Re: Hitchens to sue Bush admin over surveillance abuses (Re: Christopher Hitchens - On Why We Must Win


"kuff (Isaac Adams)" <kuff00@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1137510208.411036.324420@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17nsa.html?ei=5094&en=9aa4386db9bb10f6&hp=&ex=1137474000&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1137509794-47DvOj6YYZ9dhaIhjVYAxg

http://tinyurl.com/ajghd

Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against
the Bush administration over its domestic spying program to determine
whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers,
journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with
ties to the Middle East.

The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American
Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit and the
Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in
Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping
program.

Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to
the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. The
Bush administration has strongly defended the legality and necessity of
the surveillance program, and officials said the Justice Department
would probably oppose the lawsuits on national security grounds. ...

The lawsuits seek to answer one of the major questions surrounding the
eavesdropping program: has it been used solely to single out the
international phone calls and e-mail messages of people with known
links to Al Qaeda, as President Bush and his most senior advisers have
maintained, or has it been abused in ways that civil rights advocates
say could hark back to the political spying abuses of the 1960's and
70's?

"There's almost a feeling of déjà vu with this program," said James
Bamford, an author and journalist who is one of five individual
plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit who say they suspect that the
program may have been used to monitor their international
communications.

"It's a return to the bad old days of the N.S.A.," said Mr. Bamford,
who has written two widely cited books on the intelligence agency. ...

One of the A.C.L.U. plaintiffs, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institute, said that a Stanford student studying in Egypt
conducted research for him on political opposition groups, and that he
worried that communications between them on sensitive political topics
could be monitored. "How can we communicate effectively if you risk
being intercepted by the National Security Agency?" Mr. Diamond said.

Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist
Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan; Barnett R. Rubin, a scholar at New York University who
works in international relations; Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The
American Prospect; the National Association of Criminal Defense
Lawyers; Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group; and the Council
on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Islamic advocacy
group. ...


kuff (Isaac Adams) wrote:
> DoD wrote:
> > ...
> > There are only three things that can happen in Iraq: One,
> > that it's ruled by one of its three constituent parts (Kurdish, Sunni and
> > Shia), which in practice mean absolute rule by a minority of that minority,
> > of a kind that was Baathism.
> >
> > The other is partition, where they just separate and you get in effect three
> > states, one of which would probably be invaded by Turkey - the Kurdish one;
> > one of which might well become dominated by Iran and the other, I don't
> > know, it would probably be dominated by Saudi Arabia.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > The third alternative is where all agree that no one group, let alone any
> > minority of one group, can govern the country, which means that they agree
> > to some form of federalism and democracy.
>
> The majority group might have a little trouble with this one.
>
> > And though I don't think that's
> > fated to happen,
>
> ...
>
> >
> > Q: What's the biggest misconception, or myth or fallacy Americans have about
> > what is going in Iraq?
> > A: The biggest mistake most Americans make is to think our engagement with
> > Iraq began in 2003,
>
> That's when you invaded them after a long and fact-free PR campaign.
> It's natural folks would tend to focus on a military invasion and it's
> effects on "what is going in [sic] Iraq".
>
> > ...
> >
> > Q: Does that mean you are of the "We broke it, but we broke it a long time
> > ago school and now we've got to fix it?"
> > A: When I first heard the Pottery Barn analogy put - I think by that great
> > stateswoman Maureen Dowd - I thought how irritating and how trivial. But
> > then I thought, "You know what, by accident, she's got it right."
> ...
> > we should never have
> > tortured the Iraqi people with sanctions for 12 years.
> >
> > ...
>
> > http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20817
>
> There are some faint coals in the Hitchens ashes...

Replying to yourself these days? Well, I guess that's easier than
replying to my question :>)



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