Category Archives: War on Terror
Red Line
Mostly liberal columnist Richard Cohen is fed up with Obama’s dithering on Syria. Mostly conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer is fed up with Obama’s dithering on Syria too. Common ground.
Cohen wants to intervene on humanitarian grounds. As for Krauthammer : “A superpower’s role in a regional conflict is deterrence.” He feels Putin has taken Obama’s measure and our president comes up short – to put it kindly.
President Obama has said Bashar Assad will have crossed a red line if he gasses his own people. France says that gas would be Sarin.
Seems we’ve been down this line before.
Police State
Poor Eric Holder. He might have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply looking up reporter James Rosen’s phone records among the records of all Verizon customers collected by the NSA, as reported in The Guardian.
That action occurred under a FISA court order and was an expansion of phone surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists which began under the Bush administration Patriot Act.
Catherine Herridge at Fox News reports that, in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied that NSA intentionally collects data on millions of Americans.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police may take DNA samples from anyone they arrest. Here’s a piece by Jeffery (the other) Rosen about Scalia’s dissent in favor of the fourth amendment.
Update: It’s not just your phone calls anymore. This morning’s Washington Post reports that the government mines your internet data too.
War Bar
All good things must come to an end. Wars too. The president just doesn’t say how. Krauthammer is not impressed.
Red Line
Obama has said it would be a game changer if Syria crossed the red line of chemical weapons. Well, it appears the game has changed and nobody is in a mood to follow up on the president’s threats.For now he’s establishing the “chain of custody of chemical weapons.
Miranda
FBI agents thought they had 48 hours to extract terror information from Boston Bomber suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev. They were surprised when a federal judge strolled into his hospital room and read him his rights. The judge’s drop by was initiated when the Justice Department (home of the FBI) filed charges against Dzhokar.
Dzhokar’s dead brother, Tamerlan, once said that he didn’t have any American friends because he didn’t understand them.
Dzhokar, on the other hand, seems to understand Americans just fine. He immediately shut up.
