Originally Posted by Terminator X

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

I strongly disagree that political dissent, even during wartime, amounts to anything approaching treason...

... So, no matter how many folks have to die as a result, I 'm gonna yell "Fire!" in this movie thea, er, country all I want, even if there's just slim chance I'm right about that.

It is that simple, yet not in that way. Concerned citizens who are passionate about their country are allowed to question their government, and according to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, encouraged to do so. If they think their government is doing a shitty job of protecting their national interests, or is wasting their money on personal vendettas, or that their president is a tad bizarre in his homoerotic relationship with Saddam Hussein and find the fact that he keeps Saddam's pistol as a souvenir a little freaky, they have the right to do so and loudly.

As long as they do so in way that gives no encouragement to the enemy, yes. But they are morally obligated to take that factor into account.

On the other hand, if you are plotting to blow up apartment buildings, then you should be apprehended. If this is indeed a "war" then you should be treated according to the protocol laid out in the Geneva Conventions. If you are an American citizen, then you should face the same domestic laws that other American terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh, were subject to.
Case closed. It really is that simple, and it CAN be done.

How?

The laws failed with McVeigh. He was punished afterward, but the Oklahoma City bomb had done its work. The goal now is only secondarily to punish terror, the goal is to prevent it. Trying to apply peacetime legal approaches to this is to guarantee failure, and possibly failure to the tune of body counts with zeros on the end.

This is the reality that Kerry knows he's going to have to face if he wins, which is why he's sending people like Gore out to toss the red meat, rather than binding himself by doing it himself. The goal is not just to punish terrorism, but to prevent it, to catch those plotting it before they kill anybody else.

In order to do that, information will be necessary, it will be necessary to sort and sift that information to look for patterns, and privacy will be compromised, to a point.

This isn't a conflict of a good (privacy and individual rights) and evil (government fascism). It's a question of how to balance off two competing goods (individual rights vs. domestic security). The Patriot Act was an attempt to do that, and in my opinion a bad answer.

But there is no avoiding the necessity of striking such a balance, and for all the high talk and quotes of Ben Franklin and Justice Jackson, the practical end result will be some sort of pragmatic compromise that to a degree will offend against both.

Dealing with the problems of the Patriot Act requires that a better, safer compromise be created in its place. If you and yours insist on NO compromise, then you'll get the Patriot Act back in some form, or something worse. The 3T 'looseness' is nearly over, and nothing can keep it going much longer.

If you don't like the Patriot Act, then the first step is to decide what compromises between your rights as an American and the domestic security of Americans you'd find acceptable, and safer, and a better precedent.

If you're telling yourself that this problem can be solved without any such compromises, then you aren't facing the matter seriously.

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Do you care how many people die for it, who need not have died? If you don't care, then we really have reached impasse.

I think we all followed the bouncing ball until it hit the Iraq invasion of 2003. There is so much homegrown psychology in the situation that it made our leader very hard to trust. Here he is. The failed business man. The former alcoholic. The pitiful mutation of his father's likeness, out to out do his father in the one way his father failed, by getting the arch nemesis, Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein did not seem very threatening in the twelve years after his defeat in Kuwait. They bombed his country many times, and, aside from some surface to air fire, Iraq could not retaliate. Saddam was fair game for jokes in the 1990s. I mean, he played a major role in South park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.
And then in 2002, a year after 9-11 and Afghanistan, Dick Cheney started the march to war with a televised speech he gave in front of some usually television-friendly audience that cheered and applauded to send out the right messages to the American public.
And somehow possible weapons turned into vast storehouses of chemical weapons. The fact that the very presidencies Cheney had served donated many of these weapons to Saddam's regime didn't seem to matter. That kind of slipped through everyone's fingers.
Yes, the UN inspections were a charade. But so was the Bsuh Administrations commitment to let the process play out for a couple months. I never believed they ever had any intent of honoring the UN Inspectors, no matter how much access they were given, no matter what they turned up. They wanted war, and no matter what happened the UN inspectors woudl have failed. They put the burden of proof on Saddam, who never could have proved anything for anything he or his representatives said woudl have been treated as illegitimate, and nothing could be done to stop the Bush Administration's calculated march to war.
This was no Pearl Harbor, or Fort Sumter. There was no Alamo here, or Lusitania. No, this was a war of convenience, and remarks from the leading officials in the administration leave little to imagination. Paul Wolfowitz had been urging some kind of invasion of Iraq throughout the 1990s. In 2003, regardless of whatever grounds they gave, that deep wish came true. If 9-11 had never happened, I believe the invasion woudl have taken place anyway.
George W. Bush said that we should not be so foolish to trust in the restraint of Saddam Hussein. Fifteen months later, with little to account for those vast store houses of WMD that Mr. Cheney loved to talk about, I ask, can we really trust in the restraint of George W. Bush. A man who keeps Saddam's pistol as his souvenir? A man who chooses war out of convenience? A man who told us all many things that have yet to materialize?
If your captain is disturbed and you are heading into a gale, is it treasonous to discuss mutiny? Is it wrong to consider dismissing your captain to save your own lives? Or is it a very natural, human impulse?
We have democratic institutions in this country that allow us to select new captains. So you have no need to worry about a violent mutiny.
What some of us are advocating, is that this captain will founder the ship, and we are looking for cooler heads to guide us through the troubled waters ahead.
Coming from a group of people who love to invade other countries and spend billions of dollars propping up puppet governments so we have a choir that sings louder and in tune, it astounds me that you should dismiss remarks made within our democratic process like this as some sort of threat to national stability.
Go take a look in the mirror.

Originally Posted by Kevin Parker '59

What Bin Laden and his ilk really want is for America and the rest of the West "to submit", i.e. give up Judeo-Christianity and convert en masse to Islam. I've actually heard Al Queda sympathizers, being interviewed on CNN, actually expressing that precise sentiment. Idiots. Don't they realize that the West will blow up the world before that will be allowed to happen?

Will we? Would we really? :-?

Right now, Europe, particularly France, is facing the early stages of just such a problem. The whole purpose of Chirac's 'headscarf' ban was to discourage the spread of Islamic culture in French environs, for all his empty claims of even-handedness (banding crucifixes, etc). Yet this effort is deeply controversial.

In Britain, a UK minister (Trevor Phillips) recently made a comment that 'multiculturalism suggests separateness', among some other basically true things. The result was a social explosion of fury.

Equality Chief Branded 'Right Wing'

Frankly, I see signs of precisely the sort of lack of self-confidence that al Queda hopes to encourage and establish in the West, with America showing it in the least virulent form, Western Europe in the worst, places like Canada and Australia somewhere in between.

I hope that this is a sign of 3T, and not a more fundamental weakness.

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Originally Posted by Terminator X

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

I strongly disagree that political dissent, even during wartime, amounts to anything approaching treason...

... So, no matter how many folks have to die as a result, I 'm gonna yell "Fire!" in this movie thea, er, country all I want, even if there's just slim chance I'm right about that.

It is that simple, yet not in that way. Concerned citizens who are passionate about their country are allowed to question their government, and according to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, encouraged to do so. If they think their government is doing a shitty job of protecting their national interests, or is wasting their money on personal vendettas, or that their president is a tad bizarre in his homoerotic relationship with Saddam Hussein and find the fact that he keeps Saddam's pistol as a souvenir a little freaky, they have the right to do so and loudly.

As long as they do so in way that gives no encouragement to the enemy, yes. But they are morally obligated to take that factor into account.

On the other hand, if you are plotting to blow up apartment buildings, then you should be apprehended. If this is indeed a "war" then you should be treated according to the protocol laid out in the Geneva Conventions. If you are an American citizen, then you should face the same domestic laws that other American terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh, were subject to.
Case closed. It really is that simple, and it CAN be done.

How?

The laws failed with McVeigh. He was punished afterward, but the Oklahoma City bomb had done its work. The goal now is only secondarily to punish terror, the goal is to prevent it. Trying to apply peacetime legal approaches to this is to guarantee failure, and possibly failure to the tune of body counts with zeros on the end.

This is the reality that Kerry knows he's going to have to face if he wins, which is why he's sending people like Gore out to toss the red meat, rather than binding himself by doing it himself. The goal is not just to punish terrorism, but to prevent it, to catch those plotting it before they kill anybody else.

In order to do that, information will be necessary, it will be necessary to sort and sift that information to look for patterns, and privacy will be compromised, to a point.

This isn't a conflict of a good (privacy and individual rights) and evil (government fascism). It's a question of how to balance off two competing goods (individual rights vs. domestic security). The Patriot Act was an attempt to do that, and in my opinion a bad answer.

But there is no avoiding the necessity of striking such a balance, and for all the high talk and quotes of Ben Franklin and Justice Jackson, the practical end result will be some sort of pragmatic compromise that to a degree will offend against both.

Dealing with the problems of the Patriot Act requires that a better, safer compromise be created in its place. If you and yours insist on NO compromise, then you'll get the Patriot Act back in some form, or something worse. The 3T 'looseness' is nearly over, and nothing can keep it going much longer.

If you don't like the Patriot Act, then the first step is to decide what compromises between your rights as an American and the domestic security of Americans you'd find acceptable, and safer, and a better precedent.

If you're telling yourself that this problem can be solved without any such compromises, then you aren't facing the matter seriously.

1) Don't use some vague term like "morally obligated" to prop up your argument, it does you no good.
No citizen should feel obligated to obey the higher authority. The higher authority can only earn the respect of those it attempts to represent. If it does not honor the people it represents, it should not be awarded such loyalty.
I don't know which one of those trusty political boxes this puts me in, but I don't recognize George W. Bush as a leader. He, to me, is just a man, like you or I.
I do not feel his policies articulate what I consider to be the will of the American people, and therefore he acts on his own behalf, rather than mine, although he would like to think so. Yes, he certainly does have power. Power to destroy me, you, anybody he decides should be destroyed.
If I was a real threat I would be discredited, jailed, or killed. Instead I am just a peasant, and peasants can talk as much as they want, just as long as they pay taxes. Once I withdraw from that system, I will be dealt with accordingly.
So I feel that morally I am not obligated to recognize and support the actions of the authority, if I am vehemently opposed to such policies.
To use Godwin's Law in my argument, one could argue that Germans in the 1930s and 40s were obligated to serve their nations, as were the Japanese. Soviets who deported or killed millions of innocents were just following orders they were told would benefit their nation.
So I feel questioning that kind of relationship to be a very healthy one.
There is no moral obligation to obey an order from a higher authority if you strongly disagree with it.
I mean, isn't that what Charlie Graner and Lynndie England should have done?


2) This country could never have launched an internal war on terror, because the fringe groups that people like McVeigh and Co. were associated with are so intertwined with the right-wing that such an undertaking would have led to militarized domestic confrontation.
The United States government never fully dealt with that problem, and will not, not for the sake of prevention of future events nor the protection of the lives of its own citizenry because of base politics.

Originally Posted by Terminator X

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Do you care how many people die for it, who need not have died? If you don't care, then we really have reached impasse.

I think we all followed the bouncing ball until it hit the Iraq invasion of 2003. There is so much homegrown psychology in the situation that it made our leader very hard to trust. Here he is. The failed business man. The former alcoholic. The pitiful mutation of his father's likeness, out to out do his father in the one way his father failed, by getting the arch nemesis, Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein did not seem very threatening in the twelve years after his defeat in Kuwait. They bombed his country many times, and, aside from some surface to air fire, Iraq could not retaliate. Saddam was fair game for jokes in the 1990s.

No, he couldn't directly retaliate. Which says nothing about whether he was a threat or not. They made jokes about Middle Eastern terror groups, too, until 911. That too means nothing.

And somehow possible weapons turned into vast storehouses of chemical weapons. The fact that the very presidencies Cheney had served donated many of these weapons to Saddam's regime didn't seem to matter. That kind of slipped through everyone's fingers.

No, that didn't matter, and no, it didn't slip through anyone's fingers.

Hussein was useful to us in the eighties, against Iran. The USSR was useful to us in the 40s, against Germany. International politics is an ugly game at the best of times.

Yes, the UN inspections were a charade. But so was the Bsuh Administrations commitment to let the process play out for a couple months. I never believed they ever had any intent of honoring the UN Inspectors, no matter how much access they were given, no matter what they turned up.

I certainly hope they didn't intend to honor the UN effort. They would have been fools to do so.

It was up to Hussein to prove his innocence, not America to prove his guilt. Furthermore, he could easily have stopped Bush in his tracks by permitting real inspections.

By real, I mean (as I've said before), inspectors from America and the UK, NOT under UN supervision or control, with no limits on who they could speak to, when or how long they could speak to them, where they could go, or what doors they could open. The inspectors would have needed to be accompanied by sufficient force (meaning armed escorts of American and UK personnel) to prevent interference.

The UN inspection effort was a conscious, intentional attempt to delay the Anglo-American military action until it was too late to carry it out (another couple of months would have done the trick). It had nothing whatever to do with Hussein or what he had or did not have, and America perceived that. If Hussein had permitted actual, useful inspections, it would have become politically impossible for Bush to proceed.

So all claims that we 'invaded' Hussein without provocation are empty.

He had a straightfoward (if personally humliating) way to stop the effort. But he did not, and I suspect could not, since there was a good chance they'd have found the WMDs he was hiding. He even ended up interfering with Blix's farcical inspections. He was either hiding something, or he went out of his way to produce the impression he was hiding something. Either way, the result is the same.

They wanted war, and no matter what happened the UN inspectors woudl have failed. They put the burden of proof on Saddam, who never could have proved anything for anything he or his representatives said woudl have been treated as illegitimate, and nothing could be done to stop the Bush Administration's calculated march to war.

The burden WAS on Hussein, and rightly so. Furthermore, as I noted above, there was a very straightforward way he could have proven his innocence, if he was innocent.

Even making the offer, not through the UN but directly to Washington, in public, would have carried sufficient political force to stop the invasion in its tracks, whether Bush liked it or not. Of course, he would then have had to actually permit real inspections, which I strongly suspect he couldn't do, since he wasn't innocent.

This was no Pearl Harbor, or Fort Sumter. There was no Alamo here, or Lusitania. No, this was a war of convenience, and remarks from the leading officials in the administration leave little to imagination. Paul Wolfowitz had been urging some kind of invasion of Iraq throughout the 1990s. In 2003, regardless of whatever grounds they gave, that deep wish came true. If 9-11 had never happened, I believe the invasion woudl have taken place anyway.

Sooner or later, probably. I doubt it would have happened even yet barring 911, but Hussein was an on-going problem that had to be settled, one way or another.

George W. Bush said that we should not be so foolish to trust in the restraint of Saddam Hussein. Fifteen months later, with little to account for those vast store houses of WMD that Mr. Cheney loved to talk about, I ask, can we really trust in the restraint of George W. Bush. A man who keeps Saddam's pistol as his souvenir?

You keep harping on that. What is the big deal about something that trivial?

If your captain is disturbed and you are heading into a gale, is it treasonous to discuss mutiny? Is it wrong to consider dismissing your captain to save your own lives? Or is it a very natural, human impulse?

So far, we have no evidence that the captain is disturbed. If it turns out that the WMDs never existed, the fault still lies with Hussein, since he tried hard to make us think he did, which was suicidal. He had his chance, he failed to take it.

Coming from a group of people who love to invade other countries and spend billions of dollars propping up puppet governments so we have a choir that sings louder and in tune, it astounds me that you should dismiss remarks made within our democratic process like this as some sort of threat to national stability.

You accuse them of 'loving to invade other countries'. What evidence do you have for that view?

As for a threat to national stability, we have troops in the field!!! Can you not perceive the difference between legitimate dissent and intentionally encouraging the enemy?!

Originally Posted by Terminator X

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Originally Posted by Terminator X

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

I strongly disagree that political dissent, even during wartime, amounts to anything approaching treason...

... So, no matter how many folks have to die as a result, I 'm gonna yell "Fire!" in this movie thea, er, country all I want, even if there's just slim chance I'm right about that.

It is that simple, yet not in that way. Concerned citizens who are passionate about their country are allowed to question their government, and according to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, encouraged to do so. If they think their government is doing a shitty job of protecting their national interests, or is wasting their money on personal vendettas, or that their president is a tad bizarre in his homoerotic relationship with Saddam Hussein and find the fact that he keeps Saddam's pistol as a souvenir a little freaky, they have the right to do so and loudly.

As long as they do so in way that gives no encouragement to the enemy, yes. But they are morally obligated to take that factor into account.

On the other hand, if you are plotting to blow up apartment buildings, then you should be apprehended. If this is indeed a "war" then you should be treated according to the protocol laid out in the Geneva Conventions. If you are an American citizen, then you should face the same domestic laws that other American terrorists, like Timothy McVeigh, were subject to.
Case closed. It really is that simple, and it CAN be done.

How?

The laws failed with McVeigh. He was punished afterward, but the Oklahoma City bomb had done its work. The goal now is only secondarily to punish terror, the goal is to prevent it. Trying to apply peacetime legal approaches to this is to guarantee failure, and possibly failure to the tune of body counts with zeros on the end.

This is the reality that Kerry knows he's going to have to face if he wins, which is why he's sending people like Gore out to toss the red meat, rather than binding himself by doing it himself. The goal is not just to punish terrorism, but to prevent it, to catch those plotting it before they kill anybody else.

In order to do that, information will be necessary, it will be necessary to sort and sift that information to look for patterns, and privacy will be compromised, to a point.

This isn't a conflict of a good (privacy and individual rights) and evil (government fascism). It's a question of how to balance off two competing goods (individual rights vs. domestic security). The Patriot Act was an attempt to do that, and in my opinion a bad answer.

But there is no avoiding the necessity of striking such a balance, and for all the high talk and quotes of Ben Franklin and Justice Jackson, the practical end result will be some sort of pragmatic compromise that to a degree will offend against both.

Dealing with the problems of the Patriot Act requires that a better, safer compromise be created in its place. If you and yours insist on NO compromise, then you'll get the Patriot Act back in some form, or something worse. The 3T 'looseness' is nearly over, and nothing can keep it going much longer.

If you don't like the Patriot Act, then the first step is to decide what compromises between your rights as an American and the domestic security of Americans you'd find acceptable, and safer, and a better precedent.

If you're telling yourself that this problem can be solved without any such compromises, then you aren't facing the matter seriously.

1) Don't use some vague term like "morally obligated" to prop up your argument, it does you no good.

There is nothing vague about it. You have a duty to take into consideration how what you say and especially how you say it will be perceived by the opposition, and by our own forces. Gore and other high-profile types have a stronger obligation in that way. Period.

There's nothing vague about that.

No citizen should feel obligated to obey the higher authority. \

[/quopte

Get it through your head, this isn't about politics! This is important!

I don't know which one of those trusty political boxes this puts me in, but I don't recognize George W. Bush as a leader. He, to me, is just a man, like you or I.

He is also your current leader, like it or not, until he loses an election. You seem to have a problem with that, but you're stuck with it. Your personal views of Bush don't alter your obligation to take the realities of life into consideration.

I do not feel his policies articulate what I consider to be the will of the American people, and therefore he acts on his own behalf, rather than mine,

He is the President of the United States at this time, therefore he does act in your behalf. Period. Bush speaks for America as a whole right now, and nobody else.

I didn't like having Clinton speaking for me, either, but he had the right to do so while he was President.

although he would like to think so. Yes, he certainly does have power. Power to destroy me, you, anybody he decides should be destroyed.
If I was a real threat I would be discredited, jailed, or killed.

What evidence do you have for that paranoia, other than paranoia? I hate to break it to you, but this vast conspiracy to strip people of their rights and silence dissent isn't happening. Open your eyes and look around, TX. Where are the gulags? Where are the secret police?

And if you think Bush would have you killed, or has had enemies killed, that's a damn serious accusation. Do you have evidence for it?


So I feel that morally I am not obligated to recognize and support the actions of the authority, if I am vehemently opposed to such policies.

Unfortunately, you are so morally obligated, until you can come up with solid evidence that your leadership is acting illegally and immorally.

2) This country could never have launched an internal war on terror, because the fringe groups that people like McVeigh and Co. were associated with are so intertwined with the right-wing that such an undertaking would have led to militarized domestic confrontation.
The United States government never fully dealt with that problem, and will not, not for the sake of prevention of future events nor the protection of the lives of its own citizenry because of base politics.

:lol:

You really are clueless about the Right, aren't you? :lol:

McVeigh was never associated with the mainstream Right in America. That's a myth Clinton tried to promulgate in the aftermath, but it was never remotely true. If you think it was, you live in an imaginary world. Nor was there any danger of any kind of militarized internal confrontation in the 90s. The chance was basically nil.

McVeigh and Co. were lunatics, and they acted, essentially, on their own.

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Originally Posted by Kevin Parker '59

What Bin Laden and his ilk really want is for America and the rest of the West "to submit", i.e. give up Judeo-Christianity and convert en masse to Islam. I've actually heard Al Queda sympathizers, being interviewed on CNN, actually expressing that precise sentiment. Idiots. Don't they realize that the West will blow up the world before that will be allowed to happen?

Will we? Would we really? :-?

In a 4T mood? DEFINITELY. There is hardly a doubt in my mind that Kevin is right on the mark.

Originally Posted by Terminator X

Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

I strongly disagree that political dissent, even during wartime, amounts to anything approaching treason...

... So, no matter how many folks have to die as a result, I 'm gonna yell "Fire!" in this movie thea, er, country all I want, even if there's just slim chance I'm right about that.

It is that simple, yet...

Honesty... how refreshing. How many deaths are worth your easy comfort of dissent? One? Two? Thousands?

Dissent is like any other commodity, it comes with a price. You, however, want your dissent entirely free. Oops, I'm sorry, what did you toss into the Kerry coffers? Ten bucks? Twenty? Two hundred thousand?

The percent of you that is paid for dissent is directly proportionate to your impact on the debate on what is true liberty and just phony bs.

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

As long as they [voice dissent] in way that gives no encouragement to the enemy, yes. But they are morally obligated to take that factor into account.

Any voicing of dissent can plausibly be construed as encouraging the enemy. But that is not always a bad thing. Suppose that the Germans had been able to voice dissent encouraging to the French in 1940 or to the Soviets in 1942? Surely we can agree that the world would have been better off if the war aims of the Wehrmacht in those years had been hampered.

Or, to use a perhaps less incendiary and extreme example, what do you say in regard to these words of dissent uttered in a time of war by a very elected legislator:

The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts.

Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government-they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation - the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution.

Edmund Burke, speech in Parliament, March 22, 1775. Burke is also on record, a year or two later, of intemperately opining that while foreign mercenaries were loosed upon the colonies, "if I were an American as I am an Englishman, I would never lay down my arms! Never, never, never!"

Treason?

The laws failed with McVeigh. He was punished afterward, but the Oklahoma City bomb had done its work. The goal now is only secondarily to punish terror, the goal is to prevent it. Trying to apply peacetime legal approaches to this is to guarantee failure, and possibly failure to the tune of body counts with zeros on the end.

No. Unacceptable. I must side with Benjamin Franklin on this: Those who would trade essential liberties for a little temporary security deserve, and will have, neither. It is true that Timothy McVeigh did terrible harm. But not so great a harm as would have been done by empowering the government to punish him before he had committed a crime, or to deny him his rights as an American citizen. That cure is far, far worse than the disease. Better a little increased danger of terrorism than a certainty of tyranny.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

The laws failed with McVeigh. He was punished afterward, but the Oklahoma City bomb had done its work. The goal now is only secondarily to punish terror, the goal is to prevent it. Trying to apply peacetime legal approaches to this is to guarantee failure, and possibly failure to the tune of body counts with zeros on the end.

No. Unacceptable. I must side with Benjamin Franklin on this: Those who would trade essential liberties for a little temporary security deserve, and will have, neither. It is true that Timothy McVeigh did terrible harm. But not so great a harm as would have been done by empowering the government to punish him before he had committed a crime, or to deny him his rights as an American citizen. That cure is far, far worse than the disease. Better a little increased danger of terrorism than a certainty of tyranny.

Brian, this is an example of why I used the word 'paranoia' to describe TX above.

I didn't call for, or imply, that the government should be punishing crimes before they are committed. The goal is to prevent the crime, and conspiracy to commit such acts is itself a crime.

What I pointed out was the necessity of finding a way to balance the rights of privacy and expression against the right of the majority to security. That means finding a framwork to permit gathering more information than is currently allowed, without creating undue damage to the standing traditions of freedom and speech. The government will be gathering more information than it did before. The question is what is the best way to do that, the least dangerous way. Refusing to consider the matter merely guarantees that the outcome will be ill-considered, it won't prevent the changes from happening.

Our approach can not be purely reactive (small 'r').

Treason?

Maybe, maybe not. We'll count the votes on election day: the ultimate court of law.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Or, to use a perhaps less incendiary and extreme example, what do you say in regard to these words of dissent uttered in a time of war by a very elected legislator:

The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts.

Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government-they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation - the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution.

Edmund Burke, speech in Parliament, March 22, 1775. Burke is also on record, a year or two later, of intemperately opining that while foreign mercenaries were loosed upon the colonies, "if I were an American as I am an Englishman, I would never lay down my arms! Never, never, never!"

Treason?

Depends on your definitions. I wouldn't go that far.

But if the colonists (meaning our ancestors) heard that these things were being said in Parliament, it probably did encourage them. From the POV of a British loyalist, Burke was giving encouragement to the rebels. You can debate the rightness or wrongess of it, but there is no question that he was having that effect, if they knew.

Now, in those days, it tooks weeks to months for news to cross the Atlantic, and often almost as long for it to go from point-to-point inside a landmass. Further, news took the form of printed words on paper or word-of-mouth, robbing it of much immediacy.

Today, information criss-crosses the planet effectively instantaneously, in living color and surround-sound. Whatever is said and done in one place is effective seen in real-time around the world, with something barely short of the immediacy of being there in person.

So if you want the effect of public statements on our own forces and the enemy not to be relevant, then tough, you can't have that. It's just one more of the basic changes that technological advancement has brought, that isn't going away.

The debate is not: should the effect be relevant? It's 'how do we handle the relevance'?

Go back over my statements, Brian. At no point have I condemned the expression of dissent. I've objected to the manner of that expression, and the lack of consideration* that has been displayed in that dissent, and I've pointed out the apparently unwelcome fact that the world is watching, which produces additional considerations that apply, and will continue to apply, to wartime public statements by political figures.

(BTW, it applies to both political 'sides'. Bush should speak more carefully too, though as President he necessarily has more freedom in this respect than other politicians. Comments like 'bring 'em on' are foolish for many of the same reasons that apply to what Gore said.)

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Bush speaks for America as a whole right now, and nobody else.

Boy, how nuts are you? Let me ask you, does Colin Powell get to speak for America too, just once in awhile. You know sometimes, I like to speak for America as well :lol: And what about Bruce Springsteen, doesn't he speak for America?

But seriously.....


So basically, any evidence I offer doesn't matter, you get to define the facts of the matter, and my obligations, and anything you disagree with can be either pinned on Clinton or the liberal media.
And I live in an imaginary world.

Like I have said before, my world is just as real as yours, Mr. I Get To Say What Is Reality and What Isn't.
For what it's worth several high ranking officials who were privy to meetings in the early stages of the Bush Adminsitration have said publicly that this administration was fixated on a military intervention in Iraq from day one, and maybe even day MINUS ONE.
But I am sure they are just myths Bill Clinton drew up in between committing adultery and writing his memoirs.
Must be that over active imagination of mine again
Oh well, back to reading The New York Times

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

What is said on the home front....can get people maimed and killed.

huh..... and here i thought that it was invasion and occupation, moreso than the homefront opposition to invasion and occupation, that gets soldiers killed.

must be the dastardly liberal media that had me thinking that.


TK

p.s.-- again, remember, lukewarm supporter here. but let's accept the responsibility, rather than passing the buck, shall we?

Originally Posted by TrollKing

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

What is said on the home front....can get people maimed and killed.

huh..... and here i thought that it was invasion and occupation, moreso than the homefront opposition to invasion and occupation, that gets soldiers killed.

must be the dastardly liberal media that had me thinking that.


TK

p.s.-- again, remember, lukewarm supporter here. but let's accept the responsibility, rather than passing the buck, shall we?

What is said and done at home affects the events on the ground in the battlezone, altering both the potential for casualties and the probablity of success and failure.

Originally Posted by Terminator X

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Bush speaks for America as a whole right now, and nobody else.

Boy, how nuts are you? Let me ask you, does Colin Powell get to speak for America too, just once in awhile. You know sometimes, I like to speak for America as well :lol: And what about Bruce Springsteen, doesn't he speak for America?

But seriously.....

I'm deadly serious. Colin Powell has no business expressing any official opinions that don't jibe with those of Bush. Bush is President, the Secretary of State's job is to implement the President's policies and views, without regard for his own. If his views and the Presidents are simply incompatible, resignation is the correct response.

This applies, BTW, to any Administration.

So basically, any evidence I offer doesn't matter, you get to define the facts of the matter, and my obligations, and anything you disagree with can be either pinned on Clinton or the liberal media.
And I live in an imaginary world.

What I said was basic civics and law, it's not a matter of personal opinion. Bush speaks for America, you speak for you, and only you, just as I speak for me, and only me. If Kerry wins the election, then Kerry speaks for America. Only one person at a time can be President.

For what it's worth several high ranking officials who were privy to meetings in the early stages of the Bush Adminsitration have said publicly that this administration was fixated on a military intervention in Iraq from day one, and maybe even day MINUS ONE.

That may be true. Why does it matter? Was it a consideration of a possibility, or an established given? How credible are the people who left the Administration? These are all relevant questions.

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

What is said and done at home affects the events on the ground in the battlezone, altering both the potential for casualties and the probablity of success and failure.

even if i grant you that it alters the potential for casualties, you must admit that sending troops into the battlezone in the first place creates the potential for casualties.

and since sending them into the battlezone in the first place creates that potential, the primary responsibility lies with us.


TK

Originally Posted by My dear Mr. Lamb

Maybe, maybe not. We'll count the votes on election day: the ultimate court of law.

Is our leader King Numbers? And, the next day we look to the coming election-- the post ultimate court of counting.


Do we have a LEADER at all or do we have a Chief Servant? If our Head Butler has been sending the Lower House Maids to dust in a Neighbor's House; do not the Employers have a right to wonder why that House is so clean and our Own is so grimy? Can we not hire or fire our Head Butler or criticize Him (even if it puts the maids in an awkward position). And, what happens if the Chief Parlour Maid reports that the Head Butler is mad and thinks the Neighbor's House is that of His Employer? Or, that He wishes to dust and polish every House on every Block on every Street in every Town in every Province of the Planet?

We Employers bear the cost of Our Butler's Madness just as surely as all those costs of Our Maids in a House not our Own when we wonder how things became this disordered. The Employers may think it wise to get a new Chief Butler or they may hope that the Madness may pass; but, I do not think it unreasonable that they discuss His condition and that of the House Next Door and Our Own. And, do it again in four years time.

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

... It was up to Hussein to prove his innocence, not America to prove his guilt.

HC, you really need to take a course in logic. :?

• You can't prove a negative!

I've made this point before, but you seem to ignore it. It's NOT an opinion.

Originally Posted by ... then, HC'68

... He had a straightfoward (if personally humliating) way to stop the effort. But he did not, and I suspect could not, since there was a good chance they'd have found the WMDs he was hiding. He even ended up interfering with Blix's farcical inspections. He was either hiding something, or he went out of his way to produce the impression he was hiding something. Either way, the result is the same.

You've also written this before, but it's patently false. We've had unfettered access for a long time now and have plenty of troops to poke around. We've found nothing, yet you still believe there is something there. Assuming the current results continue, you'll still be unconvinced ten years from now, which proves my point, You can't prove a negative!

and The Return of the 'Stab in the Back'


It's not the stupid Not-War, it's the Not-Coverage of the Not-War, Stupid!

Nevertheless, the political purpose of the theory isn't hard to grasp. The groundwork is being laid for a new version of the "stab in the back" myth that helped destroy Weimar Germany. No matter how far south things go in Iraq, the blame will be laid not at the feet of the president who initiated and conducted the war, but rather on those who had the temerity to note that it wasn't working. Rather than the critics having been proven right, or so the story goes, the critics are to blame for the failure of the very policy they were criticizing. It's an ugly tactic, and as you go down the journalistic food chain, it grows uglier still.

Former Gingrich aide, Tony Blankley, writing in the well-known bastion of journalistic propriety that is The Washington Times, likewise took the press to task, calling it "heatbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media opposition want the president's defeat more than America's victory." Standard stuff, so far, but he went on to lament that nothing could be done about it . . . yet. "Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently -- although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America." Some might find it heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president's political and media allies are more committed to his re-election than to the basic principles of American democracy.

Paging "Tricky Dick", "That Man", Mr. Wilson, Honest Abe, The Man from Braintree and HM Numbers! :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Do you care how many people die for it, who need not have died? If you don't care, then we really have reached impasse.

Of course I care. That's why I opposed the Iraq invasion in the first place, because I didn't want to send our servicepeople off to die in what I believed was an unnecessary war.

You believed the war was justified, and apparently you feel the price in American lives and treasure has been worth it. I don't think it has.

Proving a cause-and-effect relationship between any particular expression of dissent in America (e.g., Gore's speech) and any particular incident in Iraq (say, the car bombings that took place yesterday and today) is nebulous at best.

If we Americans are to live in a free society, any suggestion from the Powers That Be that we water down our dissent into something more "Politically Correct" should be disregarded. Who are they to determine what is "acceptable" dissent and what is too "reckless?" Where is that line? We're not talking Hanoi Jane here by any means -- we'd be seeing Al Gore visiting bin Laden in his Pakistani hideout if we're implying something even close to that.

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

Proving a cause-and-effect relationship between any particular expression of dissent in America (e.g., Gore's speech) and any particular incident in Iraq (say, the car bombings that took place yesterday and today) is nebulous at best.

Good grief, what a statement! Feel better now?

Originally Posted by Kiff 1961

If we Americans are to live in a free society, any suggestion from the Powers That Be that we water down our dissent into something more "Politically Correct" should be disregarded...

... As will those you support come November.


p.s. I think I'll frame this post as an in-your-face rebuttal after the election. 8)

Originally Posted by David '47 Redux

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

... It was up to Hussein to prove his innocence, not America to prove his guilt.

HC, you really need to take a course in logic. :?

• You can't prove a negative!

I've made this point before, but you seem to ignore it. It's NOT an opinion.

It is, however, a falsehood.

If a person is shot at 8:30 PM on a certain Tuesday, and you are a suspect, and you prove to law enforcement that you were, in fact, 500 miles away from the scene of the crime when it happened, you will have proven that you didn't shoot the victim.

You will have proven a negative.

Another example: You are acused of concealing a gun in your pocket. You allow police officers to pat you down, strip search you, X-Ray you, etc. No gun is found.

You will have proven a negative.

David, you are misusing language, and doing it in big red letters so everyone can see your foolishness. Of course you can prove a negative. Logicians do it all of the time.

Given a
Given a indicates ~b

Therefore ~b

Sometimes, people say in a sloppy way "you can't prove a negative" in the context of whether the soul exists or something like that, but WMD are not some whispy metaphysical thing, and sloppy language is not logic no matter how big and red you write it.

In criminal investigations, it is often noted that it is USUALLY MORE DIFFICULT to prove a negative, but that doesn't mean that it is logically IMPOSSIBLE to prove a negative.

In the context we are dealing with, had Hussein used the approach of South Africa and Kazahkstan to PROVE that their WMD had been destroyed, that is, to involve international agencies in the very destruction of said weapons, to COOPERATE, then the sanctions would have been lifted by the late 1990's and Hussein would still be in power.

In this context, Hussein's regime had agreed to cease-fire terms whose language placed the onus on Iraq to demonstrably destroy their WMD. So, this whole "you can't prove a negative" argument of yours is not only false, it's irrelevant, that is, if you stick to the purely legalistic rather than jump freely between legalistic and moral arguments (as many do).

If they had simply lost track of the WMD they listed as being in possesion of in 1991, or couldn't remember where they were, or had lost the paperwork, they should have admitted it, and allowed inspectors to sift the sands of Iraq for as long as they pleased in return for lifting the sanctions. This would have been the course of a rational ruler with his people's interests in mind.

Instead, in the words of David Kay:

When it comes to the U.N. weapons inspection in Iraq, looking for a smoking gun is a fool's mission. That was true 11 years ago when I led the inspections there. It is no less true today -- even after the seemingly important discovery on Thursday of a dozen empty short-range missile warheads left over from the 1980s.

The only job the inspectors can expect to accomplish is confirming whether Iraq has voluntarily disarmed. That is not a task that need take months more. And last week's cache is irrelevant in answering that question, regardless of the U.N.'s final determination. That's because the answer is already clear: Iraq is in breach of U.N. demands that it dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.

Perhaps it is you, David, who could benefit from a course in logic.

It didn't matter what Saddam did. He was on the list of things to do, and he got taken out.
And I quote:
"Fuck Saddam! We're taking him out" George W. Bush, 2002.
"Maybe we could lop off the southern part of the country and get some of the good oil wells," Paul Wolfowitz in the 1990s.

Yes, all sorts of legalisms were employed to justify their invasion of Iraq, but in the end, they were just a side show to blood lust and greed.
Everything was done to coincide with the weather and the election schedule. It was a big show that should have gone over much better and should have been the big reelection podium Bush the Aggressor stood on in 2004.
He will be standing on that podium, only now it seems more than half of Americans can see him for what he is.