The one thing that bothered me the most during George Bush's presidency was the abrogation of US Constitutional rights in the name of fighting terrorism. That includes both the right to habeas corpus as well as privacy and due process.
To be sure, we all want the government to be aggressive in fighting and stopping those extremists (DOMESTIC and foreign) from harming US citizens. But I do not want a police state or dictatorship. If we as Americans decide our personal safety trumps all including our precious civil rights, then we are no longer Americans as envisioned by our founders.
I have deep admiration for Barack Obama and feel he is a breath of fresh air over George W Bush. I fully understand candidate Barack Obama is not privy to national security secrets (nor am I) that might change the mind of President Barack Obama. And I know that Senator Barack Obama voted in favor of the FISA law last summer that granted telecommunication companies immunity from cooperating with the Bush government in their warrantless wiretapping.
President Barack Obama invoked "state secrets" to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency's warantless wiretapping program, moving late Friday to have a lawsuit that challenged the program dismissed.
...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation fired off a scathing press release Monday.
"President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston in the release. "But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a 'secret' that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again."
So perhaps I am not surprised, but I am disappointed.
Extra-constitutional powers are no less dangerous in the hands of a sane pragmatic leader then an erratic untrustworthy leader. Even the so-called "good" leader sets further precedence and in fact the so-called "good" leader's actions are even a stronger precedence.
I deeply grieve what the 9/11 madmen have done to this country's freedoms and yet their have been facists politicians and blowhearts in this country long before 9/11 and they dreamed of the day a 9/11 would be a pretext for usurping unilateral power.
