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Posterity is the new justification for FISA
You can picture it now. Just when they’ve whittled away the last possible explanation for warrantless wiretapping, History offers a new opening.
FBI wiretaps have “given us the most powerful and persuasive source of all for seeing how utterly selfless Martin Luther King was,” as a civil rights leader, according to a leading civil rights scholar.
Think about it. If we wiretap everyone, chances are something will be interesting. Then we can use the tapes for good, not evil. Do you hate history?
This has been a known bad idea since 1505.
Amidst scrutiny on Blackwater USA’s lawless operations in Iraq, I keep coming back to one point. Blackwater’s website claims that the number of private contractors in Iraq is the same as the number of US military personnel.
But let’s get things straight. Anyone who carries a gun for hire is a mercenary. And the first and only thing anyone should read when you are dealing with mercenaries is Chapters XII of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Appropriately, Blackwater’s CEO’s name is Eric Prince.
I want to organize people to send copies of The Prince to every member of Congress with Chapter XII bookmarked. Bush should get one too. And one to Eric Prince for good luck. We cannot use mercenaries to be successful anywhere in any war. It was true in 1505, and it’s true in 2007.
Some relevant excerpts:
Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe…And as they were the sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty.I wish to demonstrate further the infelicity of these arms.
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