To save time when that happens, the US could always crib from the Canadian military's draft policy on transgender soldiers. The policy does specifically allow transitioning soldiers to wear the uniform of their target gender.
Dealing with non-heterosexual, non-cisgender people in the military isn't some bizarre new thing that the US is blazing new ground on. Other western militaries are well ahead of the US, as even NPR has realized.
Additionally, I think you're profoundly misunderstanding the Rockefeller report. You should check it for references to 'Hans Blix'. Kind of a major omission, no?
1) It's a speculative footnote - the memo authors were speculating that the 4th amendment may not apply during military operations in the US proper. The summary takes that and runs with it to its own speculation.
The FA said:
[...] it contains a footnote referencing another Administration memo that caught our eye [...]
How do you get "speculative" out of "refers to a previously unknown, classified memo generated by the same office in the Justice Department"?
"Soft alphabetizing" works fine for our books (maybe 2 kilobooks shelved, more in boxes). Broken into categories, each category gets a shelf, authors or similar subjects are clustered together, easy. We use Book Collector, but the main question that answers is "Do I already have this book?" not "Where is it." (System not guaranteed to work once the remaining boxes of books are unpacked.)
To de-richbastard the thread a bit:
The CueCats worked for us, but I saw about a 50% failure rate. They're fairly cheap, so you can buy four of them for a lot less than the author's ISBN solution. I definitely agree that a barcode scanner is a must if you want to create a book catalog. It saves a tremendous amount of typing.
Staples has reasonably-priced bookshelves that 1) they will deliver to your house and 2) have 50% off sales every so often. Some assembly required.
every prediction I can remember about oil running out has been proven wrong time and time again
This says more about you than it does about Peak oil. Peak oil is not about running out of oil, it's about oil production peaking and what happens after supply peaks and starts to decline.
In 1956, Marion King Hubbert predicted that domestic US oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. As you so clearly he remember, he was wrong - it peaked in 1971.
PS - The house I live in was built before 1890. It's been changed a few times to have different wiring and heating systems, and indoor plumbing was a big change, but there's a heck of a lot that's still original.
You are completely correct that both liquid and binary explosives exist. Nitroglycerin has been used as an explosive in the past.
However, the restrictions on carryon luggage didn't seem to be solving any actual security problem and don't really seem intended to. (If you're really worried about binary explosives, why make them pour the containers into the same bin, in front of what could be hundreds of people?)
Ah yes, disproof by vigorous assertion. Don't know the latin for that one.
Here is the questionnaire for the results I quoted - would you be so kind as to illustrate the "repeated" "subjective" words in the questions? And of course they selectively choose the topics of global warming, defense spending, Israel and Palestine, and the role of UN, trivia with no relevance to why people choose Presidential candidates.
You really didn't say anything else substantial enough to refute, but I would like to point out that "on some sites their surveys are even compared to Push-polls" doesn't make it true.
If you check polls from 2004, you will find that Bush voters were more likely than Kerry voters to be wrong about Bush's positions, and that independent voters were often wrong but wrong less often than Bush supporters. There's no reason to assume the uniform distribution.
They do have to reveal felons, as in classified document leakers.
The US does not have an Official Secrets Act. Leaking classified information can get you fired, but not prosecuted by itself. Spying is something different, as is outing CIA agents.
Classification is an executive branch administrative tool, not US law.
Ummmm..... the NYT publishing how we were tracking Osama bin Laden via his satellite phone comes to mind.
Never happened. The publication you're thinking of is the Washington Times, and even then it's not fair to blame them - Osama' big hint that we were tapping his calls was when the US launched a CRUISE MISSILE after one of his calls. Several years before the Washington Times published the info.
I'm getting sick of the "We went to war because of WMD// George Bush lied" rational for the war. WMDs were, granted, a small part of our involvment, but the causes of the war were MUCH more complex than the threat of the presence of WMD.
Reviewing a moron's arguments for going to war, I do see chemical weapons but I sure don't see anything about getting tired of bombing them. I do see an argument that inspections failed, but it sure does seem that in retrospect that was wrong.
and supporting an embargo that was internationally unpopular.
So... how's that occupation working out for you, as far as international popularity is going? Any comment on the mortality rate increases as compared to the sanction period?
Basically it's you, Rick Santorum and Don Rumsfeld on one side claiming these validate the WMD saber rattling, and the rest of the world shaking its head sadly on the other side.
Remember when Republicans claimed the inspectors were incompetent because they couldn't find WMD in Iraq, and the US couldn't afford the millions of dollars to maintain sanctions on Iraq?
There is, as of now, not much chance of a nuclear weapon being used by terrorists. A state is not likely to give such a weapon to a stateless group - because they lose control of the weapon. This is why it never made sense that Saddam might give NBC weapons to an Islamist terrorist group: because they didn't like Saddam, either, and dictators don't like to lose control.
This administration is not acting as if they felt that preventing terrorist attacks on US cities was their primary concern. We don't have to imagine what would happen if a city disappeared - New Orleans was our test case. (Here's a preview - local governments confiscating firearms.)
Having their disagreement and scorn is a sure indicator that you are on the right side of the issue.
I just wanted to point out that this is one of the stupidest concepts since the Romans made plates and cutlery out of lead.
The cartoonish axioms this statement rests on are:
There are only two sides to every issue
One side is always wrong
One group of people always picks the wrong side of every issue
This is related to the slightly less stupid idea prevalent in lazy journalism: "if both sides are mad at me, we must be doing something right". No, sometimes you're just that wrong.
If the FISA statute attempted to limit the Presidents authority to conduct the kind of survellience that is under debate, it would be an unconstitutional infringement on the president's authority to do such.
This is what the administration is claiming, but this is far from settled. (This is not the only justification that the administration has offered, including "Congress authorized it in the use of force amendement". This administration does not have a great track record with shifting justifications.)
It's not clear to me what you think "co-equal" means - let's grant for the sake of argument that an Executive with unlimited wiretap authority has abused it in the past, in the form of J. Edgar Hoover. What is Congress's ability, as a co-equal branch of government, to place checks and balances on that power?
Bonus question: if the President is allowed to independently and secretly decide which laws are constitutional and which are not, how does that differ from an elected monarchy?
Huh. If agents know their conversations might be tapped they will find ways of coding their communications. Pretty rational reason to keep the program secret. The statement you made was the irrational one.
Wow, I'm impressed. I'm impressed your lungs didn't shut down when your one brain cell was tied up in typing this.
Okay, I'll presume you're sitting down, since I don't think you can stand and read at the same time: The US has spied on calls before, and people know that. I know, this must come as a total shock to you, there there. Go read about Echelon. Osama might have learned we were tapping his phone calls when we tried to blow him up using his phone to track him, back in 1998.
Actually, some spy intercepts were purely domestic - but that's not the point. It's called "Domestic" because one person is in the US, and it isn't a purely international communication.
Since this program resulted in thousands of dead end leads, only an idiot would claim that only terrorists were monitored under this act. If the NSA was only spying on terrorists, then FISA would have granted warrants (even after the wiretap had started). Given that the administration decided to end run around FISA, it's reasonable to speculate who else was being spied upon - particularly considering this crowd's track record with honesty.
No rational person can make the case that the disclosure of this program has damaged national security, so by making it you prove your irrationality. It's not like Al Qaeda didn't know that the NSA existed, or that the NSA was spying on phone calls. No one, and I mean no one is arguing that the NSA shouldn't be able to spy on terrorists. Why in the world would terrorists care whether or not the NSA got warrants to do this? The best excuse this administration can offer is that reminding the terrorists that the NSA taps phone calls damages national security, otherwise "they forget". If keeping the NSA out of the headlines is that important, then they'd damn well better follow the law.
It's not about eavesdropping on people who want to kill us - otherwise those thousands of dead ends wouldn't have happened. It's about whether the President can pick and choose which laws he wants to follow by invoking the excuse of a perpetual war, relegating Congress to a powerless debating soceity.
The candy asses are on the right - people who will happily give away this country's proud heritage because they're terrified of the big bad swarthy bogeyman. Grow a spine.
Erm, why do you take serious what Bush and Gonzales say, when they've been proved wrong so many times before? After all, Gonzales signed a document that said whatever you do to a prisoner isn't torture if the primary purpose is to gain information. The US government has a history of interning aborigines in concentration camps against legal rulings (the trail of tears). Doctors once endorsed leeches to draw out bad humors - why go to the hospital if you are sick?
Your argument about the ACLU is a weird non sequitur. Are you seriously arguing that this is the agenda of today's ACLU, or are you arguing that one (uncited) quote from decades ago by a "founder" discredits everything ever done by every member of that organization?
I thought I was taking the NYT reports "with a grain of salt" unless by "grain of salt" you mean "ignore the commie bastards". This is the paper that brought us Judy Miller and Whitewhater - skepticism about its articles is definitely called for. I think the jury's still out on whether there was purely domestic surveillance, and to how useful the program was. But even if the surveillance had one leg internationally, that doesn't necessarily make it legal to surveil US persons without a warrant.
The precedent argument is bunk - the cases were different in important legal aspects during the Carter and Clinton administrations. "Clinton did it!" is the last refuge of Republican scoundrels.
They [Al-Qaeda] have operatives working inside of the US. When they get phone calls from places like Morocco, Algeria, Syria, well.... I'd like for our government to know what the f they're discussing.
The NY Times has reported that thousands of leads per month were referred to the FBI by the NSA. Either that means that there are thousands and thousands of US citizens in communication with Al-Qaeda (which should be news) or it means this program is picking up a lot of innocent people.
No one, and I mean nobody is disagreeing that the US government should be able to eavesdrop on terrorists. The issue is whether the USG has to meet any standard other than "members of the executive branch claim to have a reasonable believe this is so". Given that the FBI has in the past illegally spied on a first lady (Eleanor Roosevelt) and the American public did not find this out for decades, some skepticism is called for.
meh. whether its legal or not, every administration since the telephone was invented would be guilty of this to some degree, if it should even be considered a crime.
Um. Only the period since 1978 matters, since that was when the law was passed that made this a crime. (Although, arguably, the love songs of J. Edgar Hoover prove what happens when warrantless surveillance is A-OK.)
It's an open question as to whether any purely domestic conversations have been tapped; the administration has claimed not, but there have been leaks to the opposite. There are also serious questions as to whether results from the warrantless wiretaps were used to seek later FISA warrants without informing the judges - causing one FISA judge to resign in protest. The program also seems to have changed at least once based on questions about its legality, so that even if warrants are sought for domestic wiretaps now it doesn't mean this was the case throughout the program. IMO, only an independent investigation by someone with a very high security clearance can sort it out for certain.
That's ironic - you seem to have ignored some key facts involving John Lott. Pulling stats out of bodily orifices != "discovery", and creating sock puppets to defend your arguments doesn't even rise to the level of scientific rigor seen in the Professor Emeritus of Gilligan's Island.
The answer to your example is: "The house where people aren't home, and don't have a security system". There's a reason why burglaries aren't news, and "home invasions" are - burglary is a much lower-risk occupation when nobody is around.
You can see some real facts on burglary statistics here: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_02/html/web/offreporte d/02-nburglary08.html (I hope you won't get the vapors changing from Mary Rosh to the Real World). The FBI stats show that the Northeast (home of gun control) has the lowest rate of burglaries per person, and is the only region where burglaries are declining.
More to the point...didja forget this is a war? Is it so easy to forget the scores of dead? I don't want this kinda thing going on in peacetime, but I *damned*sure* want it, now.
If this is a war, what does victory look like? When dictionaries remove "terrorism" as word? When people stop behind scared? When no one tries to attack Americans or American interests?
The War on (some) Terror is no more a "war" than the War on Poverty or the War on (some) Drugs.
And if the paperwork allows on terrorist to go free, I want a sniper there on the tower.
Better that hundreds of innocent people should be tortured than one guilty person go free, eh? Especially morons who want to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch.
We're not dealing with nation-states and the Geneva Convention anymore- this is a very different threat. (As if anyone but us ever followed the Geneva Convention...)
It never ceases to amaze me how many people repeat the insipid argument that the drafters of the Geneva Conventions could not have foreseen non-state threats. Does the "Black Hand" ring a bell? Any assassinated royalty leading to wars? Any monarchies falling to internal coups, linked perhaps to international conspiracies?
Terrorism is not new, Europe has dealt with its modern incarnation for decades. Britain dealt with the IRA without invading Boston.
In World War II, Germany did treat allied POWs better than eastern front POWs, because of a concern about how German POWs would be treated. The important issue that you're missing here, though, is that humane treatment of prisoners is morally correct.
Would you care to explain precisely how this NYT report caused the loss of actionable intelligence?
Are you seriously suggesting that terrorist groups didn't know that the US used wiretaps?
The concern is not the wiretaps, but the lack of warrants. I really don't think Osama cares very much about whether the warrants are legal and illegal, and it's not like the NSA's existence was a secret.
Slashdot Mirror
To save time when that happens, the US could always crib from the Canadian military's draft policy on transgender soldiers. The policy does specifically allow transitioning soldiers to wear the uniform of their target gender.
Dealing with non-heterosexual, non-cisgender people in the military isn't some bizarre new thing that the US is blazing new ground on. Other western militaries are well ahead of the US, as even NPR has realized.
Additionally, I think you're profoundly misunderstanding the Rockefeller report. You should check it for references to 'Hans Blix'. Kind of a major omission, no?
You said:
The FA said:
How do you get "speculative" out of "refers to a previously unknown, classified memo generated by the same office in the Justice Department"?
"Soft alphabetizing" works fine for our books (maybe 2 kilobooks shelved, more in boxes). Broken into categories, each category gets a shelf, authors or similar subjects are clustered together, easy. We use Book Collector, but the main question that answers is "Do I already have this book?" not "Where is it." (System not guaranteed to work once the remaining boxes of books are unpacked.)
To de-richbastard the thread a bit:
The CueCats worked for us, but I saw about a 50% failure rate. They're fairly cheap, so you can buy four of them for a lot less than the author's ISBN solution. I definitely agree that a barcode scanner is a must if you want to create a book catalog. It saves a tremendous amount of typing.
Staples has reasonably-priced bookshelves that 1) they will deliver to your house and 2) have 50% off sales every so often. Some assembly required.
every prediction I can remember about oil running out has been proven wrong time and time again
This says more about you than it does about Peak oil. Peak oil is not about running out of oil, it's about oil production peaking and what happens after supply peaks and starts to decline.
In 1956, Marion King Hubbert predicted that domestic US oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. As you so clearly he remember, he was wrong - it peaked in 1971.
PS - The house I live in was built before 1890. It's been changed a few times to have different wiring and heating systems, and indoor plumbing was a big change, but there's a heck of a lot that's still original.
Experts have pointed out that the UK peroxide bombing plot, as discussed, was wildly implausible.
You are completely correct that both liquid and binary explosives exist. Nitroglycerin has been used as an explosive in the past.
However, the restrictions on carryon luggage didn't seem to be solving any actual security problem and don't really seem intended to. (If you're really worried about binary explosives, why make them pour the containers into the same bin, in front of what could be hundreds of people?)
Ah yes, disproof by vigorous assertion. Don't know the latin for that one.
Here is the questionnaire for the results I quoted - would you be so kind as to illustrate the "repeated" "subjective" words in the questions? And of course they selectively choose the topics of global warming, defense spending, Israel and Palestine, and the role of UN, trivia with no relevance to why people choose Presidential candidates.
You really didn't say anything else substantial enough to refute, but I would like to point out that "on some sites their surveys are even compared to Push-polls" doesn't make it true.
If you check polls from 2004, you will find that Bush voters were more likely than Kerry voters to be wrong about Bush's positions, and that independent voters were often wrong but wrong less often than Bush supporters. There's no reason to assume the uniform distribution.
They do have to reveal felons, as in classified document leakers.
The US does not have an Official Secrets Act. Leaking classified information can get you fired, but not prosecuted by itself. Spying is something different, as is outing CIA agents.
Classification is an executive branch administrative tool, not US law.
Ummmm..... the NYT publishing how we were tracking Osama bin Laden via his satellite phone comes to mind.
Never happened. The publication you're thinking of is the Washington Times, and even then it's not fair to blame them - Osama' big hint that we were tapping his calls was when the US launched a CRUISE MISSILE after one of his calls. Several years before the Washington Times published the info.
Nothing else you say is any more accurate.
I'm getting sick of the "We went to war because of WMD // George Bush lied" rational for the war. WMDs were, granted, a small part of our involvment, but the causes of the war were MUCH more complex than the threat of the presence of WMD.
No one is going argue that WMD were the only reason that Bush wanted to invade - but it is indisputable that the threat of WMD was the way they chose to sell the war to the American public. So, really, I don't care if you're sick of it or not, there needs to be accountability for starting a war on false pretenses.
That said, the whole thing is still a bungled mess thanks to the lack of strategy on behalf of the DoD.
Where does that buck stop again?
PS - If you honestly believe that humanitarian concern for Iraqis was a high priority in Bush's mind... wow. I have no words.
Reviewing a moron's arguments for going to war, I do see chemical weapons but I sure don't see anything about getting tired of bombing them. I do see an argument that inspections failed, but it sure does seem that in retrospect that was wrong.
and supporting an embargo that was internationally unpopular.
So... how's that occupation working out for you, as far as international popularity is going? Any comment on the mortality rate increases as compared to the sanction period?
Those "WMDs" were left over from the first Gulf War and by this point had degraded so much they were less dangerous than household chemicals. In order to be a WMD, the weapon must have the ability for mass destruction. 15-year-old sarin or mustard gas won't do it.
Basically it's you, Rick Santorum and Don Rumsfeld on one side claiming these validate the WMD saber rattling, and the rest of the world shaking its head sadly on the other side.
Remember when Republicans claimed the inspectors were incompetent because they couldn't find WMD in Iraq, and the US couldn't afford the millions of dollars to maintain sanctions on Iraq?
The estate tax is (usually) not double taxation.
Learn first, talk later.
If preventing a nuclear attack is such an important goal, then why is Bush cutting funds to secure loose Russian nuclear material? That budget is a sliver of the Iraq war cost.
There is, as of now, not much chance of a nuclear weapon being used by terrorists. A state is not likely to give such a weapon to a stateless group - because they lose control of the weapon. This is why it never made sense that Saddam might give NBC weapons to an Islamist terrorist group: because they didn't like Saddam, either, and dictators don't like to lose control.
This administration is not acting as if they felt that preventing terrorist attacks on US cities was their primary concern. We don't have to imagine what would happen if a city disappeared - New Orleans was our test case. (Here's a preview - local governments confiscating firearms.)
I just wanted to point out that this is one of the stupidest concepts since the Romans made plates and cutlery out of lead.
The cartoonish axioms this statement rests on are:
This is related to the slightly less stupid idea prevalent in lazy journalism: "if both sides are mad at me, we must be doing something right". No, sometimes you're just that wrong.
FISA is an independant path of authorizing survellience, apart from the Presidents authority.
Here's the thing - that's not true. The FISA law itself says it's the only method. So either FISA matters, or it doesn't.
If the FISA statute attempted to limit the Presidents authority to conduct the kind of survellience that is under debate, it would be an unconstitutional infringement on the president's authority to do such.
This is what the administration is claiming, but this is far from settled. (This is not the only justification that the administration has offered, including "Congress authorized it in the use of force amendement". This administration does not have a great track record with shifting justifications.)
It's not clear to me what you think "co-equal" means - let's grant for the sake of argument that an Executive with unlimited wiretap authority has abused it in the past, in the form of J. Edgar Hoover. What is Congress's ability, as a co-equal branch of government, to place checks and balances on that power?
Bonus question: if the President is allowed to independently and secretly decide which laws are constitutional and which are not, how does that differ from an elected monarchy?
Huh. If agents know their conversations might be tapped they will find ways of coding their communications. Pretty rational reason to keep the program secret. The statement you made was the irrational one.
Wow, I'm impressed. I'm impressed your lungs didn't shut down when your one brain cell was tied up in typing this.
Okay, I'll presume you're sitting down, since I don't think you can stand and read at the same time: The US has spied on calls before, and people know that. I know, this must come as a total shock to you, there there. Go read about Echelon. Osama might have learned we were tapping his phone calls when we tried to blow him up using his phone to track him, back in 1998.
So, to sum up: ssh! Grown-ups are talking!
Actually, some spy intercepts were purely domestic - but that's not the point. It's called "Domestic" because one person is in the US, and it isn't a purely international communication.
Since this program resulted in thousands of dead end leads, only an idiot would claim that only terrorists were monitored under this act.
If the NSA was only spying on terrorists, then FISA would have granted warrants (even after the wiretap had started). Given that the administration decided to end run around FISA, it's reasonable to speculate who else was being spied upon - particularly considering this crowd's track record with honesty.
No rational person can make the case that the disclosure of this program has damaged national security, so by making it you prove your irrationality. It's not like Al Qaeda didn't know that the NSA existed, or that the NSA was spying on phone calls. No one, and I mean no one is arguing that the NSA shouldn't be able to spy on terrorists. Why in the world would terrorists care whether or not the NSA got warrants to do this? The best excuse this administration can offer is that reminding the terrorists that the NSA taps phone calls damages national security, otherwise "they forget". If keeping the NSA out of the headlines is that important, then they'd damn well better follow the law.
It's not about eavesdropping on people who want to kill us - otherwise those thousands of dead ends wouldn't have happened. It's about whether the President can pick and choose which laws he wants to follow by invoking the excuse of a perpetual war, relegating Congress to a powerless debating soceity.
The candy asses are on the right - people who will happily give away this country's proud heritage because they're terrified of the big bad swarthy bogeyman. Grow a spine.
Erm, why do you take serious what Bush and Gonzales say, when they've been proved wrong so many times before? After all, Gonzales signed a document that said whatever you do to a prisoner isn't torture if the primary purpose is to gain information. The US government has a history of interning aborigines in concentration camps against legal rulings (the trail of tears). Doctors once endorsed leeches to draw out bad humors - why go to the hospital if you are sick?
Your argument about the ACLU is a weird non sequitur. Are you seriously arguing that this is the agenda of today's ACLU, or are you arguing that one (uncited) quote from decades ago by a "founder" discredits everything ever done by every member of that organization?
I thought I was taking the NYT reports "with a grain of salt" unless by "grain of salt" you mean "ignore the commie bastards". This is the paper that brought us Judy Miller and Whitewhater - skepticism about its articles is definitely called for. I think the jury's still out on whether there was purely domestic surveillance, and to how useful the program was. But even if the surveillance had one leg internationally, that doesn't necessarily make it legal to surveil US persons without a warrant.
The precedent argument is bunk - the cases were different in important legal aspects during the Carter and Clinton administrations. "Clinton did it!" is the last refuge of Republican scoundrels.
They [Al-Qaeda] have operatives working inside of the US. When they get phone calls from places like Morocco, Algeria, Syria, well.... I'd like for our government to know what the f they're discussing.
The NY Times has reported that thousands of leads per month were referred to the FBI by the NSA. Either that means that there are thousands and thousands of US citizens in communication with Al-Qaeda (which should be news) or it means this program is picking up a lot of innocent people.
No one, and I mean nobody is disagreeing that the US government should be able to eavesdrop on terrorists. The issue is whether the USG has to meet any standard other than "members of the executive branch claim to have a reasonable believe this is so". Given that the FBI has in the past illegally spied on a first lady (Eleanor Roosevelt) and the American public did not find this out for decades, some skepticism is called for.
meh. whether its legal or not, every administration since the telephone was invented would be guilty of this to some degree, if it should even be considered a crime.
Um. Only the period since 1978 matters, since that was when the law was passed that made this a crime. (Although, arguably, the love songs of J. Edgar Hoover prove what happens when warrantless surveillance is A-OK.)
It's an open question as to whether any purely domestic conversations have been tapped; the administration has claimed not, but there have been leaks to the opposite. There are also serious questions as to whether results from the warrantless wiretaps were used to seek later FISA warrants without informing the judges - causing one FISA judge to resign in protest. The program also seems to have changed at least once based on questions about its legality, so that even if warrants are sought for domestic wiretaps now it doesn't mean this was the case throughout the program. IMO, only an independent investigation by someone with a very high security clearance can sort it out for certain.
Given that this administration seems to be treating vegans as terrorists and this warrantless wiretap program may have been the mother of all dead ends, skepticism is warranted. There are reasons why one branch of government isn't allowed to go off wandering on its own.
That's ironic - you seem to have ignored some key facts involving John Lott. Pulling stats out of bodily orifices != "discovery", and creating sock puppets to defend your arguments doesn't even rise to the level of scientific rigor seen in the Professor Emeritus of Gilligan's Island.
e d/02-nburglary08.html (I hope you won't get the vapors changing from Mary Rosh to the Real World). The FBI stats show that the Northeast (home of gun control) has the lowest rate of burglaries per person, and is the only region where burglaries are declining.
The answer to your example is: "The house where people aren't home, and don't have a security system". There's a reason why burglaries aren't news, and "home invasions" are - burglary is a much lower-risk occupation when nobody is around.
You can see some real facts on burglary statistics here: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_02/html/web/offreport
The War on (some) Terror is no more a "war" than the War on Poverty or the War on (some) Drugs.
Better that hundreds of innocent people should be tortured than one guilty person go free, eh? Especially morons who want to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. It never ceases to amaze me how many people repeat the insipid argument that the drafters of the Geneva Conventions could not have foreseen non-state threats. Does the "Black Hand" ring a bell? Any assassinated royalty leading to wars? Any monarchies falling to internal coups, linked perhaps to international conspiracies?Terrorism is not new, Europe has dealt with its modern incarnation for decades. Britain dealt with the IRA without invading Boston.
In World War II, Germany did treat allied POWs better than eastern front POWs, because of a concern about how German POWs would be treated. The important issue that you're missing here, though, is that humane treatment of prisoners is morally correct.
Would you care to explain precisely how this NYT report caused the loss of actionable intelligence?
Are you seriously suggesting that terrorist groups didn't know that the US used wiretaps?
The concern is not the wiretaps, but the lack of warrants. I really don't think Osama cares very much about whether the warrants are legal and illegal, and it's not like the NSA's existence was a secret.