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Belated comment: spineless Dems and “Protect America Act”
By WDavidStephenson | August 8, 2007
Sorry that I was fixated on the bridge collapse when the spineless Democrats caved and let Bush get away with expanded power under the “Protect America Act of 2007.”
It’s easy to see why Congress is getting such abysmal approval ratings right now: we elected them to change things, but they’re more fixated on keeping their own seats than acting to change things Guess what: all that strategy does is undermine the public’s faith in all elected officials.
A pox on both your houses.
In addition to all the editorialists weighing in against the revised law, the outrage on the part of civil libertarians (and let’s not forget that the critics on this front include conservatives such as Bruce Fein, witness his recent op-ed on the Warrantless Surveillance Program), I noticed a letter to the editor in the Boston Globe from former AT & T researcher Daniel E. Speers, in which he pointed out that, protestations to the contrary, the expanded FISA program can’t be run technologically without wiretapping all of us, whether or not we’re making an international call to a bad boy:
“The simple truth is that terrorist or anyone planning a terrorist act will use unknown and anonymous telephone routing numbers. As an expert on telephone routing and tracking systems, I can assure you that there is no way on this earth to identify such calls unless you are listening in on all calls.
“Thus, in passing the Protect America Act of 2007, which the president signed into law, Congress has authorized the clandestine wiretapping of all Americans and all calls and communications to and from anywhere, whether private or commercial.”
Of course we can take the Bush Administration’s protestations that it will not engage in unwarranted surveillance because it falls under the watchful eye of Al “What Me Worry?” Gonzales.
My great-uncle, former Solicitor General John W. Davis, a staunch conservative (with, unfortunately, Neanderthal racial attitudes, witness his defense of South Carolina in Brown v. Board of Education), once defended Eugene Debs because of his passionate belief in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Would that such attitudes were still widespread in D.C.
In my book, passage of the ironically-titled “Protect America Act of 2007″ was a victory: a victory for the terrorists, who’ve managed to get Congress to surrender our hard-won liberties so they wouldn’t appear “soft on terrorism.”
A sad day.
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