Condor: I disagree. You forget that it was the fear of FISA requirements that allowed Asst.AG Jaime Gorelick [Reno JD] to build her intelligence wall between law enforcement agencies totally shutting states Asst.AGs out of the investigative process, including the key assistants from Florida,New York,and Massachusetts where the 9/11 hijackers were most freely moving about. This brought about a total breakdown in law enforcement cooperation and effectiveness.
Nor can you offer a scintilla of proof that the time required to garner warrant from FISA actually prevents these attack plans,done in real-time by the use of these communications. Indeed,this is precisely the reason why Englands own law enforcement agencies warded off a post 7/7 attack in London that would have been gigantic in its planned scale. MI-5,acting unfettered by the requirements of a British FISA,moved to stop this attack and round up suspects,so disrupting their terrorist apparatus that when the next attack came this summer,it was disorganized and inept,killing only the jihadis themselves.
Yet no-one accuses the English of living under a ''police state''. Thus these arguments over the 4th Amendment are hidebound in partisanship and ignorance,which is how the jihadis would prefer it.

Is "surveillance" (eavesdropping, wiretapping) any less effective when it is conducted with a warrant from a court? No.

U.S. "democracy" doesn't have power and liberty balanced any more, so long as "surveillance" is in the hands of an inept, lying, dissimulating political hack like Gonzo. Congress has just let Fourth Amendment safeguards slip away. Oversight is now in Gonzo's soiled little hands. Does everybody feel all that much safer? No.

Bill: I can't condone torture even if it works. But I think you greatly underestimate the effectiveness of surveillance. As I understand the press from London, surveillance has foiled several terrorist plots. To give it up would mean being reactive instead of proactive. Innocent people deserve more from their internal security forces than an effective investigation and successful trial of murderers. The innocent deserve protection.

Of course, power can be abused. So can liberty. We all know when both have gone too far. Personally, I think the democracies have it balanced it very well.

In the war against terrorism one important factor is overlooked. It is financial in nature. Tens of enterprises that are favorites of Bush and the Republican party get multi million dollar contracts for surveillance and torture. The number of private so called 'guards' are in fact warriors in disguise. Their number almost equals the number of American soldiers. All are supposed to fight terrorism while they are supporting one sect against another. The best way to fight terrorism is patient and secret approach to locate the culprits and imprison them. The present highly mediatic fight against terrorism is counterproductive. It produces a sense of invincibility in the perverse psyche of the terrorists. Such ill fated propaganda hurts the citizens of society under threat. 911 destroyed the fabric of American society making Ben Laden feel that he has achieved more than the destruction of Twin Towers. He undermined the American way of life, tranquility and civil freedoms.

In the war against terrorism one important factor is overlooked. It is financial in nature. Tens of enterprises that are favorites of Bush and the Republican party get multi million dollar contracts for surveillance and torture. The number of private so called 'guards' are in fact warriors in disguise. Their number almost equals the number of American soldiers. All are supposed to fight terrorism while they are supporting one sect against another. The best way to fight terrorism is patient and secret approach to locate the culprits and imprison them. The present highly mediatic fight against terrorism is counterproductive. It produces a sense of invincibility in the perverse psyche of the terrorists. Such ill fated propaganda hurts the citizens of society under threat. 911 destroyed the fabric of American society making Ben Laden feel that he has achieved more than the destruction of Twin Towers. He undermined the American way of life, tranquility and civil freedom.

During the Korean war captured US pilots confessed to plots to use germ warfare and other absurdities under the duress of waterboarding . they confessed to all kinds of fantasical tactics that were supposedly being used by US forces. That these American servicemen would confess to fabrications should lead any thinking person to conclude that not only does torture not work but that relying on these methods instead of good old human intellegence is dangerously misguided.

During the Korean war captured US pilets confessed to plots to use germ warfare and other absurdities under the duress of waterboarding . they confessed to all kinds of fantasical tactics that were supposedly being used by US forces. That these American servicemen would confess to fabrications should lead any thinking person to conclude that not only does torture not work but that relying on these methods instead of good old human intellegence is dangerously misguided.

Doug: Here in Virginia there is someone on death row who CONFESSED to a murder. 17 years later it was proven that he is not guilty; but he still resists being released. Isn't that wonderful?

Under torture one will try to end the pain by saying what the questioner wants to hear. It does not make it true; just something to end the pain. If you doubt that, try holding your head under water for 5 minutes between breaths; or don't go to sleep for 5 days. (PS: these techniques are out of Guantanamo; also the Gulag Archipelago).

In short, the burden of proof is on those who claim that torture works. Quoting '24' episodes is not proof by the way. (The only reason I mention that is because I have been presented with that as 'proof').

Proponents of torture are well advised to read Seymour Hersh's article on this topic in the current issue of The New Yorker.

CIA torturers in "black" prisons outside the U.S. were, Hersh reports, rogue psychologists who re-engineered Communist torture methods studied in past Pentagon programs to teach American servicemen how to resist when captured.

Forget the Hippocratic Oath. American doctors, like Nazi physicians before them, were active and implicated.

Hersh makes clear that the Communists used these methods to break down human personalities and make captives confess to whatever their torturers needed them to confess to. Extraction of "actionable intelligence" was not the Communist purpose, so Americans have aped the Communists pointlessly.

Is is not dishonorable for these renegade Americans to have perfected odious tortures and abuses that the Communists used? Is it not vile for Bush to have legalized them and Congress to have immunized the torturers, and Bush, from prosecution under Federal law and international treaties? What kind of disgusting country have we become? Is this what our nation was founded to do?

Most studies I've seen have one consistent answer to this. It doesn't work. It never has. And you can imagine that anyone in insane pain and abuse will tell you anything. And they will tell you what you want to hear. Anything to make it stop. Look back through legal history. How many times was an abused prisoner willing to sign a confession? The fact that the Bush Administration authorized its use shows just how shallow the brain trust is here. They should know it doesn't work. Has America become a dictatorship? Funny how Bush was willing to use the techniques of Saddam Hussein in governance of his ideology. Perhaps he should invade the White House and throw himself out.

Scenarios of torture--You are captured and do not know anything, you are captured and you only know the suspect as an acquaintance, you are a captured trained terrorist. What info will you get by torturing someone who knows nothing--Lies, someone who is an acquaintance--you will get the info you already know, torturing the trained terrorist will give you believable lies. Under totalitarianism the confession is what they want--that justifies their existence.The information obtained under torture is of no signifance--the confession is the prize.

Our "interrogation" techniques were styled on those used by Stalin's (Beria's) secret police. Those techniques were not designed to extract "intelligence" but confessions. The confessions then legalized the executions that followed. Apparently no one in charge recognized that the Soviet model was radically inappropriate for "useful" interrogation. That our techniques were wrong from the standpoint of mere humanity was an irrelevant criterion.

It is in vogue for the MSM to quote "experts" who claim torture doesn't work. One of the Kennedy clan did this most famously on The View. The claim is tenuous at best. Is there really a double-blind clinical trial involving 50,000 test subjects who either did or did not hold a vital secret after waterboarding and more extreme measures? We'll never know with precision how well torture works, which is why we should be skeptical of what these "experts" tell us.

Torture doesn't stop terror operations. We do know this. Not because this was U.S. military and intelligence doctrine for years, grounded in experience and research. "Enhanced interrogation" (torture) of high-level Al Qaeda prisoners after 2001 usually resulted in fabrications and untruth, as prisoners came to tell their torturers anything they thought the torturers wanted to hear. President Bush even used some of this torture-extracted "intelligence" in a speech, which of course was false. The community of nations, over many years, came to the consensus that torture is NEVER justified. Ends do not justify means. This consensus was crystalized in international treaties and conventions, and also in U.S. Federal law. But in a few short years, Bush threw all of this out the window. Bush is the first American president in history to legitimize and legalize torture. Every legislator, Republican or Democrat, who voted for the Military Commissions Act, which immunizes Bush's torturers, and Bush himself, from prosecution, will bear that disgrace for the rest of their ignominious lives.

As in the case of torture, if surveillance were actually to be proven to be successful in stopping terrorism and thus saving lives, it would be hard to mount arguments against it. We lose our liberties -- or, in the case of torture, allow inhumane persecution -- in a general cause, not for a specific, knowable outcome such as the one in the question. It is so easy to abuse such power granted in a general, untestable cause, that we should not grant it.

For example, if the Bushies had surveillance of CIA flight schools around Florida's 13th District before the New York liberals were taught the Pet Goat Lesson, or when the hijackers were being monitored in a hotel at Fort Meade, MD, Bush's enablers would have craftily installed someone like John Yoo as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Faith-based Justice during the first term of the George 'Arbusto' Bush administration.

Like torture, surveillance is almost never a tool which ever stops terrorism. It is the essential tool used to commit terrorism.