Justice Department To Review Domestic Spying

orgelspieler writes, "According to the New York Times, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has opened a review of his department's role in the domestic spying program. Democrats (and some Republicans) have been requesting an all-out investigation into the legality of the so-called 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' since it was made public. But this new inquiry stops short of evaluating the constitutional legitimacy of the program." From the article: "The review, Mr. Fine said in his letter, will examine the controls in place at the Justice Department for the eavesdropping, the way information developed from it was used, and the department's 'compliance with legal requirements governing the program'... Several Democrats suggested that the timing of his review might be tied to their takeover of Congress in this month's midterm elections as a way to preempt expected Democratic investigations of the N.S.A. program."

Comments

Re:They'll Still Be Remembered For What They Did

[finkployd]

I'd say there's a chance they're doing this in order to say "oh wow, this is way overboard and shouldn't be done any more" and kill the program, just in time for Democrats to not get their hands on it.

You know, it's funny. I have a lot of friends and family who believe Bush can do no wrong (since we are at war and he is protecting us all) with all of these executive power grabs, but their eyes glass over and faces go black when I ask if they would be comfortable with Kerry or Hillery Clinton bringing those same surveillance and detention powers to bear against gun owners, anti-abortion activists, other conservative groups, etc. Did everyone just forget that Bush (who they oddly trust implicitly) will not be in power forever.

Finkployd

Wow... only 10 posts...

[smilindog2000]

Does anyone else find it interesting how slowly the slashdot crowd is responding to this topic? I figure it's one of three things, but I can't guess which:

- We're too tired of talking about this issue
- We realize that we all agree it's evil, and that no one is listening to slashdot
- We're somewhat afraid that this topic will actually be read carefully by the Justice Department

Re:They'll Still Be Remembered For What They Did

[finkployd]

Just wait. They're already turning on Bush, talking about how he's not really conservative. They are, of course, correct, but everyone else started pointing that out six fucking years ago. They don't get to disown him after years and years of sucking up.

This is true, and I was really annoyed at the TV talking heads who just woke up after the election and realized that what the republicans have been doing is not "fiscally conservative" and maybe that is what turned off much of their base. Really? hemorrhaging money like a drunken sailor on shore leave is not fiscally conservative? Who knew?

Unfortunately for most people it seems conservative means "against gay marriage, against terrorists, and against abortions" and as long as those three are met, nothing else matters. Sad state of affairs.

Finkployd

Re:They'll Still Be Remembered For What They Did

[DavidTC]

The problem is, when a large group of people essentially hijack a term and take it as their own, there's not a lot you can do about it. I used to call myself a conservative, until I realized that I didn't agree with any of the new Evangelical would-be "conservatives." Like a lot of other people I know, I now tend to describe myself more in terms of libertarianism.

The actual problem is that there is no actual conservative philosophy. At all.

It means, at various times 'We want things to stay the way they are.', 'We want things to return to a mythical golden era', 'We want to reduce spending', 'We want to implement moral codes as law', along with various bigotted concepts that have snuck in, and probably more I haven't thought of.

Your thoughts are, kinda, what I'm complaining about, like there's some 'real' conservatism and people have lost their way. Although you've officially given up finding it, which is good, the point is, really, it never existed, at all, in any form. There never was, and never will be, a 'conservative' movement, because there's no principles behind in, it's just emptiness. All they know is they all have some disagreement with the left, or want something that the left won't give them. (Like the neocons, who got kicked out of the left back in the 70s because they were complete raving loonies who thought you could bring democracy to other countries at gunpoint.)

You can see there's nothing behind it by going back in time one decade and comparing what they said about Clinton to what they say now:
Waco:bad::torture:good
FISA:infringement of rights::wiretapping in violation FISA:good
UN peacekeeping:bad::invading an innocent country:good
Impeachment over something unrelated to the office:good::Impeachment over something related to the office:bad
Ethics reforms while running for office:good::even vaguely having ethics in office:bad.

'Conservatives' do not stand in some fixed position and compare things objectively to that position. They instead say and do whatever the leadership says, it is, by defination, 'conservative', and that's all 'conservative' is, there is nothing else.

The left, OTOH, is made of just two movements, the progressive movement (Fighting for the government to solve problems, especially with the downtrodden) and the liberal movement (The principles this country was founded on, with rule of law and democracy and civil rights.). In general they go in the same direction, but you can see this conflict in, for example, affirmative action, where the progressive thought is to 'fix wrongs' in the past, and the liberal thought is to treat everyone completely equal no matter what. The ACLU is very liberal, and most left religious groups are very progressive. The 'left' has two positions it's standing in, and sometimes they fight each other.

But sometimes they point in the same direction anyway: The liberals object to the Iraq war because we were lied and tricked into it, subvert the democratic process, and people are getting tortured and wiretapped and all sorts of civil liberty issues are happening. And the progressives object to the Iraq war because the poor are dying for no damn reason at all while the rich are getting even more insanely super-duper rich, and that, um, we don't seem to be accomplishing anything.(1) (That's not to say, of course, that you can't be both liberal and progressive and object to it for both reasons.)

And, thanks to the current economic inequality, and the war, a bunch of progressives just got elected to Congress.

Of course, as the media is full of complete idiots, no one in it actually appears to understand ANY of this, and the right is presented as if it actually has some sort of coherent position, and left as if it only has, maybe, one, and usually not even that.

1) The progressive movement understands that, when something doesn't work, you should actually stop doing it, re: Prohibition, which was the great progressive mistake.