And cuts right to definition of the word “whistleblower”, and the concept of accountability in Government.

Tamm exposed elements of the program that were clearly not operating within the letter of the law. This was vividly illustrated by the subsequent legal contortions wrought by the administration to try to defend the program from legal challenges. The program we have today is different than the one that Tamm exposed, because no one seriously thought the old program was legal.

Here’s my core thought Eric: folks who attack whistleblowers like Tamm are implicitly stating that they completely trust our government to police itself, to ensure that it is acting within the law. *The government* This is the most bureaucratically opaque, inefficient, and often incompetent organization in this country. There are precious few things that our government can be trusted to handle efficiently and effectively without oversight, so why is this any different? Especially to conservatives who are usually reluctant to withdraw checks against government power?

The same goes for the Patriot act, and possibly more so. There should be *no doubt* that the FBI is completely incompetent in its handling of its Patriot Act powers, and yet I routinely hear conservative attacking efforts to change the act.

And honestly you should not need my help to guide to information about the FBI’s performance for past couple of years. Just give “FBI NSL” to google, or search for the FBI’s internal audit report by Glenn Fine. You may start with this if you like:

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,259867,00.html

And here’s something funny:

“You do know that the program was about wiretapping FOREIGN PHONE CALLS ROUTED THROUGH THE U.S?”

Wrong. Only one terminus was “required” to be outside the U.S. The calls could originate or terminate within our country.

And you’re forgetting the bit about the datamining.

And here’s another strange assertion:

“The fact that it is a different program today is because Tamm and NYT blew our ability to keep doing what we were doing previously, and what we were doing previously WORKED.”

So, here I’m going to have to ask for your sources. What evidence do you have that the program “worked”. What experience or knowledge of the concepts of datamining do you have? Any idea if it has been proven effective in this or any other crime-fighting endeavors? Any indication that the bad guys stopped using phones and email after the NYT published its story? Perhaps you can tell me why the Bush administration was originally so intent on cutting FISC out the picture, and why they appeared to change course after the presiding judge gave them a talking-to? And yes, I expect you to look up all this stuff on your own.

All this crap is window dressing anyway. Since you cared to engage me on some level here, perhaps you could take a crack at my central challenge, which is that I find this great trust in our government to police itself to be out of place in a traditional conservative ideology.

But you’re not really arguing with me here. You’re good at calling me names, but there was a point to my post that everyone is dodging.

And no, I’m not convinced that Tamm got anyone killed. You would first have to convince me that the compromised bits of the surveillance program were at all effective. I don’t know that, and neither do you, because WE still know almost nothing about the program’s former incarnation.

You tell me you’re not dodging my points, and then you go on trying to quibble with me about semantics of the word “whistlebower”. And then, to top it off you give me a link to… wikipedia!

I don’t imagine anyone except me is paying attention to this thread anymore. I am supremely frustrated and I can’t get anyone to debate or even recognize my points. Why are people who call themselves conservatives willing to complete and utterly trust our government in areas that are so prone to abuse?

“Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

This is just one excerpt. Here’s the story itself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html

This isn’t about me. Bush’s OWN PEOPLE tried to put a stop to his program.

“How do you know there?s no oversight? How would you know what kind of safeguards are in place to protect your constitutional rights? All of that is classified information.”

This is real simple. Oversight over international wiretapping is not classified knowledge. It’s called FISA, and it’s been with us since the seventies. The Bush administration decided, on their own, that FISA didn’t apply to them. Bush’s program then came to a screeching halt when FISC found out about this.

So yes, we know there’s oversight, we know a lot about how it works, and we know that the president doesn’t like and would rather just do these things without having to consult anybody. And we know that a lot of top officials at the justice dept, including Ashcroft and his deputies, were having none of it. And they objected precisely because they were afraid that Bush was VIOLATING THE LAW. Remember, Ashcroft, Comey, FISC. Say that to yourself a hundred times so that it sinks in.

And yet, none of this seems to raise even the slightest bit of suspicion or even interest here on Redstate. That’s what disturbs me.

Because I’m scared. I’ve got cops in my town, using military equipment, raiding houses and KILLING people for growing weed. And what am I hearing ever more often to justify this?

Drugs support terrorists.

Our president is surrounded by crusaders of all kinds, many of whom have no use for transparency or oversight. Bush went balls-put trying to remove oversight over his activities and had to be reigned in BY HIS OWN PEOPLE. You think the government will be pristinely scrupulous in limiting it’s new powers to the war on terror?

Just curious:

This guy brought down an administration, during a war, and arguably hastened our defeat (read: cost american lives).

He leaked his information anonymously, straight to the media. He stayed on at the FBI for years afterward, always denying that he was the source.

He very effectively put a stop to undeniably illegal activities on the part of the president, but apparently, by the standards of the commenters in this thread, he does not meet the definition of a whistleblower.

So, by Redstate’s standards, is Mark Felt a traitor?

I’m not making myself clear. I’m not suspicious of very much at all. I WORK for the government, they pay my salary. My overwhelming sense of the government is that it’s a bloated, inefficient, and often incompetent, weight on society.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist any more than Ashcroft was when he essentially told Alberto Gonzoles that Bush could go F himself.

I am accustomed to conservatives raising eyebrows when something like that happens, and asking questions about transparency, accountability, damn even effectiveness.

But here on Redstate… nothing. No eyebrows.

The fact that the local cops here are out of control really only serves to remind me how necessary oversight is. That was my only point there.

nt