[Preechr]

It's not a Domestic Spying Program. It's not unConstitutional.

Personally, I sleep better at night with the knowledge that at least some phone calls made from the United States to, say... Lebanon... Saudi... Iran... pick one... are potentially being listened to. It's nice to know that at least somebody is making some sort of efforts to stop future 9/11s, despite the hard work of those that label such efforts in such a way as to make them SOUND LIKE something bad.

There's plenty of things you could reasonably be pissed at Bush's administration for. This is simply not one of them. There are very obvious and practical uses for NSA counterterrorism, Gitmo, water-boarding and (Max's favorite) SEEEEEEEECRET prisons. Do they blur the lines of Presidential Authority? No. War does that. It always has and it always will. Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus for God's sake! Roosevelt interned over 100,000 Japanese-American citizens and legal Japanese guests, but only after he set government in competition with private industry with the creation of the TVA. Hoover wiped his ass with the Constitution every morning before breakfast, and Kennedy was told specifically by the leader of the French forces in Vietnam that any American involvement in that mess over there that was pursued in the manner he and 4 other Presidents adopted as their model was doomed to failure.

Not all of these examples of Presidential overreach were specific to wars, but they were all Presidential answers to extremely difficult questions involving the lives and deaths of millions of people. You know I have a hard on for Constitutional rights, but even I'm not going to weigh a terrorists right to plot the destruction of my city against my right to not die a firey death so a bunch of assholes can continue to live in the 12th century.