RE: Mark Davis: “The Snowden Effect” townhall/columnists/markdavis/2013/06/14/the-snowden-effect-n1619620/page/2 RE: “I had the very same position as the Patriot Act was being hammered out while smoke still rose from Ground Zero. The deciding factor in my decision to support it was the faith I placed in George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to use that information to catch terrorists without spying on my phone calls and e-mails.” Good grief! What madness impelled Mr. Davis to trust George W. Bush and Dick Cheney with extra-constitutional powers? The difference between an Militarist (mislabeled “neoconservative”) like Bush or Cheney and a socialist like Barack Obama is like the difference between a corrupt police officer who uses his authority to shake down people on his beat for bribes and a corrupt government social worker who uses his authority to shake down people for bribes. Beyond a certain superficial level, there isn’t any. That is why the Constitution is for all of us at all times as Justice DAVID Davis pointed out in Ex Parte Milligan. Mr. Snowden is a genuine hero who has exposed wanton destruction of the Constitution and inalienable individual rights. That he fled the country is not surprising since his prospects of getting a fair trial in the U.S. are about a quarter mile south of zilch. His attorneys would have to face all kinds of assertions about his guilt, the details of which can’t be looked into due to the sensitive secret nature of the subject matter. Given the common excess faith placed in people in an official capacity, the jury will most likely go along and convict Mr. Snowden on the basis of mere evidence-less assertions. Look again at the Milgram experiment. As far as keeping us safe from more massive terrorist attacks? What we have here is just another example of the inability of a certain mentality to deal with ideological motivation in politics, religion, and, for that matter, terrorism. Al Qaeda, Hamas, The Muslim Brotherhood, etc. are all highly decentralized since shared beliefs result in better unity of action than centralized command and control ever can. If the CIA could find and bump off all the leaders of these organizations, it MIGHT slow them down a bit for a day or two. They would soon be back functioning again as if nothing happened. So being mentally locked into the nation-state war mentality, they got us involved in undeclared wars which wrecked Iraq and left most of Afghanistan still in control of the Taliban while killing a lot of people, further wrecking both countries, wasting the lives of brave young Americans for nothing, and bankrupting the U.S. In the meantime real terrorists could simply sneak through “under the radar” or even when detected because good police work is hard work requiring mental effort, imagination, and people willing to communicate with their colleagues in other departments.. It is easier to simply order in the Marines to wreck nations—and not just enemy nations. It is also much easier to launch spy satellites and set up supercomputers with connections and algorithms allowing them to collect infinite data on all Americans while looking for a few key words (which may or may not be relevant) than to do the on-the-ground police and spy work necessary to get real terrorists. All this mountain of information does is provide a means to persecute the administration’s opponents while failing to do the impossible: read potential terrorists’ minds. What they are thinking can only be weeded out by capable agents talking to them and picking their brains in subtle ways the would-be terrorists don’t realize what is being done to them. But that is good police work and that is hard and dangerous work. Easier to have a computer search for keywords in blogs, phone calls, and e-mails, even if it leads to the harassment of law-abiding citizens while letting the real terrorists and their bombs get through.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:09:44 +0000
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