posted
So, to clarify, your position is usually that these things aren't bad?
I've frequently come away with the impression that you've said "it may or may not be bad, but it's conceivably legal, and that's the extent of my participation in this conversation." If it bothers you that these things might be considered legal under some administrations, you've gone out of your way to suppress any expression of that sort; you've admitted as much. And you absolutely refuse to engage in any discussion of what, if these things are "legal," can be done to stop them.
Which is why, at the end of the day, lawful neutral is pretty indistinguishable from lawful evil.
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Where you are off, Tom, is in taking anything concrete from his saying "that's the extent of my interest in this conversation." Thank you for choosing those words, though, as it shows a recognition that this is not the end of Dagonee's interest in the matter.
I've long been leery of trying to defend Bush here at all because, basically, it's not worth the trouble. I have to get pretty riled about something before I'll even begin to talk on a political subject here because, by and large, my comments and input aren't valued. Even the polite responses tend to be, essentially, "how can any sane and decent person say that? you must be being duped..."
Dagonee's reasons for reticence may be different, but the fact remains that no one here is obligated to rebut points they don't wish to challenge, for whatever reason.
edited for formatting and clarity.
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quote:I've frequently come away with the impression that you've said "it may or may not be bad, but it's conceivably legal, and that's the extent of my participation in this conversation."
So you do understand the limitations of what I say. OK. This means you're being deliberately obnoxious about it. Good to know.
quote:And you absolutely refuse to engage in any discussion of what, if these things are "legal," can be done to stop them.
Not true. I've recommended ways that Congress can stop the NSA program with no confusion of constitutionality whatsoever. I recommended a way in this thread about how investigations can be done without the President stopping them.
In fact, I'm the only one to have suggested a method of accomplishing either of these things that would actually work. (Edit: on this board, that I have seen. Clearly others have done so elsewhere.)
quote:Which is why, at the end of the day, lawful neutral is pretty indistinguishable from lawful evil.
I'm really having a hard time figuring out why I shouldn't just say F&^% you!" and walk away after that.
I am most decidedly NOT lawful neutral, and you have the reading comprehension skills to know this by now. What the hell is your intent here, Tom? To piss me off? To score points off me? To show me up as the evil lawyer?
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quote: Dagonee's reasons for reticence may be different, but the fact remains that no one here is obligated to rebut points they don't wish to challenge, for whatever reason.
That's certainly true. But it's also worth pointing out that if you do think these things are bad, and yet you spend most of your time when discussing them defending them on points of legality, it's both fair and reasonable to expect that people will assume that you support them and behave accordingly.
I mean, if I spent half my time criticizing Teddy Kennedy's voting record, why would I be affronted when people react to me as if I disliked Teddy Kennedy? And when I respond, "I never said I disliked Teddy Kennedy. How dare you presume to know how I feel about Teddy Kennedy?!" and then refuse to answer the question, "Well, do you dislike Teddy Kennedy?" .... Well, you get the point of the analogy.
quote: I am most decidedly NOT lawful neutral, and you have the reading comprehension skills to know this by now.
Hm. Perhaps we're each operating from a different definition of lawful neutral, then. Or else, at the end of the day, I really just don't understand your worldview at all.
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quote:What the hell is your intent here, Tom? To piss me off? To score points off me? To show me up as the evil lawyer?
Actually, I suspect he's simply attempting to goad you into expressing your personal opinion (despite your repeated disinclination to do so). Tom is quite good at that particular trick. Usually followed with a detailed dissection of your opinion, explaining at each step why you are wrong, or why you don't actually believe what you think you do.
I admire you for standing firm, while still debating issues with him. I gave up on doing so a long time ago.
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quote:Usually followed with a detailed dissection of your opinion, explaining at each step why you are wrong, or why you don't actually believe what you think you do.
You know, I don't think I've ever accused someone of not believing what they think they do. I've accused people of believing what they do for reasons other than the ones that they think they have, though. I know that some people on this board think these are equivalent arguments, but I draw a fairly major distinction between the two.
(As a side note, Dag, my goal is not to piss you off. My "goal," insofar as I have one at all, is to understand where legality and morality intermesh. That's why I'm so frustrated by your refusal to discuss morality in these cases; the narrow parsing you use to avoid engaging in those broader conversations reminds me too much of the kind of very specific, very semantic practices used by White House Chiefs of Staff and the like to avoid addressing those same broader points (and perhaps for similar reasons), to which I must confess a certain atavistic allergy.)
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quote:In fact, I'm the only one to have suggested a method of accomplishing either of these things that would actually work. (Edit: on this board, that I have seen. Clearly others have done so elsewhere.)
I'm pretty sure I mentioned the "special prosecutor" route. Unless you're saying that wouldn't work...
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No, but if you spent a great deal of time and effort correcting people who were running around saying "Ted Kennedy should have been convicted of murder", then you can still reasonably say "when did I ever say I supported his politics or policies?" without having to enumerate which ones you support and why.
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quote:I really just don't understand your worldview at all.
Since you keep ignoring the parts of my posts where I express it, this doesn't surprise me at all.
quote:it's both fair and reasonable to expect that people will assume that you support them and behave accordingly
Not if I keep saying I'm not telling you whether I support them.
quote:I mean, if I spent half my time criticizing Teddy Kennedy's voting record, why would I be affronted when people react to me as if I disliked Teddy Kennedy? And when I respond, "I never said I disliked Teddy Kennedy. How dare you presume to know how I feel about Teddy Kennedy?!" and then refuse to answer the question, "Well, do you dislike Teddy Kennedy?" .... Well, you get the point of the analogy.
I would assume you disliked his voting record.
Considering most of the time I'm not even presenting what I consider to be controlling legal outcomes, but merely demonstrating the contentiousness of the issue to people who think it is well-settled in a particular direction, the analogy is largely pointless.
Let's go back to what seems to be the heart of your issue with me:
quote:And you absolutely refuse to engage in any discussion of what, if these things are "legal," can be done to stop them.
Will you now acknowledge that this statement is inaccurate and misrepresents my participation in these threads?
You keep moving the complaint around and not dealing with my responses to the current version.
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quote:In fact, I'm the only one to have suggested a method of accomplishing either of these things that would actually work. (Edit: on this board, that I have seen. Clearly others have done so elsewhere.)
I'm pretty sure I mentioned the "special prosecutor" route. Unless you're saying that wouldn't work...
You're right, I apologize. It would, at this point, require congressional action to create such a position, but that is the necessary solution here outside of congress's investigatory powers.
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quote:The eavesdropping program, begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and revealed in news reports last December, allows the NSA to intercept telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and locations overseas without court approval if one of the parties is suspected of links to terrorist groups.
is not necessarily an accurate description. We really have no way of knowing what criteria are used. All we have is the word of the Bush administration that this is what they are holding themselves to. Without oversight, there is no practical limit on who they look at, other than the trustworthiness of the people involved.
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That is also not accurate, Squick. There is a totally practical limit: severe manpower limitations. Easily the bigggest problem with surveillance is that you have to have people to do it. I work for a fairly small phone company and at any given moment we have tens of thousands of calls taking place. There's simply no way to go through and listen to them all. Even if you have some digital system screening them for keywords, someone still has to go back and listen to the conversations in real time and determine if this is a threat issue or not.
Intelligence resources are limited. This isn't "Enemy of the State" where someone can just task a satellite to watch Will Smith run through the streets.
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Errr...what does that have to do with what I said? I was specifically saying that they are by no means limited to the oft said "people suspected to have links to terrorist groups." Practically, they can look at anyone they want to without people finding out about it.
I wasn't suggesting that they have infinite resources. That never even crossed my mind as something I'd need to note.
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I think he was talking about the limits to where they apply their power (a la Watergate), rather than the possibility of every call being screened.
As we have already seen, those in power don't always use their power wisely. That is why oversight is so important in matter like this.
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Gotcha. Well, from what I know of the intelligence world and it's workload, I personally would be really hacked off if someone were using this for anything other than it's intent.
Constitutional issues aside, we just don't have the resources to be that frivlolous with them.
I understand and can relate to distrust of government... the line between abuse of power and need for security can be very hard to place sometimes... and it's certainly a natural tension. But more oversight *does* inherently mean less security. Whether or not it's a dodge, it *is* true.
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On the topic of trustworthiness, I've got to say, as someone who doesn't assume that you can definitely trust this administration, them using a flimsy, unprecedented reason to prevent people from checking up on them doesn't put them in the best light. They're not exactly acting like people who have been completely responsible with their power.
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quote:Gotcha. Well, from what I know of the intelligence world and it's workload, I personally would be really hacked off if someone were using this for anything other than it's intent.
Constitutional issues aside, we just don't have the resources to be that frivlolous with them.
I expected that, what with the primary focus on terrorism and all the powers that the administration said they needed to be granted to combat it, the agencies under the executive branch would be well prepared to deal with terrorist threats.
The dog's breakfast that the incompetently led FEMA made out of Katrina showed me how off I was. Frankly, given the huge mis-steps has made on dealing with terrorism, sometimes because they are focusing elsewhere, I not sure that having oversight to make sure that they are only spying on legitimate subjects wouldn't make us safer.
I have problems with people saying that an administration that appointed an ineffective and unqualified person who left his old job under suspicion of wrong doing as the head of the agency that would be primarily responsible for dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks we were assured were coming as one that can be trusted to protect us without oversight.
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Jim, I say flimsy because they are basically saying that a group that has been trusted with all manner of sensitive information, some higher level than this, and appears to have a very good track record in terms of leaks can not be trusted with this information. But they're not actually saying this, and instead are making a more general statement about how the less people you tell, the more secret something is.
When you're taking an unprecedented step in denying access to a previously trustworthy investigation group, I find that a flimsy reason, as far as I am able to judge.
Perhaps they know of reasons why they shouldn't trust this group that obviously they aren't going to share with the public. But the reason they publicly offered is, to me, pretty flimsy.
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quote:Actually, I suspect he's simply attempting to goad you into expressing your personal opinion (despite your repeated disinclination to do so). Tom is quite good at that particular trick. Usually followed with a detailed dissection of your opinion, explaining at each step why you are wrong, or why you don't actually believe what you think you do.
I admire you for standing firm, while still debating issues with him. I gave up on doing so a long time ago.
To show you how far out I am: until the last two sentences, I read this as a compliment.
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If the DoJ's OPR is such a security risk, why is this the only time in OPR's 31 year history that it was "prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation"?
Claims of national security in this case are unconvincing. The administration has played that card too many times for them to have much credibility left. A court ruling yesterday shows that. Courts have historically been very deferential to national security issues. But that might be changing recently, with this and other rulings dismissing blanket statements of national security as a reason for dismissing court cases.
quote: The government, which has defended the legality of what it has called a "terrorist surveillance program" without revealing many details about its workings, asked U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker to dismiss the case, arguing that it would divulge state secrets and damage national security.
In his ruling, Walker wrote that he saw no "reasonable danger" of harming national security by proceeding with the case, that its subject was "hardly a secret" and that the court had a constitutional duty to decide matters brought before it.
"To defer to a blanket assertion of secrecy here would be to abdicate that duty, particularly because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired," Walker wrote.
quote:As a side note, Dag, my goal is not to piss you off.
At some point, when you know something will piss someone off (as you clearly do in this case, Tom), and you keep doing it...and doing it...and doing it...the question must come as naturally as you seem to think questioning Dagonee's morality does...is it your goal to piss him off?
You dodge that question as ably and consistently as you claim Dagonee does about his own morality.
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I imagine that the reporters who ask representatives of the Bush administration (or any presidential administration, really) questions that they're not answering over and over know that they're pissing those representatives off. Would you say that their goal is to piss the representatives off?
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It is certainly one of their goals, at least some of the time, wouldn't you say? Not even for personal reasons, but for professional ones.
Comparing Dagonee to a mouthpiece of the Bush Administration (or any presidential administration, really) is not very accurate, either.
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I didn't make any such comparison. I merely presented a situation.
It might be one of the goals for some of the reporters, some of the time, but I think (and you seem to agree) that it's not a intrinsic part of the situation.
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Dag, if you don't support a great number of Bush's more alarming policies, I owe you an apology. Your steadfast defense of them has, over the years, led me to assume your agreement with them. I'm honestly relieved that's apparently not the case.
Unless it is, in which case, I'm rather confused as to why you're lashing out at Tom for asking if you do. Surely it's not that outrageous a crime, particularly given I can't recall a single instance of you criticizing Bush for compromising one civil liberty or another.
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The potential for abuse in a self-monitored program like the NSA domestic spying operation isn't that they'll got on a fishing expedition and just listen in on random conversations. It is that they'll target people who have nothing to do with a terrorist threat and use the information for their own gain. Given their track-records, I don't really trust people with the ethical lapses of Cheney or DeLay, for example, to resist that temptation. And in any organization, even one as uptight as the NSA, there are people willing to bend rules to appease a powerful person who just might do them a favor down the road, or whose politics they especially agree with. (NOTE to add: Yes, I know DeLay is a non-entity in this, I'm just using him as an example of the level of ethical behavior I perceive among the top leaders in this country, maybe I should've used Rove...)
The troubling thing for me is that FISA makes this oversight so flippin' easy that there is no need to avoid it. It's not like that court denies requests. They can even get the request after the fact, for cryin' out loud. It barely deserves the name "protection" as applied to rights. It's legal, sure, but what a mess. The judges involved sit inside the ruddy Justice Department anyway.
But this program is apparently SO special that even THEM knowing about it's operations is a problem.
Give me a break. Under what possible circumstances (other than suspicion that one of the FISA judges is corrupt) would national security be threatened by using that system to AFTER THE FACT get a warrant?
This is simply another in a series of attempts to increase the power of the Executive Branch. It's a pet project of Cheney's that GWB wasn't smart enough to block. His own father reined Cheney in on this crap, but GWB is just not the man his father is. For one thing, he doesn't have that CIA experience to know what manipulative tricks some people have.
And as far as not having enough manpower...well...Soviet-era secret police didn't need to have the manpower to monitor every call. They only had to have people thinking that every call might be monitored to put a chilling effect on that society's freedom.
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quote:Originally posted by Lalo: I'm rather confused as to why you're lashing out at Tom for asking if you do.
Because Tom has called him an evil coward? That's surely worth lashing out over, if not a flat violation of the service agreement. Insults are not any less insulting for being delivered in a refined manner.
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First, in regards to Dag and legalism. Dag and I see differently on a host of topics, but I greatly respect his input. Why? Because while others who are against some Presidential policy go off and scream and yell and panic, Dag calmy shows the true legal reality of the situation. Its not that he is a right wing voice, its just that he is a calm moderating voice, that seems to get some of you upset.
Having a screaming match against an opponent may be more fun and energetic, and requires less thought and effort, but Dag doesn't do that.
And I'm glad. If all we wanted to do was point fingers, panic and scream, then we would be no better than the fear monger politicians on both sides.
Secondly, I fear that the President may believe that he is above the law. Yet I've come to the conclusion that this is a political thing, not a constitutional thing. The main leash stopping a president from abusing the law is Congress. They have the power to invsetigate him and his departments. As long as the President has a congress that is too loyal to investigate, he can get away with what he wants.
While the courts are another limit on his power, they are physically impotent to enforce their rulings. Sure they could say, "You must not do this" the President could publically agree with them, then keep doing it. This has happened since the time of Andrew Jackson (Indian Rights. The Supreme Court said they were people. Jackson took the army and treated them like cattle, moving them down the "Trail of Tears"). More practically, the courts have a high lag time between the act and the decision. Years went by in the Hamdi case, with him locked away. The NSA program can continue for years before it reaches an final judicial outcome.
Third, my two biggest fears of the NSA recording practice is not that they will listen in to my phone recordings, or know where I've been calling. It is A) They will use this not to track terrorists, but to track political rivals. I'd love to see an experiment by a liberal or anti-war group. Have someone from that group call a friend overseas. Mention that "Joe-X, a strong Republican backer, is fed up with the President. He's been invited to a televises Presidential event. Instead of being an audience puppet, he's going to do a very visual protest, and the TV camera's will catch it all." Then see if Joe-X will be allowed to attend that event.
If he is not, that means that they are misusing this phone monitoring system.
Its clumsy and full of holes, but it appears to be the only oversite we the people, will have on this project.
The other fear is that even if the President is as faithful to our rights as he claims, this sets a precedent that future Presidents can abuse. If they can, they will.
Finally, the way this investigation was swept under the rug, first trying to hide it under the denial of clearance given the investigators (for the first time in history) without comment, then having "national security" explanation dragged out of the Attorney General only when confronted by congress, makes us all ponder the question--Why is it OK for the government to know all of our information, but for us to be kept in the dark about so much government information.
We are in the Information Age people.
In the Iron Age it wasn't the black smiths that built empires. It was those who maniputlated the Iron Technologies into the most effective use against their enemies that built empires.
In the Industrial Age it was not the workers or inventors of industrial might that built financial empires. It was those who manipulated the Industires into the most effective use against thier enemies that build financial empires.
In the Atomic Age it was not the makers of Atomic weapons that built empires. It was two countries that manipulated their Atomic weapons into the mose effective threat that built world spanning empires.
So in the Informatio Age, we all worried that some hacker or computer genius would take over the world. Wrong. It is those that most effectively use information against their enemies that are trying to build empires.
The current administration is hording information. Whether for good or for evil is open to debate, but their main policy seems to be hoard all you can. They dribble it out or use it with a hammer. They mix it with half-lies and innuendo. They use all the media like cheap hookers, then pay off the pimps. "Don't let one datum of info out of our control." seems to be Cheney's motto.
See, that above is the accesses and panic mongering that Dag will catch me on.
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quote:I fear that the President may believe that he is above the law.
It doesn't seem to me that the President believes that he is above the law, It seems to me that the President believes that he is above my sense of ethics, which is why I didn't vote for him.
There is a reason I didn't go to law school. And the reason is because I don't care about positive law. Like golf and D & D , as popular as law is, it is some other man's game, and I'm only tangentially, indirectly interested in the ways of putters, ten-sided dice, and legal precedent.
If I can live my life away from lawyers and cops, and by extension, accountants, I think I'll be a better person for it.
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_raven: If he is not, that means that they are misusing this phone monitoring system.
This is not necessarily so. I know for a fact that members of the Department of Defense, for example, have some fairly strict curtailments of their first amendment rights. Visibly attenting a protest is one of the things proscribed.
quote: The current administration is hording information. Whether for good or for evil is open to debate, but their main policy seems to be hoard all you can. They dribble it out or use it with a hammer. They mix it with half-lies and innuendo. They use all the media like cheap hookers, then pay off the pimps. "Don't let one datum of info out of our control." seems to be Cheney's motto.
I agree with your assessment of history. What doesn't follow is, after showing that this is exactly what politics has meant throughtout recorded history, you suddenly paint this administration as something new and horrid.
It's simply the nature of the beast.
Edit to add: your post also does a great job of describing why information has really been the most valuable all along-- it's not the technologies, but those who control them, which is all about information.
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quote:If the DoJ's OPR is such a security risk, why is this the only time in OPR's 31 year history that it was "prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation"?
There's the possibility that they think the leak is in that office. I have no idea if it's true, but it's the possibility that leaps to mind.
quote:I'm rather confused as to why you're lashing out at Tom for asking if you do. Surely it's not that outrageous a crime, particularly given I can't recall a single instance of you criticizing Bush for compromising one civil liberty or another.
Jim-Me summed up part of it well, although there is also the making stuff about what I've said and the what I consider to be his highly dangerous limitations he wants to place on legal analysis.
And, of course, his unwillingness to engage on either of those points. Apparently I'm supposed to be available for moral proclamations at Tom's whim, but Tom feels no duty to either correct his misstatements about me or admit that they were misstatements and won't deign to discuss the central moral theme he uses to justify his rudeness to me.
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Your steadfast defense of them has, over the years, led me to assume your agreement with them.
Dag has rarely, to my knowledge, defended actions made by this administration. He has often defended the legality of them, which, as he has been pointing out over and over, is not the same thing.
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quote:His own father reined Cheney in on this crap
Bob, I'd be really interested in reading more about this; I wasn't aware of it. Do you have any links, or barring that (hard to dig up anything about it on google, at least for me, due to the presidents in both administrations being named "George Bush") could you just summarize what Cheney tried to do, exactly, during Bush I's term?
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posted
Did reading comprehension just drop sharply on Hatrack lately?
Dagonee has disagreed with a major decision the Bush Administration has made in this thread, and said it's a terrible idea.
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quote: You dodge that question as ably and consistently as you claim Dagonee does about his own morality.
In fairness, when someone asks "is your goal to piss me off," and you reply "it's not my goal to piss you off," I'm not entirely sure how you can characterize that as a dodge.
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Because you're acting as though the pissing off part is some accident that just happpens, rather than an obvious, forseeable outcome...one which, by the way, increases the likelihood that the questioned party will slip up and reveal what you want them to reveal.
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Oh, yeah. It's all a complicated plot to learn Dag's opinion, at which point I'll cleverly destroy him. *rolls eyes* Show the guy some more respect than that.
That I might not agree with his opinion doesn't mean that expressing his opinion creates vulnerability.
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Who said anything abouut destroying him? It's ironic that you're suggesting someone else show more respect for him, I think, when you've repeatedly acknowledge you have little if any respect for his style or substance.
Hell, you've even made statements that appear to imply he's an evil lawyer, without being silly about it.
You consistently refuse to take Dagonee's posts at literal face value...why are you frustrated when people apply that same thing to you? At least, that's how it appears to me. It is difficult to take you saying, "I'm not trying to piss you off," when everyone here knows you're an intelligent person, well aware of that specific outcome, and whose goal (getting Dagonee to make a statement of morality on your terms) might be achieved by irritating him to the point he finally says what you insist he say.
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quote:Originally posted by Morbo: If the DoJ's OPR is such a security risk, why is this the only time in OPR's 31 year history that it was "prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation"?
There's the possibility that they think the leak is in that office. I have no idea if it's true, but it's the possibility that leaps to mind.
Which seems more likely: that a hypothetical leaker is in the OPR; or that the administration wished to quash the NSA investigation, and used security issues as a convenient excuse to do so?
Bear in mind, the OPR never had any clearances granted for the NSA program, so they couldn't have leaked any details of that program. So what does "the leak" refer to?
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quote:Which seems more likely: that a hypothetical leaker is in the OPR; or that the administration wished to quash the NSA investigation, and used security issues as a convenient excuse to do so?
I don't know. It seems a likely place for a leak on such things and a reason why they wouldn't give the office the information.
As I think Bob pointed out, Bush had more control over this investigation than any likely to be imposed from outside. Further, I don't see how it would serve the Bush administration to stop it in this way. But it's surely possible that they are in fact incompetent and untrustworthy enough to do this.
When people were speculating on why Novak wasn't up on contempt charges, I had numerous people tell me that the most likely reason was to get revenge on Miller and the other guy. To make this charge, one had to ignore a host of more likely possibilities and the rules of grand jury proceedings. Yet people made the accusation anyway and insisted, on no evidence other than their suspicions, that it was the most likely reason for Novak not facing contempt charges.
quote:Bear in mind, the OPR never had any clearances granted for the NSA program, so they couldn't have leaked any details of that program. So what does "the leak" refer to?
That doesn't mean they couldn't have learned about it elsewhere. There are other things that have leaked they'd be likely to know, too.
I have no idea if they leaked anything or not. It is, however, a plausible reason for denying them access to security clearances.
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"(getting Dagonee to make a statement of morality on your terms)"
Now, in Tom's defense, on a lot of subjects, it's tricky to get Dagonee to make a statement on any moral terms. ___
Here is what I see: a red hot Haracker poster will start a thread about some Bush inspired outrage. The Poster will scream and holler and use capital letters, and above all, the poster will call Bush's actions illegal or unconstitutional.
Then Dagonee replies politely and knowledgable that Bush's actions are possibly legal and possibly constitution for (insert enumerated reasons)
The two bicker on finer points, and Dagonee's usually right for two reasons, 1) he is good at this, 2) the red hot poster is way too casual about using words like "illegal," or "unconstitutional." ____
As to this vulnerability nonsense. That's what non-legal morality is. It's delicate. It's fragile. It's important. And it means leaving yourself vulnerable because your entire sense of virtue, your past decisions and those in the future, hinge on this.
It's kind of like using your real name.
Posts: 5600 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
I'm not sure I understand your scenario, Dag. If the Bush administration knows that there is a leak in the OPR, why are they not doing anything about it? It would seem to me that they have considerable leeway to isolate or more likely fire and/or prosecute this leaker. It also sounds like something it would be important they take care of, rather than taking the unprecidented step of preventing an investigation.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here. As far as I understand, on this issue, the Administration was using its perogative to deny security clearance to all people from the OPR, thus making any investigation impossible. I'm not sure what would prevent them from denying this clearance only to people they suspect of leaking information, even if they couldn't prove that these people were doing so. However, that's what it seems to me that you are suggesting, that they'd be incapable of doing so. Have I read what you are saying or the situation wrongly?
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Further, I don't see how it would serve the Bush administration to stop it in this way. But it's surely possible that they are in fact incompetent and untrustworthy enough to do this.
Remember Dag, that when this investigation was quashed, it was done in a quiet, beaurocratic, sort of way. The investigators lined up to look into the situation, and were denied security clearance. No explanation was originally given. The probe actually continued for several weeks as far as it could without the security clearances, before the head of the agency announced that the probe had hit a dead end.
It was quietly quashed.
Until the upset members of this probe risked their careers to bring this information to the press, and to congress.
The quiet beaurocratic squashing of the investigation back-fired on them. It didn't have to, but it did.
So the question remains, is the odds greater that one of these people is a national security threat, or that some one in the administration wanted to quietly silence this probe without facing the political heat of an out right command to cancel it.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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quote:Until the upset members of this probe risked their careers to bring this information to the press, and to congress.
I think that might be a bit over-dramatic a characterization. From what I understand of this story, it wasn't them coming forward, so much as it was the press asking "What is the state of your investigation?" and being answered truthfully, that they had to close the investigation because they were being denied access. I could be mistaken about that though.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:I'm not sure what would prevent them from denying this clearance only to people they suspect of leaking information, even if they couldn't prove that these people were doing so.
Here's one possible scenario:
1) A particular document has been leaked. 2) They have decent evidence that the leaker was in one of three offices. 3) They can't narrow it down further. 4) The leak is related in some way to the NSA program and seems to be motivated by civil libertarian concerns.
There are only something like 12 attorneys on the OPR Washington staff.
I can't speak to this in DoJ, but I know similar things have been done in the Navy (keeping one office out of the loop on certain announcements, for example, because they thought the leak was coming from there but couldn't prove it).
quote:So the question remains, is the odds greater that one of these people is a national security threat, or that some one in the administration wanted to quietly silence this probe without facing the political heat of an out right command to cancel it.
And you've got no way to answer this question accurately.
Someone asked "Why is this the only time they've been stopped?" I gave another possible reason, one with as much evidence as the other one being bandied about.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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