Alberto "I Buried Bush's DUI" Gonzales: Critics Of Domestic Spying A Grave Threat To Security

[Human Torch]

Gonzales attacks ruling against domestic spying



http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/18/gonzales.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales contended Saturday that some critics of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program were defining freedom in a way that presents a "grave threat" to U.S. security.

Gonzales was the second administration official in two days to attack a federal judge's ruling last August that the program was unconstitutional. Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday called the decision "an indefensible act of judicial overreaching."

Gonzales, in remarks prepared for delivery at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said that some see the program as on the verge of stifling freedom rather that protecting the country.

"But this view is shortsighted," he said. "Its definition of freedom -- one utterly divorced from civic responsibility -- is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."

[Vickers]

1. "OK, who raised the podium???"

:rofl:

Oh, um, OK, about the subject at hand, er, doesn't that sawed-off dipshit understand that freedom is what we are pursuing when we are trying to get rid of this invasive, illegal program?

Has it stopped ANYTHING?

[acmejack]

8. Another eight inches would have been perfect!

He has a rather strange view of "freedom". He must have been home sick the day they covered that concept at Harvard Law School.

[ixion]

2. and your defintion of freedom, Mr. Gonzales, is thinly veiled fascism.

which has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with freedom and liberty and a democratic republic, which you seem unable to accept.

[davekriss]

14. The freedom the Bush administration talks about...

...is the freedom of the master to exploit the slave. Nothing else matters to them. It's the owning class, the thin sliver of magistrates and managers that oversee this plantation, then all the rest of us -- We the Nonpeople, either wage-slaves, cannon fodder, and useless eaters.

What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them.
–- Former First Lady Barbara Bush, on the hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston

We're not welcome at the Big House but must isntead return to labor in the fields -- for their benefit, to safeguard their freedoms. Cheney them!

[Kagemusha]

3. Freedom is a grave threat to national security (heard it here first!)

Too much freedom, furthermore, is a grave threat to freedom.

Did even Ashcroft's words rise to this level?

Edit: Better way to put it: The Attorney General believes that Americans' aspiration for excess freedom is a threat to both freedom and security. Yes, I can see why HE thinks this. And it does not speak well for the Attorney General as an American or a human being.

[PretzelWarrior]

4. Message to Gonzales

you better start securing cooperation with the rest of us in this country our you will have GRAVE limitations on your personal freedom when we HOGTIE YOU and F*CKING TAKE YOU DOWN TO GITMO and lock you up and THINK FOR THE NEXT 50 YEARS about whether or not we want to charge you with a crime, you ASSHAT!

[roguenkatz]

5. Yes it is a threat...

to HIS JOB security!

[rodeodance]

6. they used to call them unpatriotic, now a GRAVE security threat.

CRAPOLA

[acmejack]

9. His inflammatory threats grow bothersome.

That this man, who is in charge of Justice in this, the most lawless administration ever, has rationalized the most egregious violations of international law, based upon the most specious of legal reasoning while he has engaged in the belligerent of bullying of administration critics should not be forgotten when his time comes to answer. He should be held to full account this time as well, not allowed to repeat his shameful performances of the past where he is allowed to evade giving full and truthful responses.

[Tiggeroshii]

7. They have to defend themselves again cause they know this is

going to be on the top of the Democrats' agenda starting January...

[gratuitous]

10. Hey Alberto . . .

Wait until the subpoena hits your desk. Under oath, you can try calling all of us traitors. Better have your exit route all planned out, is my earnest advice.

[Cass]

11. Wiping your behind with our Constitution is a grave threat to this nation, Alberto.

They have yet to offer a coherent explanation as to why the FISA law is deficient. I doubt we'll ever hear one either.

[thingfisher]

12. GOnzales must go!

[vixengrl]

13. Actually, deciding upon a point of law does not appear to be

judicial overreaching for a federal judge, but actually the job a judge should do. It seems like "judicial actvism" is called out any time a judge proves to be effective at reading the law. The wiretapping issue seems to be a fourth amendment issue--it is government responsibility to recognize the privacy of presumptively innocent citizens where no warrant has been issued. His claim that the actual fourth amendment definition of freedom (ahem, a "right") is divorced from "civic responsibility" is to say that we all fall under a burden of proof (Yes, all of us, once the criteria is weakened, who knows whose conversations may be monitored?) to prove ourselves not subject to any such wiretapping--by what virtue?

We are obviously not presumed to be innocent. We needn't be doing anything that is identifiably suspect--if this were any criteria, obtaining a warrant would be no problem. One may be a Quaker peacenik, a Buddhist vegetarian, a Green party ex-patriot--you may have signed up for Greenpeace once, and be a card-carrying member of the ACLU, it's no matter. You should be perfectly willing to permit your conversations to be monitored, because, well--that's how the Executive Branch likes it. And, well, if you were *really* innocent, you'd never mind it. The potential for abuse of your rights, by any divulging of your private business at any time in the future, or, say, the potential of gaining leverage by learning information about the "natural enemies" (say, environmentalists, or peace activists) of a given administration--why, such *obvious flagrant abuses*--should be tolerated in the name of safety, is what Gonzalez means.

I very much dislike his argument, and I very much dislike any person who could make it with a straight face.

The protection of this country seems to me to lie in actually identifying people who would do us actual harm, physical, quantifiable harm, not some nebulous, ideological harm. By endevouring to "keep us safe" by extending investigation to any "possible" threat, we dilute our ability to follow up on the "probable" threats. It seems a damn ineffective way to wage any sort of intelligent war on anything. It's not merely anti-freedom or anti-American, it's very likely, anti-common sense. The argument is "power for power's sake"--the consequences or necessity thereof is irrelevant, so long as they can claim it. The people (of, whom, and by, alledgedly, this government is for) should not stand for it.

(Disclaimer: Or so runs my little opinion. Not a lawyer, just a liberal.)

[treestar]

15. This moran either should not have passed the bar exam, or he

knows he is lying.

[Imagevision]

16. Gonzo-boy, Senator Leahy said produce the documents or it's subpeona time