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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2006-02-05

Prima Facia STUPID

The top story on the WaPo website for Sunday morning is one headlined "NSA's Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects."

Of course, my first thought was "Good!! They're turning up a few suspects!"

See, what the Left (apparently), aided by the press, and abetted by the Democratic Party, clearly fails to grasp is that EVEN ONE terrorist threat unchecked translates into thousands of dead Americans. So if we have to intercept one million calls from al Qaeda suspects to turn up ONE credible threat, then I'm pretty happy we're doing it.

But maybe I'm jumping to conclusions based on the headline. What does the article REALLY say?

From paragraph 3:

Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.

And from paragraph 7:

The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained. [emphasis mine]

"Other officials" . . . also might be more accurately written as "other officials with ties to or who have given financial support to Democrats", don't you think?

And if part of the standard is "reasonable," then isn't the sane way to judge such a thing whether it is "reasonable" to weigh the potential intrusion (which is not random, like a DUI checkpoint, nor is it widespread) against the potential harm? On the one hand, the NSA hears a pointless conversation; on the other hand, somebody blows up the Brooklyn Bridge in rush hour, killing hundreds and crippling a city.

But, I suppose, "reasonable" is too much of a stretch for the Modern Alliance of Lefties. To paraphrase a federal judge from a few weeks ago speaking to the ACLU, "the Left no longer represents a 'reasonable person.'"
Posted by: Michael / 2/05/2006 01:18:00 AM

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