A Simple Question

(h/t TF Stern)

The lies that this government tells regarding the unconstitutional NSA surveillance programs are never ending. Just this past weekend we learned that contrary to administration and congressional assurances, analysts at the NSA routinely listen in on phone calls and read private emails without any warrant whatsoever. At this point, I’m not sure how anyone with a pulse can actually believe the drivel coming out of the DC establishment. (The Chief Liar, when the revelations about the scope of the NSA wiretapping were first being divulged: “Some of the hype we’ve been hearing over the past day or so — nobody has listened to the content of people’s phone calls.”)

The one thing that we’re constantly told by those same DC establishment types is that these programs are justified, Fourth Amendment be damned, because they’ve stopped “dozens” of terrorist attacks. The Nitwit-in-Chief said,

“I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.“

This was his justification for abandoning his oath to uphold the Constitution, suggesting that in order to keep the nation safe we were going to have to “choose” to ignore pesky Constitutional limitations on executive authority. It’s a common theme from Herr Obama, who also raised the specter of doing away with the Second Amendment in the name of “public safety.”

In the name of fairness, I’ll play along with the little game the DC spinmeisters created. We’ve been told by all kinds of politicians that “dozens” of attacks have been stopped by their illegal spying on Americans, but to date they’ve only told us of two, including an attempted bombing of the NYC subway. Yet, a little digging on my part has turned up 28 terrorist attacks since the program began, including 7 on US soil since Obama was sworn in:

• June 1, 2009: Abdulhakim Muhammed shoots two soldiers at a Little Rock, AK recruiting station. Muhammed freely admits to being an Al-Qeada operative.
• Novermber 5, 2009: Maj. Nidal Hassan shoots up a dispensary at Fort Hood, killing 13 and wounding more than 30. The investigation discovers that he has been espousing a Jihadist philosophy in emails and message board postings. Last week, a military judge refused to allow Hassan to use his preferred defense – that he was defending Al-Qeada from American aggression.
• December 25, 2009: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempts to explode a bomb concealed in his underwear while his international flight is on final approach into Detroit. The flight is spared only when the underwear bomber’s bomb fails to detonate and other passengers subdue the Al-Qeada agent.
• May 1, 2010: Faisal Shahzad plants a car bomb in NYC’s Times Square. Disaster is averted only when Shazad’s bomb fizzles instead of detonates. A broken wire in the detonator is later found to be the cause for the bomb’s failure.
• May 10, 2010: A pipe bomb detonates at a Jacksonville, FL mosque, wounding 60. Nobody has ever claimed responsibility and no arrests have ever been made
• January 17, 2011: A bomb is discovered along a parade route to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Again, no one claims responsibility and the case remains open.
• April 15, 2013: Two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, explode a pair of backpack bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line. 3 are killed and over 170 wounded. In the resulting manhunt, it’s discovered that the elder brother “disappeared” in Chechnya for six months and that both brothers have “radicalized” in recent years.

I have 7 examples of terrorists that slipped through the warrantless dragnet first unleashed by Bush and expanded by Obama. There are 21 more where the terrorists either successfully killed their American targets overseas, or were only stopped by their incompetence. Quite frankly, the entire program looks absolutely ineffective.

Unless, of course, the intent of the program is simply to give the administration surveillance powers not even the Gestapo or NKVD dreamed of. In that case, it is the most successful program of it’s type in history.