The Wiretap Vindication

Posted January 16, 2009, 10:05 p.m.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, since I’ve covered it before. Like it or not, in a time of war the president has fairly broad powers to protect the people of the United States using means (like warrentless wiretaps) that might be illicit in peacetime. Every president who has led us in times of war has used these powers—Republican or Democrat—and was completely within their rights to do so.

The liberal left—who don’t seem to mind that one of their heroes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (D), authorized the war-time internment of certain Japanese, German, and Italian persons right here in the U.S. under Executive Order 9066—seem to go into fits of spasms over President George W. Bush’s (R) approval of very limited wiretapping of potentially terrorism-related phone calls. Recording some suspicious phone calls seems to be quite a bit less intrusive than the complete suspension of Japanese-Americans’ civil liberties, but such is our partisan world. Either might be morally wrong; neither is illegal in war time.

The Wall Street Journal printed an editorial today bringing to light a story that most other media outlets have ignored. Most critics of these wiretaps have claimed that Bush was required to get permission to perform these wiretaps from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (‘FISA Court’) established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The court itself just released a (highly-redacted) ruling disagreeing and re-affirming the President’s war-power authority to gather foreign intelligence without any judicial involvement, even when one end of the call is in the United States.

Hopefully we can put this tired, baseless issue to rest now.

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.

The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Whenever anything disagreeable or displeasing happens to you, remember Christ crucified and be silent.

It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness.

I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.

We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.

Trust between people who are not naive is a form of courage, because betrayal is always a possibility, and because this is consciously understood.

The transient passions and the interests of an hour, or the chance of circumstances, may have created the external forms of independence; but the despotic tendency which has been repelled will, sooner or later, inevitably reappear on the surface.

If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons’ schools, the history of education would be very different.

Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.

Like Judaism, but unlike most other religions, Christianity is not mythical, in that it is based on events that took place not in a timeless realm but within human history itself.

In the last instance, men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.

In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.

Few institutions in our society are in a more unsatisfactory state than schools. Few generate more discontent or can do more to undermine our liberty.

The purpose of the First Amendment’s religion clause was not to protect the state (or the people) from religion, but to protect religion from the state. . . .

The very idea of converting what was formerly a confederation to a consolidated government is totally subversive of every principle which has hitherto governed.

Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.

When you get a whole country—as did ours—thinking that Washington is a sort of heaven and behind its clouds dwell omniscience and omnipotence, you are educating that country into a dependent state of mind which augurs ill for the future.

You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal.