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ruveyn
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18 May 2012, 10:23 am

Kraichgauer wrote:

I fail to see how keeping people from going hungry, or freezing to death, or providing people with higher education would pave the way to hell.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


Is anyone stopping you from being charitable. If person A with some money wants to feed person B who has little or none, let Person A be charitable with his own money. Stealing to feed the hungry is a crime and in breach of several commandments.

Let's start with the basics: thou shalt not steal. If only the government obeyed that commandment.

ruveyn



WilliamWDelaney
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18 May 2012, 3:06 pm

Dox47 wrote:
Just for fun, I'll make this one a double feature and move right along to "debunk" #4

The assertion:
Quote:
Obama tricked executive-power critics into thinking he would roll back the excesses of the Bush Administration. He has transformed those excesses into matters of bipartisan consensus, and gone farther in some respects, as when an American citizen was killed extra-judicially on his order.


The response:
WilliamWDelaney wrote:
To Lie #4: Anwar al-Aulaqi was NOT JUST A TERRORIST, but he was the GODFATHER or Yemen's al-Qaeda faction.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/che ... _blog.html


I don't CARE how terrible the Obama administration says he was, if he was that bad they should have had no problem proving it in open court with standards of evidence and a judge or jury.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9LQp5GQJiA[/youtube]

So you really think that Anwar al Awlaki was just regular guy from a "leave it to beaver" family who just happened to disagree with Obama on some political trivia? Maybe he said something to one of his coworkers about Obama's gun control policies while sipping coffee at a Starbucks, and one of Obama's meanie-weenie liberal goonies just happened to overhear it. Maybe what really happened was that Obama got all red in the face when he heard this news, stamped his feet, and ordered one of his liberal bad guys to break into his happy little home in Atlanta, fly him to Yemen, and try to make it LOOK like he was a terrorist.

How DEVIOUS! Obama must be truly determined to take away your little gun rights!

Dox, you are a living caricature of everything that is wrong with conservatives. You are a walking example of why liberals are justified in hating conservatives.



simon_says
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18 May 2012, 3:33 pm

The 9-11 troofers say the same about Bin Laden and Zawahiri. Ultimately there is little you know about their roles that hasnt come via the government or their own statements of support for AQ. Al Awlaki was like the Forrest Gump of AQ. He knew many of the movers and shakers in AQ (including operational agents) promoted jihad, called for the murder of US nationals and cartoonists, recruited for AQ, etc. That's before the US government says he planned and promoted specific attacks. I have no more problem with his death than I do with American passport holders who were killed or captured fighting for AQ or the Taliban in Afghanistan circa 2001+, or in Germany in 1944, or the American AQ that Bush killed with a predator in 2002 in Yemen in a strike targeting someone else.

As for Manning. lol. He's a fool. He's getting what he deserves. Maybe better. "Whistle-blowing" by releasing hundreds of pages of unrelated classified material isnt much of a defense. And there will always be a danger when you claim to "whistle-blow' in the defense and intelligence world. You accept those rules when you get your clearance. It's not play time.



Dox47
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18 May 2012, 4:55 pm

WilliamWDelaney wrote:
1) It would be stupid to treat an intelligence officer who leaked a classified document, the famous video, the same way we would treat a civilian who made a home-made video, which is how you have been treating it. Manning no more has unlimited freedom of speech than an enlisted soldier has the right to leave base and walk home on a whim. I went through basic combat training. The only reason I didn't serve was that I came down with pneumonia during training, and it turns out I have a weird mood-reactive immune system. It was made clear to me, during my training, that our rights were restricted. We could not leave the base, for any reason, without approval. If you are a member of the US Army, even as a soldier in training, deciding to just wander off the base and catch a ride home could get you charged with desertion, which is a serious offense. Soldiers and civilians are treated differently, and it is right that they are treated differently... [snip]


I listed a laundry list of charges against Obama on the whistleblower issue, and all you do is talk a bunch of trash about one case, Bradley Manning, and declare yourself done. Let's review that NYT article I posted last time, but in greater detail:

The New York Times wrote:
Last Wednesday in the White House briefing room, the administration’s press secretary, Jay Carney, opened on a somber note, citing the deaths of Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid, two reporters who had died “in order to bring truth” while reporting in Syria. Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that the administration had lauded brave reporting in distant lands more than once and then asked, “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”

He then suggested that the administration seemed to believe that “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here
.”

Fair point. The Obama administration, which promised during its transition to power that it would enhance “whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers,” has been more prone than any administration in history in trying to silence and prosecute federal workers.

The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office.

Setting aside the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who is accused of stealing thousands of secret documents, the majority of the recent prosecutions seem to have everything to do with administrative secrecy and very little to do with national security.

In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business.

In the most recent case, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who became a Democratic staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was charged under the Espionage Act with leaking information to journalists about other C.I.A. officers, some of whom were involved in the agency’s interrogation program, which included waterboarding.

For those of you keeping score, none of the individuals who engaged in or authorized the waterboarding of terror suspects have been prosecuted, but Mr. Kiriakou is in federal cross hairs, accused of talking to journalists and news organizations, including The New York Times.

Mr. Tapper said that he had not planned on raising the issue, but hearing Mr. Carney echo the praise for reporters who dug deep to bring out the truth elsewhere got his attention.

“I have been following all of these case, and it’s not like they are instances of government employees leaking the location of secret nuclear sites,” Mr. Tapper said. “These are classic whistle-blower cases that dealt with questionable behavior by government officials or its agents acting in the name of protecting America.”

Mr. Carney said in the briefing that he felt it was appropriate “to honor and praise the bravery” of Ms. Colvin and Mr. Shadid, but he did not really engage Mr. Tapper’s broader question, saying he could not go into information about specific cases. He did not respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.

In one of the more remarkable examples of the administration’s aggressive approach, Thomas A. Drake, a former employee of the National Security Agency, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act last year and faced a possible 35 years in prison.

His crime? When his agency was about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a software program bought from the private sector intended to monitor digital data, he spoke with a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. He suggested an internally developed program that cost significantly less would be more effective and not violate privacy in the way the product from the vendor would. (He turned out to be right, by the way.)

He was charged with 10 felony counts that accused him of lying to investigators and obstructing justice. Last summer, the case against him collapsed, and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor, of misuse of a government computer.

Jesselyn Radack, the director for national security and human rights at the Government Accountability Project, was one of the lawyers who represented him.

“The Obama administration has been quite hypocritical about its promises of openness, transparency and accountability,” she said. “All presidents hate leaks, but pursuing whistle-blowers as spies is heavy-handed and beyond the scope of the law.”

Mark Corallo, who served under Attorney General John D. Ashcroft during the Bush administration, told Adam Liptak of The New York Times this month that he was “sort of shocked” by the number of leak prosecutions under President Obama. “We would have gotten hammered for it,” he said.

As Mr. Liptak pointed out, it has become easier to ferret out leakers in a digital age, but just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be.

These kinds of prosecutions can have ripples well beyond the immediate proceedings. Two reporters in Washington who work on national security issues said that the rulings had created a chilly environment between journalists and people who work at the various government agencies.

During a point in history when our government has been accused of sending prisoners to secret locations where they were said to have been tortured and the C.I.A. is conducting remote-controlled wars in far-flung places, it’s not a good time to treat the people who aid in the publication of critical information as spies.

And it’s worth pointing out that the administration’s emphasis on secrecy comes and goes depending on the news. Reporters were immediately and endlessly briefed on the “secret” operation that successfully found and killed Osama bin Laden. And the drone program in Pakistan and Afghanistan comes to light in a very organized and systematic way every time there is a successful mission.

There is plenty of authorized leaking going on, but this particular boat leaks from the top. Leaks from the decks below, especially ones that might embarrass the administration, have been dealt with very differently.


Bold and emphasis mine.

This is about a whole lot more than Manning. An honest person would have answered the whole charge, not cherry picked on item, attacked it (ineffectually), and then declared victory, after tossing in a few more personal attacks. But then again, I am knowingly arguing with an agent of the Obama reelection campaign, so I suppose I shouldn't expect any better.


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Dox47
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18 May 2012, 5:09 pm

WilliamWDelaney wrote:
So you really think that Anwar al Awlaki was just regular guy from a "leave it to beaver" family who just happened to disagree with Obama on some political trivia? Maybe he said something to one of his coworkers about Obama's gun control policies while sipping coffee at a Starbucks, and one of Obama's meanie-weenie liberal goonies just happened to overhear it. Maybe what really happened was that Obama got all red in the face when he heard this news, stamped his feet, and ordered one of his liberal bad guys to break into his happy little home in Atlanta, fly him to Yemen, and try to make it LOOK like he was a terrorist.


Nope, I'm quite sure that he hated America and was at the very least colluding with our enemies and publishing their propaganda; the point is that I don't CARE about that, what I do care about is due process of law and transparency when such a monumental decision as assassinating an American citizen in concerned. That's a cute straw-man though, although I think you're BS to straw ratio could use a little adjustment.

WilliamWDelaney wrote:
How DEVIOUS! Obama must be truly determined to take away your little gun rights!

Dox, you are a living caricature of everything that is wrong with conservatives. You are a walking example of why liberals are justified in hating conservatives.


Oh, how clever, you think you're going to bait me out with some cracks about gun rights. And you still haven't figured out that I'm not a conservative either. Do you get your talking points directly from the DNC, or do you just parrot things you've heard on DU?
Did it completely escape you that in this case I'm critiquing Obama for lying to progressives? I'm not calling him a socialist or launching some crazy birther conspiracy, but attacking him for not being as liberal as he said he would be. Yeah, that's just the sort of thing that brings out the liberal hatred... :roll:
Unless of course the liberal in question is part of the Obama campaign, albeit pretty low level. I guess distorting reality to support your man is all in a days work, huh?


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Dox47
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18 May 2012, 5:10 pm

marshall wrote:
This thread has been on the Road To Hell ever since page 2.


Hmm, what happened on page 2... Wracking my brain... :wink:


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“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson