Warrantless WHAT?

As you may have noticed, I've been silent for the last week. Every day it gets worse, every day there is more reason to believe we're being lied to and our country is in deep and dire straits... and I got kind of tired of shouting into the wind, so I took a break.

It's not that there's been nothing to talk about. A week ago, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave a speech in which she likened the attempts by some to quash the judiciary to the beginnings of a dictatorship, and said some things which ought to scare the pants off of anyone who still respects the Constitution and the principles of freedom on which this country was based.

Since that time, news has circulated that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has talked about an increase in death threats to judges since the neoconservatives started rattling the cages of the insane and making inflammatory statements about how acting as a check on otherwise unchecked power was "judicial activism". Apparently an unprecedented number of judges are now requesting federally funded security in their homes.

There have been several stories about various surveillance undertaken by the FBI and other governmental agencies against anti-war groups, groups which have no ties to terrorism or terrorist groups, groups which simply oppose pre-emptive war based on false premises.

There was a great piece this past week about how some governmental agencies are now saying they will refuse to comment any more to any news organization which does not agree to give said agency advance copies of the story for "fact checking"... as though further muzzling of the already anemic free press is the solution to any of our problems.

Another story last week involved the Administration's justification of pre-emptive warfare, which has gotten little play but which reads astoundingly like something paranoid old Adolph Hitler might have come up with. The world got together and shut him down (eventually). We may be the biggest kid on the block right now, but that doesn't mean the smaller kids couldn't work together to take us down.

And through all of this, I just shook my head ruefully, unable to even motivate myself to write about them, because it's just so much more noise. As if the whole plan of the current leaders is to overwhelm us with so many unthinkables that eventually we shut down and stop paying attention.

But tonight, there's a story from US News and World Report which I can't not write about. You can read it here.

Basically, at the same time the White House concocted its theory that the President had the authority to order electronic surveillance without legally required warrants, they apparently also decided that the President ALSO had the authority to order physical searches similarly withour warrant.

It is unclear as yet whether this authority has actually been used or whether they merely decided they had it if they wanted it, but it is CLEARLY illegal.

You can argue, if you like, that the electronic wire tapping is a gray area, perhaps not included in the Fourth Amendment. Physical searches, on the other hand, there is simply no way to dance around. If the President believes he has such power, and if he has ordered such searches, he is absolutely in violation of the Constitution.

Let's all remember why warrants are required: It isn't to protect the rights of the guilty, it is to make sure the rights of the INNOCENT are not infringed. And the reason there can't be exceptions for certain types of criminals or certain "extenuating circumstances" is that the warrant process is specifically to ensure what types of searches are justified when. If you create even one loophole in the law, you create a pathway for abuse, because if the President can use an assertion of terrorist association as justification for going around the law, then we have only the President's word, because no one else will necessarily ever oversee the search and ensure that it really WAS for terrorist grounds, or that it was conducted properly and within the law.

Watch this story. Let's see how it unfolds. But it should scare the crap out of any patriotic American that the Administration even asserted such authority, even if they never actually used it. And does anyone seriously believe that this administration especially would go to the lengths of asserting an authority and then NOT using it?

Liam.