Just Remember The Real Reason & Whose Civil Liberty’s

I took some time off from posting over the holidays and I just checked my casualty numbers. It seems that in the few days I was out of the loop 18 more American Soldiers have died. That brings us to a total of 2,172 soldiers who have died as a result of the war in Iraq. I just wanted to lead with that so you could get the idea of where I'm coming from today. You might also note that unlike the politicians in Washington, B.D. of Doonesbury fame isn't debating PTSD here: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/
dailydose/index.htm

Now to my drum beat. As I listen to program after program, television and radio, about the Iraq war I find it striking how our original reasons for initiating this war are always so conveniently left out. We do not need to keep pushing the reasons we are in Iraq to the back and acting like they don't exist. I believe it is imperative that the citizens of this nation and the world stay focused on why and how we got there in the first place. I firmly believe that now that we are in Iraq and have won the conflict of armies we must exit in an orderly fashion and leave the Iraqi people to determine their own fate in a 'relatively' safe environment. That being said I also believe that it is critical that we consistently draw attention to and reemphasize the reasons we are there in the first place so that we might insure that it never happens again.

One comment that I have heard repeated about the Iraq war is that "we just have to keep slogging it out". No, we don't have to "keep slogging it out". We kept "slogging it out" in Vietnam to the tune of 58,226 American lives. What I believe we need to do is act decisively and rapidly. We need to take steps to ensure stability in the region as we pull the hell out and while we are doing that I think we need to remember that we are in Iraq because we (The American people and the world.) were lied to. I don't believe it was "poor intelligence", as the current in vogue phrase being used would have us believe, I believe it was cooked intelligence that took us there. It is also my thought that the real unbiased intelligence said Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were responsible for 9/11 and that they were being harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan and that the vast majority of those hijackers who attacked us were from Saudi Arabia. I think that the real unbiased intelligence didn't say that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but that it said "for all practical purposes Sadam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction and is not a threat to the United States".

The second issue I want to beat the drum about again is spying on American citizens. I heard someone express it best this week when they said that they had nothing against the president ordering wiretaps of Americans to protect the nation but that their problem was the apparent lack of judicial oversight. I have addressed this issue in earlier post. The purpose of judicial oversight is to prevent abuse and any possible violation of civil liberties and not to impede investigations. The Federal Intelligence Security Act (FISA) court has even historically approved these taps even after the fact. (Remember now that they have only disapproved 4 in over 25 years.) That's right; they approved the wiretaps after the agency, due to the urgency of the situation, tapped the communications but they still had oversight in the process and could still intervene should it be necessary to protect civil liberties. This president on the other hand chose to ignore the constitution and authorized wire taps without a warrant. He chose to violate the law and he did this based on the need for speed. I fail to see how if the government can do the wiretap and then get the warrant from the FISA court how eliminating the court all together sped up the process. I understand how it violates our rights but I don't understand how it speeds anything up.

Those Are The Sergeant Majors Thoughts On That.