It just seems to me that indefinite incarceration of an American citizen without charge and long-term warrantless wiretapping of people on US soil are illegal, but I am not a judge.

I want a judge to look at these actions because the review that I see as necessary is a legal review, not the resolution of a political question.

Fine. The trouble, of course, is precisely that that’s what Bush and his lackeys are NOT saying.

Hey, Perry, I like that script. I’d like to pass it on to John and Tim—what do you think?

Glad it’s useful. I just did a second version that’s a bit easier to use. It prompts on the first load to enter the names you want to filter, then appends the filtered user’s name to the toggle area (so you can tell who made the comment). I love greasemonkey.

Feel free to pass it on to John and Tim.

Hey, Pooh, I wanted to go back to something that you wrote earlier. You mentioned that the ruling was in an evidentiary hearing, not an appellate. Were you talking about precedential value? From a FISA standpoint/Fourth amendment, the admissability of the collected data would seem to be critically important.

Well the fact that it is an evidentiary hearing means that it has little, if any, precedential value. It is also limited in scope to claims advanced in support of suppression by El Hage. From reading the opinion, it’s basically a standard 4th Amendment challenge (with an unusual fact pattern to be sure). Basically it’s self-limited to the particular case and the particular issue (i.e. 4th amendment), so it’s of limited relevance unless we are talking about 4th amendment aspects (and even then, it’s easily distibguishable on the facts do to the fairly unique scenario).

Is that what you are asking?

Lemme play with it for a while and see if I can break it.

Let them argue with you, because defending a position against a meaningless attack is good practice

Let’s review the Meme of Fours: Four Things I Hate:

1. People who wait until their grocery order is totalled to get out their checkbook and begin writing a check

2. People who constantly (not sometimes, which is okay) treat everyone who disagrees with them as a homogenous bloc with some sinister agenda (aka, Darrell)

3. People who treat other people or animals as disposable

4. Being lectured

Let’s talk about Number Four. I’m a guy who will walk on a busy freeway to rescue a cat, but who would gladly back over somebody in the driveway if they KEEP LECTURING ME.

It’s number 4 that I want you to focus on.

But all seriousness aside, I have no use for Darrell. If he wants to put down his shitty condescending attitude and act like a human being, then we’ll talk. Until then, fuck him and the horse he rode in on. And if I were a righty, I’d be out to drown him in the pool … he is making all responsible conservatives look like idiots. That’s quite an accomplishment.

Darrell has one and only one position: Nobody gets to criticize George Bush for anything, unless Darrell approves the criticism. Otherwise he will spam you and the thread into oblivion to have the last word.

If that’s okay with you, fine. Great. I don’t like it, and will say so as the inclination strikes me.

I once got blasted by John for making about 10% of the posts to a long thread. Darrell has been averaging 30-40% of all posts to NSA threads.

I count 39 Darrell posts out of the 140 total posts to this thread for a Darrell rate of 28%. That’s more than one out of every four posts, slightly below his NSA thread rate of more than one out of every three posts.

Check out the number of ad-hominems, insults and abuse hurled my way for sincere arguments, and then come back and tell us who is being honest

Time to check the dictionary, Duhrrell.

An ad-hominem attack is when someone uses ridicule and insults to dismiss another’s argument.

Your arguments have been thoroughly shredded based on their lack of merit – not because someone said you were stupid and that’s why your argument is wrong.

Insults do not an ad-hominem make.

If I say the 4th ammendment isn’t the issue for the tenth time, will you listen? (not holding my breath).

El Hage is a red herring because it A) is a District Court opinion – not binding on anybody save the parties in that case (tough luck for Mr. El Hage, but TFB for him), though some may find it’s reasoning persuasive (I, and some other courts, do not) B) dealing with 4th amendment issue; and C) It involved actions that would (IMO) break a law if said law applies, which it doesn’t. (The Hamdi ‘neccesary incident of war’ argument would also be much stronger in a fact pattern such as El Hage)

It’s like taking a case overturning a speeding ticket for a guy caught doing 58 in a 60 MPH zone and then trying to apply to a guy caught doing 58 in a 40.

I’m thinking seriously about sitting down and writing a greasemonkey plug in to filter balloon juice. That will only help if everybody uses Firefox, though—who does, and who doesn’t?

How about this quick and dirty script? You can go to about:config and adjust your anti-troll preferences with a comma delimited string in greasemonkey.scriptvals :)

But don’t let your complete lack of understanding stop you from posting on it anyway. It’s the type of person you are

oprn Congressional hearings, yeah, I said open

Sensitive technology and data collection methods aired for our nation’s enemies to see and hear. I hope your side runs with that. Make it your 2006 campaign issue. I know your side is stupid enough to do exactly what you are advocating.

For what it is worth, Darrell is simply wrong here. El Hage does not bear on FISA, because FISA is explicitly silent on intercepts which do not touch American soil.

I don’t disagree. However, the federal court did comment on FISA’s shortcomings in monitoring foreign intelligence. As the entire controversy has revolved around FISA statutes involving monitoring of US citizens without warrant, I believe the court’s opinion to be worth noting, rather than dismissing it outright as you have done

El Hage is a red herring

El-Hage is federal court ruling which upheld not only the warrantless surveillance of a US citizen, but the physical search of his house w/o warrant.. all based upon info obtained from warrantless surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists. That seems to me to be a big f*cking deal. Not a “red herring” as you suggest without basis

2) What does this have to do with data mining? (I’m working on a longer set of thoughts about that, but…they don’t fit in the space available.)

Such ‘thoughts’ would presume knowledge of the type of technology involved, which I seriously doubt you or anyone else posting on BJ has any meaningful understanding of. But don’t let your complete lack of understanding stop you from posting on it anyway. It’s the type of person you are

I’m not a very good wonk and though I have gone all over the web, the mintue it descends into legal technicalities and definitions of technology, my eyes glaze over to my unending shame.

I DO believe that this admin has a history of obfuscation and imperial tendencies (led by Cheney) that would, sadly, make it entirely possible for them to have figured “screw you, we’ll do it anyway”. I notice that others have had the same thought occur to them about NSA intercepts and John Bolton. That right there tells me that it isn’t just about foreign earsdropping. And 72 hours (3 days) to get a retroactive warrant, what is the problem?

I do find the reaction of many Bush defenders very sad. While our soldiers are over there fighting for our “freedoms”, the Bush apologists are semmingly bending over backwards to excuse the lessening of those very freedoms. It must be nice to be free of the irony gene.

You don’t want honest answers or dialog, you just want to spam the commenters into submission.

Re-read this thread again. Check out the number of ad-hominems, insults and abuse hurled my way for sincere arguments, and then come back and tell us who is being honest