Those were unprecedentd circumstances with Britain's existence at stake.Churchill figured that breaking the german high command's code would yield more decisive benefits by not letting the enemy suspect that his code was broken.It happens sometimes in wartime that a commander offers one unit as bait to entrap the enemy by
unleashing an unexpected attack by his other units.....that's why wars are so dirty!

The problem we have is the 4th amendment, which does not permit unreasonable search and/or seizure; and this constitutional provision was made a condition of the Federal union, and has been observed well over 200 years.

Disregarding it or any other term of the social contract risks fragmentation of the nation.  I am dismayed by the number of people, especially in high office, who fail to appreciate this.

As to the policy of spying:  deception is an essential part of conflict; but honesty is essential to cooperation.   A democracy depends on the assumption that the interests of most people in the nation coincide; and as we have seen, we have arrested over 2000 ethnic Arabs, and yet prosecuted none; we have arrested US citizens in the USA and held them indefinitely without charges.  This has uncanny parallels to the mass incarceration of the Nisei during WW2, which the Supreme Court upheld in the Korematsu case; but which years later the nation came to regret deeply.

As we know from our own history, let alone the history of others, spying and any other secret police activity is extremely dangerous to democracy, and easily subverted to evil purposes that would destroy the American nation.

A nation that presumes its citizens are its enemies is condemned by its own fearfulness.

Our adversaries are a small group of individuals with a medieval ideology, who cannot control any fixed population or territory.   They are determined to destroy our way of life; and amazingly, we simply surrender it to them in fear of these, these insects, and start to behave much as they do, because we are so thoughtless that we do not understand ourselves, let alone our enemies.  Their only useful weapon is ideas, and yet they handle that weapon more adroitly than the leaders of the American nation, with all its history of intellectual and moral acheivement.

It is pathetic that we should pour our resources into occupying a country after we discover that there is no real terrorist threat, instead of pursuing these few hundred or thousand criminals.   I cannot escape the suspicion that it is not the terrorists who are the threat to us; it is our own clumsiness that is the threat.

That a President should blatantly violate his duty to the people that he depends upon for cooperation  is a dangerous sign.   What if the people decided that they should violate their duties to the  government, in the same way?  Is it reasonable that they could feel the government has breached the social contract?   The leadership seems to be playing with fire, without so much as realizing what fire is.    

Is the problem that we are being led by a chimp?  Ie., a person whose own White House revealed the identity of a CIA operative, apparantely in a fit of spite?

we should instead spy on people that we *can* find something out about, that is, Americans.

But it's far more logical to fire the incoherent idiot who doesn't know what the 4th amendment is, the incompetent motherfuckers who can't run effective foreign intelligence networks, possibly because they are so damn busy compromising those operatives.   It might be a good idea to show them the inside of Leavenworth for a few years, too.

you have to be careful where you, or others, might take this line of reasoning.

Fer example, the Michael Moore types COULD argue that the US gov't had sufficient forewarning of 091101 and deliberately failed to act in order to provide the pretext for US intervention on a massive scale in the Near East/Persian Gulf/Iraq War.  See? [Hmm, I think this arguement may already have been advanced somewhere].

[I would argue that we ought to ponder what info our erstwhile allies had or didn't have, when they had it, and what was shared and what was withheld.  Now THAT would really be worth knowing].

Just like the isolationalists in WWII who argued that FDR deliberately allowed the Japanese Empire to attack Pearl Harbor in order to provide a pretext for US entry into WWII.  See?

I think it's just the overall perception of Bush's total foreign policy ineptness that makes these things seem so much more objectionable than they are, and they're pretty objectionable.  But many would dismiss this as a necessary evil if there was greater confidence in Bush & company and the Neocons who ruin, er run, our benighted foreign policy.

Bush has nicer hair than Churchill, so I wouldn't worry.  Did anyone honestly believe that the government here did NOT tap our conversations, regardless of president or party.  SUCKERS!

Do you have responses to the various comments?

Or what?