel enough to cause a collapse... I see that the idea that we might have some kind of problem other than what we're being told is still treated as a kook idea. I find this even more fascinating (and worrying) than I do the events themselves, which after all, have killed far fewer people than the administration's incursion into Iraq.
Was this something other than it appeared to be? We have some very troublesome evidence that doesn't fit the "a plane hit it, so it fell" scenario. We have a lot of missing gold from the vaults of the buildings. We have the removal of a single jet engine (which appears not to be an airliner engine anyway) from a hole in the Pentagon that was far too small for any of the wing materials of the putative airliner to have entered, and no holes (or even any damage) out where the wings would have caused the engines to impact; We have a knee-jerk war reaction against two countries that were not the majority source of the people we were told were the hijackers. The actual source of most of them, Saudi Arabia, remains untouched and a firm business partner. I'm not really on the "MIHOP" bus, but then again, I'm not really on the "it was just a hijacking with intent to fly into buildings" bus, either. I'm jusst mostly on the "my fellow citizens sure are an uninformed and spoon-fed bunch of people" bus.
Spend some time looking through the MIHOP sites on the net. I'm not saying you'll be convinced by any one site, but you sure will be entertained — and there are some startling facts worth thinking about.
Re:uh, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
too add (Score:3, Insightful)
Secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Re:Funnier and funnier. (Score:3, Insightful)
So you say. Even if true, it hardly changes the point. Your "points" are incredibly dishonest and biased.
I blame Bush for what he has done. Seems pretty simple and straight forward. You want to give him a pass, and your reasoning for that is absolutely nonsense, based on blaming Clinton or some such.
Since you apparently can't read, I'll re-post part of my last replay: "If there was any evidence they were ever spying inside the country (insane crackpots need not apply)..."
I didn't say anything about it being okay or not. It is, however, LEGAL for them to do so. Meanwhile, spying inside the US is strictly illegal, and Bush has broken the law by doing so.
I realize you don't like facts, but you can't make up nonsense or rant on some other topic to refute them.
Re:Well it couldn't get any worse... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thus, for all practical purposes, the war on terror ended the moment that the US seized control in Afghanistan. This has been recognized by all (former) allies of the US as an important step to take. All the other stuff is simply a power-grab and the settling of old scores. Really nothing to do with any war on terror.
Re:uh, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Small nitpick: 9/11 severely messed up the economy for a while, at least a lot more than murders and suicides. Whether that realistically justifies the money poured into Homeland Security is up for somebody else to debate, I'm not defending it. I'm just pointing out that terrorism has more consequences than just killing people. That's why the term terrorism is used in place of mass-murder.
Re:Our "incompetent" president (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So What Do We Do Now? (Score:3, Insightful)
How on earth did the Repulican party become a socialist institution?
Well, in the first place, it's not socialism, it's fascism.
It's been longer than 10 years. It really started going into overdrive with Reagan, but the roots go back to WW2. Most people forget that the wealthy elite, industrialists and the like (i.e. the Republican base) were tremendous supporters of the european fascists. It was only the American left (when we had one) that supported going to war against them. Most Americans were isolationist and didn't want to get involved either way. Heck, our current president's grandfather actively supported Germany against his own country. He narrowly avoided treason prosecution. It's nice to have friends in high places.
After WW2, an unholy alliance was created between Christians and Republicans for the first time in history due to the threat of the "godless communists". The rural Christians have continually voted against theior own stated "moral values" since this time. That's why you see them frothing at the mouth about sex on TV and gays being presented in a positive light even though those are inevitable consequences of hyper capitalism which is what they keep voting for. Tie that in with the fact that rural America has never dealt with the negative effects of capitalism until recently as they have lived under a form of socialism for a hundred years where the people in the cities are forced to subsidise their way of life.
Since Reagan with all the crimes of his administration including arming terrorists, creating torture schools and aiding the international cocaine trade, it's gone into high gear.
Someone needs to write a book about this transformation.
Not a book, but a couple of long, well researched articles are right here:
First a primer on what fascism is and how it came about in Europe [rationalrevolution.net]
Then an analysis of the rise of fascism in America [rationalrevolution.net].
There are a lot of other very well reearched articles on that site as well ranging over a variety of topics.