It's not about Israel, but would you believe that in a lengthy Friday editorial, the New York Times
slammed President Obama (Hat Tip:
NY Nana)?
Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual
suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom
Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long
they talk and from where.
This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate
information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance —
with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now
exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the
individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles
governing search, seizure and privacy.
The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of
California, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is
supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She
said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case
someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss
of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance
has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant
information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”
But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein
went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being
collected was used?
The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the
executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that
they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and
appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”
That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of
revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the
killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been
reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a
half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the
protocol by which he makes such decisions.
•
We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court
order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that
power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr.
Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the surveillance policy of
the George W. Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between
the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”
You mean Obama's a liar and a hypocrite? You don't say....
Just a little tantrum. Headlines this morning are that the NYT has "revised" the harshness of that column. New Left Marcuse Progressive Democrats are marxists before, during, and after everything. Dead people in the streets of Mexico? No problem to the Progressives. So 1984 Big Brother certainly will be no problem. They're conducting major lawless operations out in flyover to eliminate the second party. Obama will NEVER lose these people. Think of President Peres... the quintessential example. Nothing ever turns him.
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