The Urban Grind

Here’s one professor who blows apart McCain’s whiney anti-torture/anti-humiliation arguments. Now if only Michael Levin were running for office…

Death: Suppose a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island which will detonate at noon on July 4 unless … here follow the usual demands for money and release of his friends from jail. Suppose, further, that he is caught at 10 a.m on the fateful day, but preferring death to failure, won’t disclose where the bomb is. What do we do? If we follow due process, wait for his lawyer, arraign him, millions of people will die. If the only way to save those lives is to subject the terrorist to the most excruciating possible pain, what grounds can there be for not doing so? I suggest there are none. In any case, I ask you to face the question with an open mind.

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Once you concede that torture is justified in extreme cases, you have admitted that the decision to use torture is a matter of balancing innocent lives against the means needed to save them. You must now face more realistic cases involving more modest numbers. Someone plants a bomb on a jumbo jet. I He alone can disarm it, and his demands cannot be met (or they can, we refuse to set a precedent by yielding to his threats). Surely we can, we must, do anything to the extortionist to save the passengers. How can we tell 300, or 100, or 10 people who never asked to be put in danger, “I’m sorry you’ll have to die in agony, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to . . . ”

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Idealism:There is an important difference between terrorists and their victims that should mute talk of the terrorists’ “rights.” The terrorist’s victims are at risk unintentionally, not having asked to be endangered. But the terrorist knowingly initiated his actions. Unlike his victims, he volunteered for the risks of his deed. By threatening to kill for profit or idealism, he renounces civilized standards, and he can have no complaint if civilization tries to thwart him by whatever means necessary.

Continue reading…

I knew it would happen. And there will only be more after this one.

Iyman Farris, who pleaded guilty in 2003 of participating in a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge now wants to rescind that plea.

Iyman Faris was sentenced to 20 years in prison in October 2003.

His attorney is asking a federal court to force the government to hand over information about whether the National Security Agency secretly eavesdropped on his Faris, and government sources have told CNN that it did.

Attorney David Smith wants Faris’ May 1, 2003, guilty plea thrown out and is requesting “all documents relating to or concerning” electronic surveillance or any monitoring of Faris’ conversations “whether or not pursuant to warrant,” according to court filings.

What is it with these left-leaning types who insist on extending our civil liberties to those who would destroy our whole system?

Now the organ publication of the Democrat party has sued the Pentagon to get more documents on the NSA’s surveillance program.

Now thanks to this left wing rag, all the terrorists and their sympathizers will get to sue, saying that their civil rights were violated. The defense lawyers will be on this like flies on dog excrement.

So now it’s obvious, if it’s a question of America’s national security, the Times will go on and on about freedom of the press and the public’s “right to know,” etc. They care more about the feelings of Muslims around the world than their own country.

Right wing Rabbi Aryeh Spero puts it perfectly.

Though on the Danish cartoon issue they surrendered the precept of freedom of speech, they will attempt to show their “concern” regarding “freedoms and rights” by raising the bar as to what is acceptable and “allowable” for the U.S. to do in defending herself. Yes, listening to Al Qaeda conversations with its operatives here is, for them, a violation of what? — freedom of speech, freedom from search.

To the extent world liberals curtail our freedom to speak out against radical Islam or publish items critical of Moslem intolerance will they, inversely, demand from our government stricter rules as to what is permissible in fighting our war on terror.

To the extent that liberals demand more tolerance from us toward our enemies will they demand less tolerance from our enemies toward our ways and values.

Forty years of liberal thinking has come home to roost. Earlier, with its brazenness and promiscuity, it polluted our souls; now it intends to invite our decline and physical death. It is a disease that must be purged.

For people who constantly portray President Bush as a stupid buffoon, the Democrats seem to be very good at being misled/lied to/and otherwise kept out of the loop by him.

The most recent example is the NSA intercepts. When news of this first broke out, the Democrats were going on about how they were never briefed on it, and how the Consitution has been violated, etc. But as it turns out, they’re not quite as ignorant as they were claiming to be.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi actually knew of the NSA’s surveillance activities as of October of 2001.

On Oct. 1, 2001, three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was running the National Security Agency at the time, told the House intelligence committee that the agency was broadening its surveillance authorities, according to a newly released letter sent to him that month by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.). Pelosi, the ranking Democrat on the committee, raised concerns in the letter, which was declassified with several redactions and made public yesterday by her staff.

Here’s a link to Rep. Pelosi’s letter.

Also, do any of you find it odd, that she would complain about NSA information being sent to the FBI without it being requested just one month after America was so viciously attacked? Anyway, moving right along.

The secret NSA program, developed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Washington and New York as a way to find any hidden al Qaeda operatives still in the United States, was authorized in October 2001, a senior administration official said.

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An intelligence official close to Hayden said that his appearance on Oct. 1, 2001, before the House committee had been to discuss Executive Order 12333, and not the new NSA program.

The order, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, gave guidance and specific instructions about the intelligence activities that the U.S. government could engage in. It specifically prohibited domestic surveillance for intelligence purposes without a warrant “unless the Attorney General has determined in each case that there is probable cause to believe that the technique is directed against a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.”

Here’s more information on Executive Order 12333.

And another thing is, if you have an American citizen or a legal resident dealing with Al Qaeda, I don’t see why that person WOULD NOT qualify as an agent of a foreign power.

In terms of President Bush “violating” the Constitution, check out what the National Review’s Rich Lowry has to say on the subject.

In a 2002 decision, Judge Robertson and others on the FISA court imposed restrictions on the Bush administration’s conduct of foreign-intelligence investigations that weren’t mandated by the language of the 1978 FISA statute, and that had been explicitly made unnecessary by the 2001 Patriot Act. The Bush administration appealed, and the FISA court of review issued a stinging rebuke to Robertson, et al.

The court of review, apparently a stickler for such things, said the FISA “court did not provide any constitutional basis for its action ? we think there is none ? and misconstrued the main statutory provision on which it relied.” Besides that, it was world-class jurisprudence. By effectively trying to micromanage the Justice Department, the decision continued, “the FISA court may well have exceeded [its] constitutional bounds.”

Would that the court could permanently monitor the debate over the NSA program. Democrats who argue that Bush has abused the Constitution are, like Judge Robertson, themselves Constitution-abusers. The president has the authority under Article II of the Constitution to defend the United States. If he can bomb the nation’s enemies overseas without a court’s approval, he certainly can listen to their conversations. (FISA, which requires a special warrant for foreign-intelligence surveillance in the U.S., doesn’t apply abroad, making cross-border calls a murky area).

Also, it’s not just the so-called right wing nut jobs who are defending the NSA intercepts. Even Colin Powell believes the surveillance should continue

Via Outside the Beltway

The New York Times seems to be reveling in its position of being the ones to leak the news about the secret NSA intercepts. Never mind that Bush Administration met with the editors of the Times and the Washington Post to try and dissuade them from making this information public. No, the Times wanted to be the first one to break the news.

Anyway, in their latest NSA installment, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen write about how the NSA poured through large amounts of data, including large amounts of phone and internet traffic, and how this was done with the cooperation of telecommunication companies.

Frankly, I just don’t understand the purpose of this article, except that it’s another hit piece on President Bush. Also, I’d like for these “current and former government officials” a—s to be fired for leaking such information to the Times, not that it will ever happen.

Still, for those of you who think America is being repressive under President Bush, Real Clear Politics provides examples of Canada, France and England’s anti-terrorist laws.

The Canadian government has broad authority under anti-terrorism laws to intercept communications without court oversight. And, complained a Toronto Star columnist recently, ?the [Canadian] government now has significant new authority to stage secret trials. In some instances, the very fact that the courts are even hearing a case may be kept secret.?

Meanwhile, the government of Jacques Chirac ? who seldom loses an opportunity to lecture the United States about its supposedly dreadful policies ? has reacted to the recent ?intifada? in France by declaring a ?state of emergency.? It allows the government to impose a curfew on communities where rioting has taken place, search for and seize evidence with no showing of probable cause, place suspects under house arrest for up to two months and otherwise ride roughshod over normal protections.

In England critics are complaining that the crown jewel of civil rights, the ancient right of habeas corpus, is at risk because of a measure allowing detention without charges for up to 28 days. The government of Tony Blair, no right wing extremist, had initially asked for 90 days. Under the Terrorism Act of 2005, moreover, demonstrations within two miles of Britain?s Parliament are forbidden, severely crimping the equally ancient right of assembly.

I just find this all ironic, since these are the countries that liberals insist America emulate.

But, as I’ve writen before, this is what countries are forced to do when they adamantly refuse to seal their borders during times of war.

Since the Times leaked the news about the NSA conducting surveillance without FISA warrants, the cry from the MSM, as well as liberal bloggers has been, “why didn’t Bush get a warrant?” And “this is in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” among other things.

Yet it turns out that one of the members of the FISA court, US District Judge James Robertson,who recently resigned over the whole surveillance scandal, was a Clinton appointee/partisan Clintonista.

US District Judge James Robertson, a member of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts late last Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation, the report said.

Two other judges were quoted as saying Robertson privately expressed “deep concern” that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may “have tainted the court’s work.”

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Also, Robertson’s protest resignation rings hallow when one considers that he never resigned or voiced his displeasure when President Clinton’s NSA conducted warrentless surveillance of American citizens. Apparently, the good judge is selective in what outrages him.

Indeed! Again, another example of Democrats getting a free pass.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the FISA court also discouraged FBI agents from pursuing a warrant to search the laptop of Zaccharias Moussaoui.

It also turns out that the FISA court previously denied President Bush’s warrant requests at an unprecedented rate.

Washington, Dec. 26 (UPI) ? U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Heart newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court’s operation.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered “substantive modifications” took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years — the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court’s history.

With judges like James Robertson, this is not surprising.

According to their latest report, the U.S. Congress and the Bush Administration have not done enough to prevent another terrorist attack.

They say that the top priority should be preventing terrorists from acquiring WMD’s. Making sure our first responders have the necessary tools, and checking passengers against terror watch lists are also important.

But what I would like to know is what about our wide open Southern border???

Call me anti-immigration, but even without a war going on, it would behoove us to have people who want to be Americans entering the country legally. But the way things are now, any old gringo hating Juan or Jose Aztlanista can sneak into the country.

If Jorge Bush was at all serious about preventing another terrorist attack, our borders would have been sealed by now. And all immigration from rogue Middle Eastern states would be stopped. Immigration should be a privilege, not a right granted to any and everybody.

Unfortunatley, nothing seems to be more important than whoring for Hispanic votes. Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of this. What other explanation is there for our beloved GOP congress earmarking 4 million dollars for the leftist, pro-illegal alien group The National Council of La Raza?

But the GOP is not the only culprit here.

One possible culprit is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) who sits on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that handled the bill carrying the earmark. In 2001, Reid sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee requesting $5 million for La Raza?s housing programs. That same year Reid also received NCLR?s Capital Award for ?his commitment to advance legislation priorities of the Latino Community.? In gratitude, Reid told NCLR, ?La Raza is like the biblical David, fighting all these Goliaths.?

Still the La Raza people are not happy campers.

Despite the significant federal assistance La Raza has received, Cecilia Munoz, the group?s vice president for policy, has rebuked the Bush Administration for not catering to the needs of immigrants. ?We all know there is a wing of the Republican Party that will never like anything that treats immigrants well,? she said in June. ?Any attempt by the President to move in the direction of those folks is going to be viewed as hostile to the Latino community.?

Actually, I think a more appropriate description of La Raza would the eternal malcontents.

Liberals seem to enjoy portraying the CIA as far right wing fanatical bogeymen. But that, as we shall see, is simply not the case.

Mona Charen believes that Congress should investigate the CIA. As one example, she writes about how agency Michael Scheuer was allowed to write a Bush-bashing book while still active in the agency.

The CIA has been known to hold up the publication of books by former employees for months or more on national security grounds. And CIA employees are required to sign a confidentiality agreement. Yet the agency permitted an active employee, Michael Scheuer (he has since retired), to pen a broadside against the Bush administration under the provocative pen name “Anonymous.” In “Imperial Hubris,” Scheuer lambastes Bush for what he calls the “avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war” against Iraq, and argues (in the Cindy Sheehan mode) that under Bush’s leadership, America has declined from “the much-admired champion of liberty and self-government to the hated and feared advocate of a new imperial order.” These are the words of one of the CIA’s top counterterrorism officials.

Furthermore, Powerline’s John Hinderacker, in a column for the Weekly Standard points how how it was the CIA who leaked information to the New York Times and the Washington Post about the secret jails in Europe for terrorists.

Recent events indicate that the CIA might even be willing to compromise the effectiveness of its own covert operations, if by doing so it can damage the Bush administration. The story began last May, when the New York Times outed an undercover CIA operation by identifying private companies that operated airlines for the agency. The Times fingered Aero Contractors Ltd., Pegasus Technologies, and Tepper Aviation as CIA-controlled entities. It described their aircraft and charted the routes they fly. Most significantly, the Times revealed one

When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job.

The Times went on to trace specific flights by the airlines it unmasked, which corresponded to the capture of key al Qaeda leaders:

Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.

A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri’s deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.

But that’s not even all of it. When it comes to undermining President Bush and the war on terror, they cover all their bases. In fact, they are very creative in the types of information they leak to the MSM. They gave misleading information on Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to the New York Times. The Gray Lady then used this information to write about how President Bush was being duplicitous about Iraq’s connection to Al Qaeda.

But there’s even more. Former agent Ray McGovern, who worked at the agency’s Russian desk formed a group consisting of former disgruntled agents called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. This appears to be a far left anti-war and anti-American group.

Also part of this group are former CIA agents and husband and wife team William and Kathleen Christison. Not surprisingly, they are supporters of Saddam Hussein, North Korea and the “Palestinians.”

I say, let Congress investigate the CIA, then charge the offending individuals with treason.

Granted, they always seem to be in a snit. But now it looks like the FBI is wising up to what these groups are really about.

FBI agents monitored 2004 web sites calling for protests during the political conventions in Boston & NY on behalf of the bureau?s counter terrorism unit.

The American Civil Liberties Union pointed to the documents as evidence that the Bush administration has reacted to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States by blurring the distinction between terrorism and political protest. FBI officials defended the involvement of counterterrorism agents in providing security for the Republican and Democratic conventions as an administrative convenience.

“It’s increasingly clear that the government is involved in political surveillance of organizations that are involved in nothing more than lawful First Amendment activities,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “It raises very serious questions about whether the FBI is back to its old tricks.”

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A Sept. 4, 2003, document addressed to the FBI counterterrorism unit described plans by a group calling itself RNC Not Welcome to “disrupt” the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. It also described Internet postings from an umbrella organization known as United for Peace and Justice, which was coordinating worldwide protests against the convention.

“It’s one thing to monitor protests and protest organizers, but quite another thing to refer them to your counterterrorism unit,” said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice.

In terms of these groups just being about first ammendment rights, here’s what the co-founder of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin had to say:

Co-founder Roger Baldwin stated, “I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the properties class, and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.”

For more background on Castro-groupie Leslie Cagan, click here.

To read what United for Peace and Justice is truly about, click here.

All I can say, is when these groups are in a snit, you know that our government is doing something right.