Bushco isn't worried whether spying evidence is legal BECAUSE...

[bspence]

...they don't intend on ever bringing the suspects to court.

Kennedy made a great point at the hearings today. Kennedy said the eavesdropping program could actually weaken national security, raising the prospect that terrorist suspects could go free if courts rule evidence collected from such surveillance to be tainted. To this, Gonzales said,"We don’t believe prosecutions are going to be jeopardized because of this program."

How can he know this? He's a lawyer, so he must know that evidence obtained this way would be illegal. I think he knows it won't jeopardize prosecutions because their suspects will never see a trial.

Look at the circumstances. We're renditioning suspects to foreign countries that use torture. We've locked up people in Guantanamo Bay without giving them a trial. Bush's lawyers claim that he's been given extraordinary powers to do whatever it takes to fight the war. Bush will go to any means necessary to find terrorists, even if it means trampling over the Constitution. They're laughing at due process.

What do y'all think?

[electron_blue]

1. I think you're right.

You really have to think outside the box with these guys. They don't care about the law, bcs they have no intention of ever using the law.

[hlthe2b]

2. I think the world is not going to forget/forgive us for generations...

and... no I don't think Bush* gives a damn. He is truly a narcissist, but even worse, a sadist.

[benddem]

3. because

they have the courts in their pockets.

[bspence]

6. not completely

If the courts were in their pockets, they wouldn't be calling the Guantanamo detainees as "enemy combatants" instead of POWs. They wouldn't have fought so hard against Moussaoui coming to a regular trial.

They want to control all the variables.

[AtomicKitten]

4. They still have to contend with the two lawsuits filed already.

ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights.

[Trevelyan]

5. I think you are right and the recent award to Halliburton for Concentratio

Camps on the American mainland should put everyone on alert. Look up Oliver North's testimony on FEMA/FISA Camps for Americans in the Operation Cable Splicer, Garden Plot and REX84 camps.

InfoWars via The Watchman:

In another shining example of modern day corporate fascism, it was announced recently that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency.

The language of the preamble to the agreement veils the program with talk of temporary migrant holding centers, but it is made clear that the camps will also be used "as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency."

Discussions of federal concentration camps is no longer the rhetoric of paranoid Internet conspiracy theorists, it is mainstream news.

Under the enemy combatant designation anyone at the behest of the US government, even if they are a US citizen, can be kidnapped and placed in an internment facility forever without trial. Jose Padilla, an American citizen, has spent over four years in a Navy brig and is only just now getting a trial.

In 2002, FEMA sought bids from major real estate and engineering firms to construct giant internment facilities in the case of a chemical, biological or nuclear attack or a natural disaster.

Okanogan County Commissioner Dave Schulz went public three years ago with his contention that his county was set to be a location for one of the camps.

Alex Jones has attended numerous military urban warfare training drills across the US where role players were used to simulate arresting American citizens and taking them to internment camps.

The move towards the database state in the US and the UK, where every offence is arrestable and DNA records of every suspect, even if later proven innocent, are permanently kept on record, is the only tool necessary to create a master list of 'subversives' that would be subject to internment in a manufactured time of national emergency.

The national ID card is also intended to be used for this purpose, just as the Nazis used early IBM computer punch card technology to catalogue lists of homosexuals, gypsies and Jews before the round-ups began.

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act in Britain enables police to obtain name and address details of anyone they choose, whether they are acting suspiciously or not. Those details remain on a database forever. To date, 119,000 names of political activists have been taken and this is a figure that will skyrocket once the post 7/7 figures are taken into account. At the height of the Iraq war protests, around a million people marched across the country. However, most of these people were taking part in a political protest for the first time and as a one off. Even if we take a figure of half, 500,000 people being politically active in Britain, that means that the government has already registered around a quarter of political activists in the UK.

In truth the number is probably above half because we are not factoring in those already on MI5 'subversive' lists and those listed after the 7/7 bombings, when the powers were used even more broadly.

Concurrently in the US, a new provision in the extended Patriot Act bill would allow Secret Service agents to arrest and jail protesters accused of breaching any security perimeter, even if the President or any other protected official isn't present. The definition of 'free speech zones' can be shifted around loosely and this would open the floodgates for protesters to be grabbed and hauled away in any circumstance at the whim of the Secret Service.

During the 2004 RNC protests, thousands of New Yorkers were arrested en masse in indiscriminate round-ups and taken to Pier 57 (pictured), a condemned, asbestos poisoned old bus depot, where they were imprisoned without charge for up to 24 hours or more.

The existence and development of internment camps are solely intended to be used to round up en masse and imprison 'political dissidents' (anyone who isn't prepared to lick government boots) after a simulated tactical nuke or biological attack on a major US or European city.

[leftstreet]

8. They're not concentration camps.

Bushco is using the excuse of ending catch/release of illegal immigrants in an effort to push his guest worker program. The contract was only for $385 million. That's peanuts, and will probably just by some Bushco crony at KBR a new yacht.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/national/04halliburto...


In recent months, the Homeland Security Department has promised to increase bed space in its detention centers to hold thousands of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation. In the first quarter of the 2006 fiscal year, nearly 60 percent of the illegal immigrants apprehended from countries other than Mexico were released on their own recognizance.

Domestic security officials have promised to end the releases by increasing the number of detention beds. Last week, domestic security officials announced that they would expand detaining and swiftly deporting illegal immigrants to include those seized near the Canadian border.

Advocates for immigrants said they feared that the new contract was another indication that the government planned to expand the detention of illegal immigrants, including those seeking asylum.

"It's pretty obvious that the intent of the government is to detain more and more people and to expedite their removal," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami.

Ms. Zuieback said the KBR contract was not intended for that.

"It's not part of any day-to-day enforcement," she said.

She added that she could not provide additional information about the company's statement that the contract was also meant to support the rapid development of new programs.

Halliburton executives, who announced the contract last week, said they were pleased.

"We are especially gratified to be awarded this contract," an executive vice president, Bruce Stanski, said in a statement, "because it builds on our extremely strong track record in the arena of emergency management support."

[The Backlash Cometh]

7. How can we determine what their motives were, if we don't know who

they targeted?

Boxer is probably right. We will probably find out that who was under surveillance will go beyond the usual Al Qaeda suspects, because if they were just targeting Al Qaeda suspects, as they claim, then they wouldn't have needed to circumvent the process. Instead, they went for a broader target.

Once we know just WHO those targets were, we can determine the validity of what they did. Because Al Qaeda suspects versus ordinary American groups that have routinely worked against Republican policies are two totally different things.

So, why are we having trouble finding out definitively, who they were spying on?

[Trevelyan]

9. everyday what we have done that day to bring Bush to justice.

We should all ask ourselves everyday what we have done that day to bring Bush to justice.
If not us, who?
If not now...it may be too late.

=Catch-22" is explained a couple of different times in a couple of different ways in the course of Joseph Heller's novel. One of them is: Catch-22 says they have the right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. This administration seems to be operating under a rule very much like that...

Add this one to your thinking process You're post sort puts this in a new light don't you think?

Dragnet nabs 10,000 fugitives April 15, 2005

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- More than 10,000 fugitives from justice have been captured in a nationwide, weeklong dragnet involving federal, state and local authorities, said the U.S. Marshals Service, which led the effort. Operation FALCON lasted from April 4 - 10 and marks the largest number of arrests ever recorded during a single operation. Of priority: suspects wanted in homicides, sexual assaults, gang-related crimes, kidnappings, major drug offenses, and crimes against children and the elderly.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/04/14/fugitive.arrests/index.html

Most people didn't give this a second thought and in fact it sounds like a good thing, but to people who come from a law enforcement background it sounded damn peculiar. The reason is that in law enforcement, when you find out the location of a dangerous fugitive... especially murder suspects... you don't wait until you have 10,000 warrants piled up and do a mass round-up.

You get a squad together and get the suspect before he/she has a chance to move! Fugitives don't wait around when they know that there is a warrant out for them, they keep moving. I asked friends of mine from the FBI and other agencies if this made any sense and they all agreed that it didn't. It looked like a practice run for a mass roundup.

Remember... every sword thrust from Bush Co has a hidden agenda that has been in the works for a long time.

[Inland]

10. The same authority for wiretaps is authority to jail Padilla w/out trial

you are absolutely right. Plus, they can't actually try anyone because then the top secret means would be exposed.

That's for the taps that aren't just to find dirt on democratic candidates.

[bspence]

11. More telling evidence

How many terrorists are on trial in the states now? Two or three? Moussaoui? Padilla? The American Taliban guy? Maybe there are others, but I think that's it. If the media doesn't find out about them first and push the administration to take them to trial, then these suspects just disappear in the night. Even in Padilla's case, the government tried to get him tried in a military (closed doors) court. That way their secrets can remain hidden.

[bspence]

12. Thanks for the vote, whoever you are n/t

[DoYouEverWonder]

13. That's why the DOJ

hasn't brought to trial and convicted any terrorists since Bush took office.

Not a single one.

[warrens]

14. NPR said of the thousands of suspects, there were only a few

Requests for DOMESTIC wiretaps, to find out who they were talking to here. The WP reporter (he wrote a major piece in Sunday's paper, which I missed) said that it was literally thousands of unauthorized targets, but of those, "single digits" were found to be doing something suspicious enough to move to the next level. In other words, this careful, targeted program of spying on hard-core Al Qaeda killers turns out to be pretty much a shotgun approach of spying on anyone they don't like the looks of.

That's why the Bushies are pushing back so hard. It's not only illegal, it was a total bust. I take comfort in the fact that, like murder, there is no statute of limitations on treason.