Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers

There are real questions to be asked about whether the Bush adminstration has made America more secure: certainly in terms of the adminstration's foreign policy the Iraq war has heightened incentives for jihadists to confront America and kill Americans. It is as though Bush sought to confirm Bin Laden's ideology that posits a U.S. project to control and subjugate the Muslim world. Domestically, the record of prosecutions under the Patriot Act and under various immigration laws have criminalized behaviors that only by the most obtuse reasoning threaten America. The justice adminstration has several times pursued thought crimes, as in the recent failed attempt to prosecute Sami Arian in Florida. These prosecutions have been more successful jeopardizing fundamental freedoms than in truly making America more secure.
The Congress is inspired by the Time's revelations to conduct a more probing debate on the Patriot Act. That debate brings with the need to serioiusly reflect on the conduct of the Bush adminstration in its poorly conceived "War on Terrorism".
Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers: "In his four-year campaign against al Qaeda, President Bush has turned the U.S. national security apparatus inward to secretly collect information on American citizens on a scale unmatched since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s.
The president's emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program's dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress."