"HeyBub" wrote in message
m...


Refuting one of your observations: governments have been listening in on
enemy conversations for a long time.

Bzzzzt! Sorry, no score. There is a special court set up years ago to
handle listening in on *citizens* talking to enemies real or suspected, but
announcing you just don't need no stinkin' warrant from anyone even if a
citizen is on the line is a different kettle of fish. There is also the
small matter that in order to hear those conversations you have to collect
pretty much every phone call and e-mail sent or received in the U.S., which
they do. So in fact they are listening in when *you* call or e-mail another
true-blue (or should that be true-red-state?) citizen, and who knows,
depending on what you say the computer scanning your message might find it
interesting enough to flag it for further attention. Maybe you better stop
singing the praises of sawed-off shotguns.

Refuting another claim, during WWII, we held literally hundreds of
thousands of German and Italian POWs on U.S. soil. (My state alone had
over 100 POW camps.) Of those held, thousands were U.S. citizens (think
dual citizenship). NOT ONE ever appeared in a U.S. courtroom. The were not
"charged" because they were not criminals and not subject to the criminal
law.

Bzzzzt! Another lost round. If you recall (or even if you don't want to)
the Bush administration said captured Taliban or AQ fighters were not
entitled to POW status since they were not soldiers, remember? Well, what
do we do with terrorists? We try them in our civilian courts and put them
in prison, did it many times prior to Bush being CIC. So, why didn't we do
that again?

But then they also wanted to hold a couple of U.S. citizens as "enemy
combatants"--sounds kind of like POWS, doesn't it. Does a citizen who took
up arms against his own country get a trial for treason or related offenses,
or is he a POW in which case he's entitled to the usual protections
according to treaties the U.S. has signed and according to the U.S.
military's own rules. Well? Which is it?

Nope, they just made up a new category--not POWS, not terrorists to be tried
and convicted, not anything--just guys we're going to lock up for years
until we maybe admit they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and let
them go. Or they really were combatants and they go back to fighting us
after we've released them--too bad we didn't convict them and put them in
prison for a couple of decades huh?

It's quite the bizarre world they built for those *******s, not fish, not
fowl, just locked up because we don't know what else to do with them.
Another lovely legacy of the Bush administration.