Tim Daneliuk wrote:

The one exception here was W's expansion of NSA "wiretapping" on
domestic communications. He certainly did this the wrong way. It
absolutely should have been done selectively and under a court's
supervision. But let us not forget that the Democrats - those
fabulous patriots that they are - blocked any attempt to help W in
this matter - say, by providing him with a more rational and
streamlined court oversight system. They were quite happy to sit by
and do *nothing* (but bitch and whine, two of the
three pillars of the Left, the other being stealing) and then use the
issue to go after Bush politically.

There was no "domestic" wiretapping - except by accident. All tapped
communication involved at least one foreign subject.

The first instances of intercepting enemy electronic communications took
place during the Second War of Independence when both the Union and the
Confederacy tapped into their adversaries telegraph lines - without
warrants, I might add. Such surveillance continues to the present day with
the heyday during the times when we cracked the Japanese "Purple Code" and
the Brits at Benchely Park deciphered the Enigma machine. We didn't need
warrants to listen in to the Japanese fleet traffic and the British didn't
require a QC warrant to follow the German submarine fleet.

The Left and the Right talk past each other: The Left sees all the issues as
crimes and constitution. The Right sees the issues as war problems. The 4th,
5th, and 6th Amendments deal with "crimes" as in "In all criminal
proceedings..." The Left asserts that detainees and everybody else are
entitled to constitutional protections.

The Right sees things through the president's Article II powers. The
detainees at Gitmo, according to the Right, are not criminals - they have
committed no crimes and are not charged with crimes. As such, they are not
entitled to lawyers, courts, witnesses on their behalf, indictment by a
grand jury, speedy trials, and all the other constitutional privileges we
give to criminals. For example, we incarcerate people all the time who are
not "criminals:" Civil contempt, juveniles, illegal aliens, contagious
disease carriers, and more. None are constitutionally entitled to a trial,
lawyers, compulsory process for witnesses, avoidance of self-incrimination,
and the like.

During WW2, several hundred thousand captured German and Italian prisoners
were housed on US soil (Texas alone had over 100 POW camps). Of these
hundreds of thousands of prisoners, many were U.S. citizens (usually dual
citizenship). Not one got access to our courts. Not one got legal
representation. Why? Because they were not criminals.

I'm not saying the good folks at Gitmo are POWs, far from it*. I am only
illustrating that there are parallel tracks of justice: one for criminals
and one for events arising under the rules of war. These tracks are NOT the
same and, from legal perspectives, are treated differently, with different
rules by different people.

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* The people at Gitmo are "unlawful enemy combatants" in the same category
as spies, guerrillas, saboteurs, fifth-columnists, etc. Under the customary
rules of war, they can be summarily executed.