Quotes of the Morning: Oops

“In Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the holidays, his spokesman, Trent Duffy, defended what he called a ‘limited program.’
‘This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner,’ he told reporters. ‘These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches.’"
-Reuters, December 28, 2005

“Um.. If this was really about people who blow things up, wouldn’t that be covered under out existing laws? I mean, I can’t imagine that you’d have any trouble getting a warrant to keep an eye on someone who blows up weddings. And why exactly have we let these violent people run free for the last four years? I’d think that if they have a known ‘history’ of violent acts it would be fairly simple to prove that and arrest them. I mean, we shouldn’t be screwing around with national security.”
-Skippy

“The CIA’s independent watchdog is investigating fewer than 10 cases where terrorist suspects may have been mistakenly swept away to foreign countries by the spy agency, a figure lower than published reports but enough to raise some concerns.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush gave the CIA authority to conduct the now-controversial operations, called ‘renditions,’ and permitted the agency to act without case-by-case approval from the White House or other administration offices.
The highly classified practice involves grabbing suspects off the street of one country and flying them to their home country or another where they are wanted for a crime or questioning.”
-Associated Press, December 27, 2005

“There are four things that you should note about the above quote..
1) ‘Renditions’ are ‘now-controversial’ because the public wasn’t aware of them until recently. It wasn’t like this was acceptable until now.
2) When they say ‘or another where they are wanted for a crime or for questioning’ what they mean is ‘for questioning’, and when they say ‘for questioning’ what they mean is ‘thumbscrews and internally inserted glow-sticks’.
3) We’ve screwed up a few of these leading to innocent people being ‘renditioned’.
4) The CIA claims that this is a ‘mistake’, when instead this is an illegal and immoral travesty.
You would think that we’d be a little more careful with National Security. You’d think that we were cutting corners and not doing due diligence.”
-Skippy

“One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it.
‘For FISA, they had to put down a written justification for the wiretap,’ said the official. ‘They couldn't dream one up.’"
-Washington Post, December 22, 2005

“How many times can the administration blame a ‘mistake’ for what they do? So far, and this is by no means a complete list, we began a war based on intelligence ‘mistakes’, then we goofed on the needed number of troops and how the Iraqi people would take an invading force, then we screwed up rebuilding their post-war military forces, errored in setting up their infrastructure again, oopsied on a few bombing runs that took out weddings and 30,000 or so civilians, accidentally gave power in Iraq to conservative Islamic groups (the kind that we theoretically are there to stop), renditioned a few innocent people, tortured prisoners, sorta-kinda pissed off the UN and now are totally screwed.
Oops..”
-Skippy