You Can Fool Some Of The People Some Of The Time...

The NY Post may be making an art form out of covering for the Bush administration (and labeling as treasonous anyone who stands in their way), but even their readers know a scandal when it's in front of them. After Ralph Peters' Malkin-esque column last week (in which he called the Democratic Party the "Osama bin Laden Fan Club" and said that civil liberty safeguards in surveillance law are "overkill"), the Post got some letters. Because the Post's readers apparently have a better understanding of our intelligence laws than former military intelligence officer Ralph Peters, they didn't buy his non-argument. A sampling of the letters:

#1-

Before the story broke, almost any person on the street would have said that domestic wiretapping should require a court order. In fact, the president in the past has said the same thing.

It's absurd that, while politicians on both sides of the aisle are debating renewal of the Patriot Act, the president would insist that he had the right to secretly assume unchecked power far beyond the act's provisions.

If President Bush wants this power, he needs to take his case to the public and try to change the law.

Eroding civil rights is cheap, and the administration looks to this first because it doesn't tread on their tax cuts.
Michael Faherty
Brooklyn

#2-

Has Peters finally gone off the deep end? He throws around the word "treason" just a bit too easily.

Peters challenges readers to name anyone who has suffered from Bush's illegal surveillance of American citizens. How can we? It is a secret program deliberately kept away from judicial scrutiny.

What Peters does not seem to understand is that all Americans suffer when another American is denied his civil liberties.

The nature of tyranny is not that all suffer equally, but that each of us has the potential to suffer at a tyrant's whim.

When any American citizen can be made to disappear as an enemy combatant on the sole discretion of the president, all Americans are at risk.

When a president can unilaterally decide which laws he will obey and which ones he will not, the groundwork for tyranny is laid.

Peters may hold the Constitution in contempt and wish for the creation of the "national security police state," but this reader, and I suspect many others, are still willing to fight for those freedoms.

Andrew Burroughs
Paramus, N.J.

#3-

If I said that Edward Cardinal Egan was wiretapped by the NSA, could Peters prove I was wrong? Of course not — he has no more knowledge than anyone else outside the NSA or the Bush administration.

If the administration's pattern of secrecy continues, the list of those who were under surveillance will be classified for many years, with only successes leaked.

Once again, Peters declines to state that the surveillance was legal or that getting warrants would have been impossible.

If the names of the innocent U.S. citizens who were wiretapped were leaked, Peters would call for punishment for the leaker.

Justin Gensler
Manhattan

To quote Stephen Colbert, "You guys get it. You come from a long line of it getters."