Ah, the heroic excuse. FISA, a law regarding wiretapping written in the late 1970’s was completely outdated, so to save us all, those laws were ignored. It is just like World War II, after the Japanese attacked in Hawaii, no one was sure what would happen next, and as a precautionary measure, people of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and put into camps. The law had to be broken to save us.
Of course, years later those Japanese citizens that were still alive received an apology and a bit of money for the inconvenience of being locked up. The fact was that the only reason for their imprisonment was fear. This seems to be little different. Yoo prattles on about communications to and from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, saying that other information is filtered out in much the same way that people flying must endure security checks to make sure they do not have a bomb in their shoe and/or toothpaste.
This reasoning completely ignores the vastness of the collection program, the fact that few could ever know if they were being monitored (hooray for freedom), and the fact that if FISA was so completely worthless that new laws could be drafted to regulate the wiretapping/monitoring programs. Few laws were, of course, as the government sort of liked its new toy. The ability to monitor citizens with few if any oversights are a dream come true for signals intelligence officers, but somewhat of a drawback to what at least in theory is supposed to be a free society.
And for all the laws that they ignored, they never did catch Bin-Laden, so nice job on that one. They can complain all they want about the press releasing information to the public, ruining a perfectly good tool for them, but just why hadn’t they managed to capture or at least kill the heads (now figure heads) of al-Qaeda?
In the movies, sometimes a good guy (or girl) will ignore the law to serve a higher purpose, and we all go along with it because we want him or her to exact justice, even if it is outside of what the law allows. These assh*les managed to break laws, not catch or kill any of the big fish through these programs, and yet they are still trying to justify it.
F*ck you John Yoo. Pissing in your pants does not make you a hero, it makes you a coward. If you had brought us the head of Bin-Laden or Al-Zawahiri, maybe we could have let it go.
Citing possible dangers to a nation cannot possibly be enough of a reason to through out the rule of law, otherwise any damn danger there might POSSIBLY be would be more then enough justification for a government to just do whatever the hell it wanted to.
