If I were calling Al-Qaeda operatives in Morocco, damn right President Clinton (our most uncompromising wartime President, doncha know) better be tapping those operatives’ communications.

What if you weren’t, though? Since that’s the situation we’re discussing. Wiretaps on persons completely uninvolved in terror activities.

The army is busy.

If I were calling Al-Qaeda operatives in Morocco, damn right President Clinton (our most uncompromising wartime President, doncha know) better be tapping those operatives’ communications.

Not that she’d stand a chance; she’ll be stabbed in the back by you squishes at the convention.

And would you like it if President Hillary Clinton were warrantlessly tapping your phone lines on the ground that you were a useful idiot?

Yes, for reasons that are obvious to a mango. Know how I’d smuggle a nuclear bomb into Houston? In a crate marked “relief supplies” coordinated through my dummy non-violent humanitarian group, or in a bus full of obviously harmless hippie morons coordinated through my dummy non-violent peace group.

Look into the history of the Soviet and Nazi use of useful idiots, then decide whether keeping tabs on such groups and watching for foreign subversion of them is a good idea or not.

Arresting Michael Moore and holding him in the naval brig until after the next election, and the grounds that his anti-American message is undermining the war?

Which hasn’t happened, so I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up.

Oh wait, I am sure – because the things that have actually happened aren’t disturbing like this would be.

Nothing worries you until they commit the kind of atrocity that goes down in history as a black mark on a nation, I see.

Yeah, shocking – I’m not going to get concerned about crimes against freedom until they’re actually crimes against freedom.

Zuzu:
You know, for a libertarian, you seem pretty sanguine about the expansion of police powers.

What police power is being expanded? The executive is and always has been free to organize the entities it uses to exercise its legitimately held police power as it sees fit. This does not appear to be an expansion; it appears to be a reorganization.

Imagine my shock and dismay that the entity tasked with protecting the national territory against terrorist subversion might actually have, you know, COPS. With nebulous duties! Oh, and that answer to the private direction of the President!

I wasn’t worried before – when the President had sole control of a military of three million people, 10,000 nuclear warheads, and ten different federal police agencies with enough collective legal powers to make John Gotti cry like the new fish at Nolube State Penitentiary – but now that he might have some uniformed rent-a-cops who are allowed to arrest people while wearing a different badge than all the other people working for him who are allowed to arrest people, democracy is finished.

Finished, I say!

Sounds like they’re adding a uni division to take some of the load off the FBI, which has traditionally handled federal cop duties but which isn’t really all that well suited to the role. What’s ominous about it, Zuzu?

First, you misunderstand the purpose of the FBI. They serve an investigative function, not an order function. They’re detectives, not riot cops or a security force.

What’s ominous about this, if you look at the full text of the proposed statute of which I provided excerpts, is that the new uniformed secret service would be given rather nebulous duties not limited to the traditional function of the Secret Service, which is to provide security for certain government officials and foreign officials. The new service would be under the discretion of DHS, which means essentially that it would serve at the direction of the president. Since the statute would allow the president to deploy them at need, that essentially gives the president a private security force.

You know, for a libertarian, you seem pretty sanguine about the expansion of police powers.

Nothing worries you until they commit the kind of atrocity that goes down in history as a black mark on a nation, I see. Quite a standard.

Intern American citizens because of their national origin and spreading contagious diseases (although that was the British, not the US, as I recall).

Summary executions of combatants and civilians in the field isn’t necessarily problematic; exigencies of war. There’s a long tradition of partially or completing suspending habeas corpus in time of national emergency, which this qualifies as. That we are holding incommunicado a guy who had been trying to hook up with Al Qaeda to build radioactive WMDs bothers me not a whit. I assume that they didn’t summarily execute him on the theory that he might have information that will lead us to other cells.

(Although if the privileges and powers bequeathed by the analogy to the DC cops are a guide, I suppose this could be worrisome for proprietors of donut stands and titty bars in DC, who will see the demand for freebies skyrocket.)