New York Times (that liberal rag who gave us Bush-fellating wankers like Judith Miller, Adam Nagourney, Elisabeth Bumiller, and the ever-popular Jodi Wilgoren:
What we have here is a clandestine surveillance program of enormous size, which is being operated by members of the administration who are subject to no limits or scrutiny beyond what they deem to impose on one another. If the White House had gotten its way, the program would have run secretly until the war on terror ended — that is, forever.
Congress must stop pretending that it has no serious responsibilities for monitoring the situation. The Senate should call back Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and ask him — this time, under oath — about the scope of the program. This time, lawmakers should not roll over when Mr. Gonzales declines to provide answers. The confirmation hearings of Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee for Central Intelligence Agency director, are also a natural forum for a serious, thorough and pointed review of exactly what has been going on.
Most of all, Congress should pass legislation that removes any doubt that this kind of warrantless spying on ordinary Americans is illegal. If the administration finds the current procedures for getting court approval of wiretaps too restrictive, this would be the time to make any needed adjustments.
President Bush began his defense of the N.S.A. program yesterday by invoking, as he often does, Sept. 11. The attacks that day firmed the nation's resolve to protect itself against its enemies, but they did not give the president the limitless power he now claims to intrude on the private communications of the American people.
Washington Post, that equally Bush-fellating liberal rag that went so far as to hire a wingnut plagiarist in their efforts to appear "fair and balanced":
WHEN THE New York Times revealed the National Security Agency's domestic wiretapping program late last year, President Bush assured the country that the operation was carefully limited to international calls, targeted only al-Qaeda suspects and did not involve snooping on law-abiding Americans. That turns out to be far from the whole truth.
Spit it out, Brady. It's called a LIE. "llllll........eeeeeeeyyyyyyyeeeeee". Try saying it. It rolls nicely off the tongue. More:
We don't contend that data-mining is illegitimate. With appropriate controls and oversight, it has a role to play in modern intelligence and law enforcement. But a giant government database detailing which phone numbers called which other phone numbers -- the NSA data, according to USA Today, do not include people's names or addresses or the contents of their communications -- is a massive intrusion on personal privacy.
[snip]
The goal must be to modernize the rules of anti-terrorism surveillance within the United States, allowing for the uses of new technologies unimagined when Congress wrote current law but insisting on proper limits and systemic judicial and legislative oversight. This cannot begin to happen without a sustained congressional effort to find out what the NSA is doing.
The conservative Boston Herald tries valiantly to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, but ultimately comes to the conclusion:
Since 9/11 the American public has been willing to rely on the assurances of government leaders that they are preserving our privacy while fighting terrorism.
Unfortunately, and perhaps understandably, many Americans no longer believe them.
Another conservative-leaning paper, the Chicago Tribune:
The government apparently has even bigger plans "to create a database of every call ever made within the nation's borders" to identify and track suspected terrorists.
Think about that. Every phone call ever made.
No, not so fast.
This sounds like a vast and unchecked intrusion on privacy. President Bush's assurance Thursday that the privacy of Americans was being "fiercely protected" was not at all convincing.
We need to know more about this. The government, though, didn't offer confirmation or elaboration on Thursday. Based on the newspaper's reporting, this effort appears to go far beyond any surveillance effort that would be targeted at terrorist operations.
At first blush this program carries troubling echoes of Total Information Awareness, a proposed Defense Department "data-mining" expedition into a mass of personal information on individuals' driver's licenses, passports, credit card purchases, car rentals, medical prescriptions, banking transactions and more. That was curbed by Congress after a public outcry. It seems the people who wanted to bring you TIA didn't get the message.
[snip]
Why would the government seek and store records of every telephone call to your doctor, your lawyer, your next-door neighbor?
Tell us.
The New York Post, owned by that guy who's raising funds for Hillary Clinton (probably because a mere photo of Hillary on the front page of his "news" papers guarantees his frothing, rabid readership), not surprisingly defends the program:
No one is listening in on domestic phone calls, as the NSA is doing to a limited number of international calls involving Americans suspected of terrorist links.
What this database does is record phone numbers, in search of calling patterns that might tip terrorist activity.
No names, no addresses. No personal information. Just phone numbers.
[snip]
President Bush, while not confirming the existence of the alleged program, stressed that "we're not mining or trolling the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans individual privacy is being "fiercely protected."
Indeed, all of the outrage neglects the stark fact that preventing another 9/11 demands the use of any sophisticated investigative techniques now available to law enforcement. Sophisticated enough to stay one step ahead of the terrorists.
Whether those techniques work or not. Valdis Krebs, a leading authority on social network analysis, says:
"If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense."
"Certain people are more suspicious than others...They make frequent trips back-and-forth to Afghanistan, for instance. "So you start with them. And you work two steps out. If none of those people are connected, you don't have a cell. Because if one was there, you'd find some clustering. You don't have to collect all the data in the world to do that."
But why let reality stand in the way of the Worship of the Codpiece?
I realize that people have a deep-seated need to believe that their government is coming from a place of honesty, patriotism, and good will. However, the Bush Administration has demonstrated time and time again that it is NOT a government of goodwill; it is a government with aims of tyranny. The Bush Administration couldn't give a rat's ass if you're safe, they only want you to continue to BELIEVE that they're keeping you safe. And all the delusion in the world isn't going to change that fact. George W. Bush is a sociopath, surrounded with sociopaths and power-mad corporatists. And no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that.
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