A recent Christopher Hitchens post was copied here recently by JimL to bolster his position on the Iraq war. (I would ask that next time JimL has articles we should read, he simply provides the link.) As is frequently the case with Hitch, he's quite the ideological chameleon. Today, he comes to my rescue on NSA spying and sheer dumbness of the Bush administration (he's rumored to have been a target of domestic spying). I guess to keep JimL happy, he takes a swipe at the CIA as well. Money quote here:
We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet ...was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The better the ostensible justification for an infringement upon domestic liberty, the more suspicious one ought to be of it. We are hardly likely to be told that the government would feel less encumbered if it could dispense with the Bill of Rights. But a power or a right, once relinquished to one administration for one reason, will unfailingly be exploited by successor administrations, for quite other reasons.
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4 comments:
I agree with his thoughts on this. Again, I would not want to be painted as a cheerleader for the Bush Administration. My thoughts are somewhat mixed. I think there are plenty of mistakes being made. I just don't think that EVERYTHING that is done is necessarily a mistake, including going into Iraq. I think Clinton had some pros and cons. Unfortunately, I think too many people decide they are red or blue and that's that.
I agree Jim. Most of us are some shade of purple and I try to reflect my purplity in my posts but I fear I frequently appear more blue than red. My new mantra will be that everyone needs to embrace their inner purplity.
Hey, I got news for ya'll, especially you Chris Hitchens. There is a government organization in the U.S. called the NSA. It was created once the bad guys started getting ahead of the good guys technologically, primarily in the techno age of communications. If you are sitting in front of your computer now enjoying the freedom to blog without concern for your kids who are at school now, and without fear that they'll be blown up at the mall tonight . . . then you have in large part the NSA to thank for it. Here's what the NSA does for a living: they listen. They are the world's most sophisticated eavesdropping entity. That's almost all they do. And they're not spying on people to see if they're looking at porn or cheating on their wives. They're staying ahead as best they can of the bad guys who want to blow us to Kingdom Come, and I assure you they're doing a pretty damn good job of it Mr. Hitchins.
As much as I usually agree with Hitchins, he goes too far in his critcism of our governments' post 9-11 efforts. In fact, George Bush had to completely rebuild the CIA in a very short period of time; an organization that his own father sought to dismantle. What's almost comical is the effort by the media and civil libertarians to make a big deal out of the "eavesdropping scandal", yet they seem to have no problem with the necessary work provided by NSA!
First of all, three cheers for the NSA. I have no problem with the NSA and support wiretaps as a fundamental evidence gathering and preventative method. I love the idea of wiretapping bad guys. This is where the president's rhetoric gets in the way. In an election year, he sees this as a way to paint Democrats and Libertarians as soft on terrorism by insinuating we don't believe in wiretapping the enemy. It's not true. However, I believe in laws and checks and balances. When we give up on the rule of law and checks and balances in favor of supreme executive power, we're screwed. He very easily could have wiretapped legally...he just didn't.
Two, how are you so sure they're not checking on who is downloading porn? Every day we hear about some new invasion of privacy going on in the name of national security. The defense department is spying on anti-war protesters. The government is trying to get search engines to turn over search records to see who's looking at porn. How can you trust these guys with their track record of concealment and lying by omission? I'm not sure I could be surprised by them.
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