Not un-American – anti-American
Responding to complaints about the supplemental appropriation that passed the House, Juan Cole of Informed Comment notes:
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution clearly says that Congress has the right:
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years . . . ‘
The Founding Fathers did not want even so much as a standing army, much less a standing war. It was the clear intent of the Constitution that any funding for any military effort be strictly limited in time. The idea that Bush could take the country to war for 4 years and never face any Congressional scrutiny or limits on funding is wholly antithetical to the US constitution.
Via Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway Jim Dwyer of the New York Times reports that the NYPD Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention. The NYPD doesn’t have any power that extends beyond the city and county of New York unless in hot pursuit, nor any reason to believe they have such power.
Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post informs us that the Terror database casts a wide net:
Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the list is a storehouse for data about individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States. It is the wellspring for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts and U.S. consulates, created to close one of the key intelligence gaps revealed after Sept. 11, 2001: the failure of federal agencies to share what they knew about al-Qaeda operatives.
Watch list sets low bar
But in addressing one problem, TIDE has spawned others. Ballooning from fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to about 435,000, the growing database threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it. “The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control,” said Russ Travers, in charge of TIDE at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean. “Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?”
It’s almost as if they no longer believe that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution exists, or they can do whatever wild thought comes into their head, if they claim an association with the War on Terror™.
The oath that everyone in government service in the United States takes explicitly requires you to support and defend the Constitution. I don’t care what justification you claim, if your actions are violations of the Constitution, you are anti-American. If you don’t believe in the Constitution, there are procedures to amendment it. If you don’t want to take the trouble to do that, just leave. There are plenty of people waiting in line to take your place, who do believe.
2 comments
Bryan,
What do you make of the
gwb43.com e-mail system? Josh is on it now, too.
I don’t know enough about “servers” and such to be sure, but the Abramoff and Ohio vote connections sure tickle one’s nose. See also Think Progress.
These are the rules, John:
Nothing that goes through the White House system can be deleted, it is all automatically backed up and archived to prevent accidental or intentional deletions.
The only way to avoid this requirement is by using an outside mail server, like gwb43.com or the RNC server. They are using outside servers to avoid having to comply with the law, and I would assume that such avoidance is also in violation of the law.
It has been noted that several people involved in the firing of the US Attorneys use non White House mail servers. It is going to require separate subpoenas to get records from those mail servers, and there is no requirement that prevents those records from being erased.