Stuart Taylor: Obama Should Conduct Illegal Surveillance

[gogoplata]

Civil libertarians are rightly outraged by the brutality of some Bush administration interrogation methods; by Bush’s denial of fair hearings to hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo and elsewhere who claim that they are not terrorists; and by his years of secretly and perhaps illegally defying — rather than asking Congress to amend — the badly outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/12/stuart_taylor_obama_should_conduct_illegal_surveillance.php
But the civil libertarians’ outrage does not stop there. Indeed, the prospect of anyone in the U.S. being inappropriately wiretapped, surveilled, or data-mined seems to stir the viscera of many Bush critics more than the prospect of thousands of people being murdered by terrorists. This despite the paucity of evidence that any innocent person anywhere has been seriously harmed in recent decades by governmental abuse of wiretapping, surveillance, or data mining.

On these and similar issues, Obama will have a choice: He can give the Left what it wants and weaken our defenses. Or he can follow the advice of his more prudent advisers, recognize that Congress, the courts, and officials including Attorney General Michael Mukasey have already moved to end the worst Bush administration abuses — and kick the hard Left gently in the teeth. I’m betting that Obama is smart and tough enough to do the latter.

....Meanwhile, like the prospect of a hanging, the prospect of a terrorist nuclear bomb obliterating downtown Washington -- including the Obama family -- or Manhattan will concentrate the president-elect's mind wonderfully.

Everyone seems to want to kick the hard left in the teeth these days.

edit to add quote box.