Washington and Lincoln authorized electronic surveillance?

[greenman3610]

Wiretaps on what wires?

[leftstreet]

1. Illegally detained carrier pigeons. Read your history

:rofl:

:hi:

[Mythsaje]

3. Electronic carrier pigeons?

:LOL:

[leftstreet]

4. LOL. I think Abu Gonzalez was one of those children Left Behind

What a dork he was today.
:rofl:

[ShockediSay]

8. We have a new "GONZO"

one who "smokes Dutch Cleanser"**
one whose idea of lawyering is to tell our great Fuhrer Pres, if YOU want to torture, it's legal

if YOU wanna do the secret police spying thing, it's legal

if YOU wanna haul anybody's ass off to Gitmo, or any other hole, to have YOUR WAY with him

it's legal because I say so, and I'm your lawyer

and even more so

because

I'M GONZO YOUR ATTORNEY GENERAL!!!




__________________________________
**When Gonzales argues that the Constitution gives the president undisputable powers to conduct warrantless surveillance despite a statute aimed at requiring him to seek court approval, such an interpretation "is not sound," Specter said in the interview. ". . . He's smoking Dutch Cleanser."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/06/AR2006020601463.html

[leftstreet]

9. The Dr. of Journalism would be puking his guts out. n/t

[ShockediSay]

12. please delete

[Mythsaje]

2. Ummm...

Lincoln could've tapped telegraphs as of 1861...

Wilson could've tapped both telegraphs and early telephone transmissions.

Washington would've been restricted to intercepting the post, I suppose, but that wasn't electronic.

[radio4progressives]

5. You know that Paul Revere was some Spook wasn't he?

back from the future...

the terra-ist are cumin, the terra-ist are cummin!

edited to make a little more sense ;)

[punpirate]

6. In the case of Washington, of course...

... the allegation is absurd. (Perhaps Gonzales threw that out to impress the Senators, who knows?) In Lincoln's case, the nearest telegraph office was in the nearby War Department (there was no telegraph in the WH), and Lincoln spent much time there reading the decoded messages of Confederate generals. I suppose that one could say that those generals were technically US citizens, but, in practical terms, they were the enemy with which the Union was at war.

To my knowledge, there's nothing in the literature to suggest that Lincoln went out of his way to spy on US citizens in time of war. Since Lincoln himself interviewed decoders in the War Department for information about what the Confederates were doing, sweeping up every telegram that passed through the wires would have overwhelmed that effort to determine what was happening on the war front.

On edit, I should add that Wilson did a lot of things we would consider unconstitutional today, with the cooperation of Congress. When domestic support for the war still fell short of the expected level after war was declared by Congress in April, 1917, Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it illegal to interfere with the recruitment or drafting of soldiers or to do anything adversely affecting military morale. This act helped to generate a certain amount of patriotic war hysteria which was further amplified when Wilson approved the Sedition Act of 1918, making it unlawful to obstruct the sale of war bonds or to use disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language to describe the government, the Constitution, the flag, and the military uniform.

It was also Wilson who employed Mitchell Palmer and his young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, to create the plans for the post-WWI purges of foreigners as a means of convincing the public that union activity was a great threat to the United States. It was also Wilson who arbitrarily shelled and invaded the Mexican city of Veracruz to convince investors that the oilfields near there were safe for investment. Just because Wilson did these things--often in concert with a war-fevered Congress--doesn't mean they were intrinsically Constitutional or right, in retrospect.

[Selatius]

10. President Wilson was a bastard, worse than Bush, imho

He used the powers given to him under the Sedition Act/Espionage Act to attack and drive underground the Anti-War Movement of the era. Then he went and attacked democratic socialists such as Eugene Debs. The first Red Scare happened during and after WWI, not during the 1950s. As a libertarian socialist, I detest him.

[bunkerbuster1]

7. via atrios:

[Kurovski]

11. No wires...just kite strings with keys attatched.

[radfringe]

13. just because "everyone" did it

does it make it right?

seems to me bush* wants to "protect our freedoms" by putting them in a lockbox and only he has the key

[I_Make_Mistakes]

14. Dick Durbin pointed out that all this occurred prior to the FISA

Doctrine, was basically made all the previous historic cases cited irrelevant. That is what the Rw'ers do, they try to confuse the masses with partial truths. Our approach should be "The WHOLE TRUTH and nothing but the TRUTH!"

On edit: "Thous shalt not bear false witness".

[Historic NY]

15. Those radical colonial phones..........

were too big and cumbersome to carry. Only the elite had them like flushing toilets.:yoiks::crazy:

[woo me with science]

16. Stephanie Miller was playing the audio this morning.

I was rolling on the floor. What a fool. What a great example of how they will say ANYTHING.