Hayden: "I didn't need to ask 'mother, may I' from the Congress or the president or anyone else."

[IDemo]

Michael Hayden's Hollow Constitution

In a speech at Washington and Lee University, Michael Hayden, a former head of both the CIA and NSA, opined on signals intelligence under the Constitution, arguing that what the 4th Amendment forbids changed after September 11, 2001. He noted that "unreasonable search and seizure," is prohibited under the Constitution, but cast it as a living document, with "reasonableness" determined by "the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves in history."

He explained that as the NSA's leader, tactics he found unreasonable on September 10, 2001 struck him as reasonable the next day, after roughly 3,000 were killed. "I actually started to do different things," he said. "And I didn't need to ask 'mother, may I' from the Congress or the president or anyone else. It was within my charter, but in terms of the mature judgment about what's reasonable and what's not reasonable, the death of 3,000 countrymen kind of took me in a direction over here, perfectly within my authority, but a different place than the one in which I was located before the attacks took place. So if we're going to draw this line I think we have to understand that it's kind of a movable feast here."

I think I understand.

The Bill of Rights may guarantee certain limits on government today. But if there is a terrorist attack tomorrow, a bureaucrat within the national security state may decide, without asking permission from any elected official, that the people are actually owed less protections than before. The more innocent people that terrorists succeed in murdering, the less our own government is limited by the Constitution. With every attack that the government fails to prevent it gains new powers.

http://news.yahoo.com/former-nsa-director-nsa-doesnt-just-listen-bad-110000822.html

[NuclearDem]

1. Yes you do, asshole.

[OldRedneck]

2. Translation:

"Ve know vhat ist gut for you Untermenschen!!"

[GeorgeGist]

3. That little shit stain needs bleach.

[niyad]

4. nobody anointed you a deity, you arrogant jerk.

[The CCC]

5. Hayden: "I didn't need to ask 'mother, may I' from the Congress or the president or anyone else."

I'm opposed to the death penalty for sedition, but I'm staring to change my mind.

[JDPriestly]

7. A jury should be allowed to decide. But our Constitution did not put teeth in the Bill

of Rights.

Madison and his friends never thought that a total heel like Hayden would ever be born in America.

He's a disgrace to our country. A disgrace. Shame on him. Yes. We ask ""Mother May I" of Congress and the courts before we violate the constitutional rights of others. That's what the American Revolution was about -- the Fourth Amendment and taxation without representation. The Fourth Amendment is the cornerstone that protects the rest of our rights.

Let's see what other bad words can I call Hayden? How about ignoramus.

Well. It didn't change anything, but it felt good. Shame on Obama for keeping Hayden on.

[jtuck004]

6. And when all your employees are in those surplus brown shirts, you will just be recycling? n/t

[grasswire]

8. nearly 600 comments on the story...

....and Hayden is getting ripped by nearly all.

Good quote posted:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” Cicero, 55 BC in Roman …Senate

[TwilightGardener]

9. The third paragraph of the excerpt pretty much says it all.