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Nov. 27, 2009
JWisdom.com:Ascending to Earth with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Bibi's bad week
Nov. 25, 2009
Daniel Pipes: Islamism 2.0
JWisdom.com: No God No You! Know God, Know You! with Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (8 minutes)
Nov. 24, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran : The Atheists' unintended gift
JWisdom.com: You are a Philanthropist with Aliza Bulow (5 minutes)
Nov. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com: Actually, it really is all about you with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff
Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review August 18, 2006 / 24 Menachem-Av, 5766

Zeal can be good, but it's dangerous

By Wesley Pruden


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | You don't have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to understand the First Amendment guarantee of free speech is fundamental to everything we are — and to regard anyone who tries an end run around it as someone who deserves a bracing smackdown.


Presidents of both parties are sometimes tempted to try an end run or a shortcut because the Constitution can get in the way of the easiest way to enforce the law. The ruling yesterday by a federal judge in Detroit that the government's wiretapping without a warrant is unconstitutional and must be stopped at once should have been unnecessary. There's a law that enables the government to get a warrant, but sometimes a president and his attorney general think that's too much trouble.


The judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, ordered a permanent injunction — temporarily stayed to allow appeal to higher courts — barring agents of the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program from listening to conversations between American citizens and suspect parties abroad. "It was never the intent of the framers [of the Constitution] to give the president such unfettered control, particularly when his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights," she wrote (and continued for another 42 pages).


The Bush administration argues that it has the right to eavesdrop without a warrant because this enables the government to move quickly to protect American lives. The government says proving it would reveal state secrets. "We could tell you," the attorney general is saying, "but then we would have to kill you."


Before the Corporate Republicans in the government, whose instincts are to run the government as they would a large corporation where how secrecy is enforced is nobody else's business, ride off in three directions at once to denounce the ruling they should invoke a variation on the WWJD rule ("what would Jesus do?") and ask, "what would Janet do?" Janet Reno, the attorney general under Bill Clinton, rankled Republicans and other conservatives with imaginative assertions of dubious federal rights (think Waco, think Elian Gonzalez) to make the jobs of cops and government bureaucrats easier. Republicans, even Corporate Republicans, would rightly scream foul if a Democratic attorney general in the mold of Ramsey Clark or Janet Reno should assert the right to flout the requirement of obtaining a warrant because it was just too much trouble.


It's not that the government has a shortage of lawyers, or a shortage of sympathetic judges. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act created a secret court where the government can apply for warrants. The court has turned down government requests only three times in 30 years, and in the present climate where nobody — well, almost nobody — discounts the lethal threat of Islamic fascism it's difficult to imagine the court making it difficult for the president's men to get a warrant to protect American lives. "It's not the most difficult statute to comply with," says Evan Caminker, dean of the University of Michigan Law School, "but they do have to have some reasonable belief that the person may commit a crime." No fishing without a license, you might say.


Maybe you can't blame the government, which knows a lot of scary things it doesn't want to talk about, for its zeal in putting evildoers away. But it's nevertheless still true that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, it's still true that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and it's still true that Ronald Reagan was right when he warned us to "trust, but verify."


The government sometimes warns of catastrophe when it really means someone is merely annoyed. The Justice Department, for example, has indicted two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, under a law enacted at the beginning of World War I, for talking about what they heard — gossip, essentially — about what the government might do about Iran. This follows the government's case against journalists who may, or may not, have leaked gossip about Valerie Plame, the queen of the pastepots at the CIA. The government is asking us to put up with certain infringements on rights and privacy, and most of us understand that we're in a different kind of war against a shadowy but no less lethal enemy. But the government, whether Republican or Democrat, has to be careful what it asks us to put up with. Confidence lost is difficult to regain.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.

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