Sunday, February 05, 2006

Short Post on Wiretaps

Charging RINO links to a fascinating piece in the Washington Post that shows that the wiretapping program initiated by the White House is bigger in scope than what was initially known.

My own view on this is two fold: First, we do need to know what terrorists might be planning and I can see wiretapping as one way of doing that. However (and this leads to my second point) it has to be done within a legal framework-something the President seems to have forgotten. The President could have turned this into a positive by calling on Congress to stregthen or update the FISA statutes to fit the times. Instead, he used the old tactic of fear.

However, the Democrats haven't done any better. They could have scored some points by also offering a bill that would create a legal framework for wiretapping of suspected terrorists, but instead they chose historonics over policy.

What's sad is that there are two problems. Terrorists who mean America harm, and an Administration that tends to overstep its bounds way too often. We need our leaders to come up with solutions to both; to find ways to keep the government from snooping too far into the lives of Americans and that will give them the legitamate tools they need to combat terror. But silly me, I'm thinking logically.

1 comment:

Burt Likko said...

Major props; you've boiled the wiretap situation down to its dismal essence.