Cognitive Dissonance

So it seems that Condi is making the rounds distributing new talking points about the President's policy on warrantless wiretaps of Americans.

One TP that caught my attention and made me go HMMM. Was all this talk about needing to do wire taps to keep us safe from terrorists living within the US.

Fair point, but there was already a mechanism in place for that. FISA grants the President this authority with the caveat of getting a warrant from the secret FISA court. The court regularly grants these warrants to the Feds, particularly when they make a good case for the bugee being a suspected terrorist.

The next talking point was that by doing warrantless wire taps on Americans, was that these were suspected terrorists only and that there was the potential for getting intelligence.

Fair enough. However, if these folks were known terrorists or had known ties to terrorists, and a FISA warrant would somehow not be granted, there was yet another mechanism for getting the same information from the suspected terrorists.

Check that. There are at least two that come to mind. Extraordinary Rendition, and dissapearing someone off to Gitmo.

The administration has repeatedly defended their torture policies by saying that holding "suspected terrorists" without charge while torturing them would lead to actionable intelligence. I repeat, the believers in torture use the possible intelligence gathering capabilities of our operations in the gulag of Gitmo, as their defense of the techniques used therein.

That would again make the idea of warrantless wire taps inoperable.

All that is left to complete the circle of wankery and cognitive dissonance, is for the people who will inevitably defend the President's actions by saying the FISA court is a quaint step in the process and therefor irrelevant. These will no doubt be the same people defending Sam Alito and his embrace of parental/spousal notification laws. Which can be basically boiled down to a court's approval being a necessary step for granting permission to abort a baby.

Does the court's power in stopping abortions trump the court's power in stopping intrusions into civil liberties? Somehow in my latest read of the Constitution, I missed that part.