 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
Credits |
Cast |
1 |
2 |
3 |
End |
Reviews |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
Credits |
Cast |
1 |
2 |
3 |
End |
Reviews |
|
|
|
. . . Berlin - British anti-terrorism police are tracking more than 200 groups and more than 1,600 suspects who are thought to be planning attacks in Britain and abroad, the head of Britain's domestic intelligence agency said in a speech released Friday in London. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director- general of MI5 since 2002, said networks inspired by the goals of international terrorism and either directed by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida in Pakistan or locally controlled are plotting about 30 mass-casualty suicide attacks in the United Kingdom. [ . . . ] Manningham-Buller said that since she took command of the spy organization in 2002, and in her five years as deputy director before that, she's seen "a steady increase in the terror threat to the U.K." She noted that al-Qaida's first attempted attack in Britain was foiled in Birmingham, an industrial city in the British Midlands, in November 2000. "Let there be no doubt about this: The international terrorist threat to this country is not new," she said. "It began before Iraq, before Afghanistan and before 9/11." --Matthew Schofield _McClatchy Newspapers_ [10 November 2006] - The Datamining Scare _The Wall Street Journal_ May 13, 2006 The Bush Administration's Big Brother operation is at it again -- or so media reports and Democrats this week would have us believe. We suspect, however, that this political tempest will founder on the good sense of the American people much like the earlier one did. Last December, the New York Times reported that after 9/11 the National Security Agency began listening to overseas phone calls of suspected terrorists, including calls placed from or received inside the U.S. This was supposed be a scandal because the tapping was done without a warrant from something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But as the debate wore on, it became clear that the 1978 FISA statute didn't block a President's power to allow such national-security wiretaps, and that most Americans expected their government to eavesdrop on terror suspects. HOT TOPIC Now comes a sensationalist USA Today front pager suggesting an even larger scandal. The government is "amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans -- most of whom aren't suspected of any crime." Worse, reporter Leslie Cauley writes, while President Bush had suggested after the wiretapping story that "domestic call records" (her words) were still private, we now know that's "not the case." Democrats are outraged, or at least they pretend to be. And major papers have joined the chorus, with the Washington Post calling the newly reported program a "massive intrusion on personal privacy." We're prepared to be outraged, too, if somebody would first bother to explain in detail what the problem is. * * * Let's start by debunking Ms. Cauley's piece of journalistic sleight of hand. President Bush never suggested that domestic call "records" were private. He has said actual warrantless surveillance was restricted to conversations that involved an overseas party: "The government does not listen [our emphasis] to domestic phone calls without court approval." Datamining and wiretapping are not the same thing. So much for the "Bush lied" angle to this story. Yes, Mr. Bush could have volunteered the larger "datamining" details at the time. But no President is obliged to divulge every secret program, especially one central to war-fighting. Had Mr. Bush done so, we doubt Democrats and the press corps would have sat back and said OK, thanks, let's move on -- not when they see his poll numbers and sense a chance to take back Congress this autumn. And once it's clear that telephone records are all we're talking about here, the rest of this alleged scandal melts away. Nobody has suggested one single call has been listened to as part of the program reported this week by USA Today. Rather, the datamining appears to keep track, after the fact, of most calls placed to and from a great many phone numbers in the U.S. In other words, the scary government database contains the same information you see on your monthly phone bill -- slightly less, in fact, since names aren't attached to numbers and never will be unless government computers detect activity suspicious enough to warrant some being singled out of billions of others. And what might the government do with these records? Well, it might use them to break up a suspected terror plot -- presumably after requesting a surveillance warrant for any future domestic calls it actually wants to listen to (nobody has suggested otherwise). As important, the database will enable us to respond much more effectively to the next terrorist attack. Once the ringleader or leaders are identified, this information will make it much easier to track down any remaining comrades and prevent them from committing future crimes. In short, the database is utterly non-invasive in itself and merely provides information for law enforcement to use, with warrants whenever necessary. By using this technology to find terrorists in haystacks before they can strike, the government can afford not to resort to the much more heavy-handed inspection and inconvenience practiced by necessity in, say, Israel. Liberals who object to datamining should wait until they see the "massive intrusion on personal privacy" that Americans will demand if the U.S. homeland gets hit again. Alas, even some Republicans are buying into the notion that datamining is cause for alarm. Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter has threatened to subpoena the major U.S. phone companies to explain why they've been cooperating with the government. California Democrat Dianne Feinstein predicts "a major constitutional confrontation" over Fourth Amendment guarantees against "unreasonable search and seizure." And Michigan's John Conyers -- who would take over House Judiciary if Democrats win in November -- wants a bill to ensure that phone records are collected within the confines of FISA. But since the database doesn't involve any wiretapping, FISA doesn't apply. The FISA statute specifically says its regulations do not cover any "process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing." As to Ms. Feinstein's invocation of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court has already held (Smith v. Maryland, 1979) that the government can legally collect phone numbers since callers who expect to be billed by their phone company have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" concerning such matters. So the law appears to be on the Bush Administration's side here. And so does public opinion. An ABC News/Washington Post poll yesterday found that 63% of those surveyed approve of the database program. That's similar to the public's reaction to the warrantless wiretapping controversy, and helps explain why the President's critics on surveillance issues rarely have the courage of their professed civil libertarian convictions. Instead, they will quibble endlessly over procedural formalities while conceding the broad policy goals. The chutzpah prize on this score goes to Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, whose position on wiretapping is that we should definitely be listening to al Qaeda but that Mr. Bush has committed an impeachable offense by doing it the wrong way. Republicans would love to see a Democratic Presidential nominee take that proposition into the 2008 election. * * * Most Americans seem to be cooler customers, or perhaps they can sort substance from mere political opportunism. After all, even most of the Democratic critics of datamining don't say they'd stop it. They just want to see it "investigated" and supervised -- by them and their fellows in Congress, so they can pound away at the President without having to take responsibility for keeping America safe. Perhaps Americans outside Washington understand that it's probably not an accident that the homeland hasn't been attacked again since 9/11, and that maybe -- just maybe -- the aggressive surveillance policies of the Bush Administration are one reason. - The Libya Lesson _The Wall Street Journal_ May 17, 2006 The Libyan dictatorship of Moammar Gadhafi, now in its 37th year, is a nasty thing to behold. It has sponsored terrorists, waged wars on its neighbors, blown up German discos and U.S. commercial jetliners and held foreigners for ransom. It continues to repress its people and imprison, torture and murder its political dissidents. Yet one need not be under any illusions about the nature of Mr. Gadhafi's regime to agree with the Bush Administration's decision this week to resume full diplomatic ties with Libya after a 27-year suspension. Championing human rights and democracy is a vital American interest. Reversing the spread of nuclear weapons among rogue regimes is equally vital. The difference is that the former set of interests is easier to advance without the sound of an atomic clock ticking in the background. [ . . . ] By 2003, Libya was in possession of 4,000 advanced uranium centrifuges and sufficient quantities of highly enriched uranium to make a 10-kiloton bomb, or nearly the yield of Hiroshima's "Little Boy." This is vastly more advanced than what Iran is suspected of possessing, not to mention what was ultimately discovered about Saddam's WMD programs. What changed Mr. Gadhafi's mind? A decade of international sanctions had an effect. A more proximate cause was Mr. Gadhafi's belief, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in Oct. 2001, that he was next. And when U.S. troops began deploying in Kuwait prior to the invasion of Iraq, Ms. Miller reports, Mr. Gadhafi phoned Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to pass this message to the White House: "Tell them I will do whatever they want." But the decisive factor was Mr. Gadhafi's belief that his best hope of escaping the American onslaught was to abandon his nuclear dreams. "The purpose of WMD is to enhance a nation's security," Mr. Gadhafi's son Saif told Ms. Miller. "But our programs did not do that." Had Mr. Gadhafi persevered, he may have had a functional weapon this year, or in 2008 at the latest, according to the head of the Libyan weapons program. Preventing that would have required a showdown with Libya akin to the present showdown with Tehran. Ultimately, the administration might have had no choice but to invade. It seems to us, however, that American interests are better served by deploying diplomats to the shores of Tripoli than cruise missiles and GIs. Critics of the deal point out that by extending full diplomatic ties, the Administration has foregone leverage it might have had to win the release of political prisoners: "There is nothing left to bargain with," Mohamed Eljahmi, brother of imprisoned dissident Fathi Eljahmi, told the New York Sun yesterday. But there is no reason the U.S. cannot continue to insist on the release of Mr. Eljahmi and other prisoners from the embassy in Tripoli. Other critics argue that the resumption of ties is tantamount to forgiving Libya for the Pan Am 103 bombing. Of course Libya cannot be forgiven. But it has been made to pay $2.7 billion in compensation to the victims' families, or $10 million per family. In 2004, relatives of 230 of these victims signed a letter to Mr. Bush urging the lifting of sanctions. Normalizing ties with Libya does not require the U.S. to be friends with Libya or abandon Mr. Eljahmi. But it does give the Administration a chance to show that it is willing to co-exist with cruel and unsightly regimes so long as they meet a threshold of global respectability: no WMD; no sponsorship of terrorism; no threatening of their neighbors. Libya has now come in from the cold. We can only hope that the despots of Tehran and Pyongyang have the wisdom -- and the incentives -- to do so as well. end page | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
||
