The ACLU vs. America
The lead ACLU attorney in the lawsuit against NSA wiretapping appeared, with her client, on Hardball Tuesday. Here’s the heart of the exchange:
MATTHEWS: Can they get a court order which would allow them to do the kind of data mining that they‘re doing?
BEESON: On the data mining question, we think that they should have to get a court order as well, and we think that‘s clear under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the law Congress passed to overcome the abuses, the wiretapping abuses of the ‘60s and ‘70s. That‘s the law that the president and the NSA violated in this case.
MATTHEWS: Do you believe, I missed that point.
Are you saying that a president who wants to do data mining, listening for phrases like, there might be security problems, like somebody all of a sudden is talking in Arabic and you hear the phrase “Lincoln Tunnel” or you hear the phrase “Empire State Building” or “Sears Tower” or something like that, and you go, “Oh my God, they‘re talking about a plot here,” are you, is it your position of the ACLU that the president shouldn‘t be able to go out and mine for those kind of phrases without having a court order that names names?
BEESON: Absolutely not. It shouldn‘t be able, the president and the NSA should not be able to sift through the content of Americans‘ e-mails and phone calls without first getting a warrant.
MATTHEWS: But suppose they don‘t know the names of the people, they‘re just looking for the, for phrases being used. They don‘t want to, in other words, they‘re not tracking suspects or people involved in militant Islamism here in the United States who are in contact with al Qaeda people that they know about, but they‘re looking for people talking about security targets, terrorism targets. Now, how would you go about doing that if you were president?
BEESON: Well, what you‘ve just described sounds to me like a classic fishing expedition. And the reason that we have a Fourth Amendment in our Constitution is to prevent precisely that kind of…
MATTHEWS: So you‘re saying the president, forget about court orders, you believe the president shouldn‘t be engaging in that kind of what you call fishing expeditions?
BEESON: That‘s right.
MATTHEWS: How does he then make use of our electronic capability to catch people who are doing us harm or planning to do us harm? How does he go about doing the job?
BEESON: By using names and phone numbers of people that they already have reason to believe and can show to a court are a terrorist or criminal suspect.
MATTHEWS: So you‘re saying the president, forget about court orders, you believe the president shouldn‘t be engaging in that kind of what you call fishing expeditions?
BEESON: That‘s right.
Think about what this idiot just said. She said that, unless we know the names of known AQ operatives here in the US, we shouldn’t be able to try and find them. I have no doubt but that that’s their core belief. What she’s calling a fishing expedition is part of daily intelligence gathering.
Ms. Beeson’s lawsuit, if it succeeds, would seriously cripple our intelligence gathering capability. In the end, that’s why I can’t see them winning this lawsuit and why I see the Supremes ruling for the President this time.
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Intervene In The ACLU Case Against The ACLU
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing
January 19th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
Beeson (and her ACLU cohorts) of course believes she will be a part of the ruling class that “takes care” of all us drooling knuckle-draggers, protecting us from evil profit makers and all kinds of satans who lure stupid people into such things as accepting responsibility and taking care of themselves, earning and paying their own ways.
Why wouldn’t she want to cripple the country irrepairably?
And lawyers (including most politicians now, who are mostly trained lawyers) wonder why the average schmuck on the street doesn’t trust lawyers? If they were honest (and I’m not saying all lawyers are dishonest), most would look in the mirror and throw up.