Re: Anybody else listening to W?
"Sorry guys, I can not figure why if you have done nothing wrong, why looking at your emails and stuff hurts you."<br /><br />And what if the government officials in charge of secretly spying on Americans turn out to be corrupt and/or incompetent? What if they secretly break into my house, spy on me, seize my property, arrest me and trash my reputation, or worse, arrest me secretly and "render" me to some other country who will torture me, or just lock me up indefinitely without charges and it turns out they are just plain WRONG?<br /><br />Can you imagine what that might do to your life? Can you imagine that maybe, just maybe someone in the government could be just WRONG about something? Make a WRONG assumption, or get the WRONG address? <br /><br />Checks and balances are there for a reason! And don't say that none of that could ever happen. It already has, to many people. There was that guy in Portland who was secretly spied on, house broken into and searched secretly and arrested based on faulty fingerprint analysis by the FBI for the Madrid train bombings. It was a huge mistake, and one that the Spanish authorities warned our authorities they were making, but our spooks went ahead with their WRONG assumptions anyway, and trashed this guys reputation and his life and terrorized his family. It was all so much easier for them to go rushing down the wrong trail, because the guy was also a Muslim. And because they were doing it all in secret, at their own discretion, with little or no oversight.<br /><br />There was also a Canadian citizen who was basically kidnapped at an airport and sent off to the middle east where he was tortured and imprisoned without cause for almost a year, and then released when they realized that he was nobody they were interested in. Oops!<br /><br />I saw in the paper the other day something about over 300,000 names on the domestic "terrorist watch list". I'm sorry, but if there were really 300,000 dedicated terrorists and their allies in this country, I think we would be under almost constant attack. It only took 19 and some support to bring down the towers. My conclusion? The terrorist watch list is a dishonest crock and a ruse to spy on politcal opponents and peaceniks. I'd be surprised if there were even 1000 of those names that were really and truly terrorists bent on attacking us domestically. Of course, we'll never know because the contents of that list, like so much else these days, is a state secret. If you end up on the no-fly list, well, tough sh#*, right? There's no way to clear your name, and since it's all in the name of national security, you shouldn't even be bothered about it. <br /><br />Think that this kind of thing is what the founding fathers envisioned? And no, there were no planes flying into buildings, but they did just come out of a brutal and costly war, waged on this soil, so they were no strangers to hardship and fear.<br /><br />Hope I'm not getting too offensive here, but my hackles are definitely UP. I am so tired of hearing that line that as long as I am not doing wrong, I should be happy to be secretly spied on and that I should just TRUST those in power, simply because they say I should. Our whole system of government is based on NOT simply trusting those in power, but watching and monitoring them carefully and replacing them frequently and setting up different branches to keep tabs on the others. It seems that many people now, based on FEAR, are quite happy to toss that whole thing out and to merge the whole thing into one branch of government, the "unitary executive". Or at least make it so that that branch is the only one that matters, and cannot be checked by any of the others. Doesn't anyone see where this is a BAD IDEA?<br /><br />I'm sorry, but as bad as 9/11 was, I don't believe that it trumps everything. Seems like many do though, and that is definitely the angle that this administration has been playing ever since late 2001.<br /><br />Whew! Now I need to crack a cold one!
