Pruning Shears

UPDATED BELOW

This one is a couple of weeks old, but just for the record the administration is so much in favor of torture that they are willing for American citizens to be subject to it in order to keep it available to them:

Philippe Sands: Let me put it in yet another way. Could you imagine any circumstances in which the use of water boarding on an American national by a foreign intelligence service could be justified?

John Bellinger: One would have to apply the facts to the law, the law to the facts, to determine whether any technique, whatever it happened to be, would cause severe physical pain or suffering.

Time columnist Joe Klein was given worthy grief (hat tip Jane Hamsher) over his most recent effort.  If he wrote the world was flat he wouldn’t be being provocative, he’d just be an imbecile.  If people pointed that out forcefully they wouldn’t be overreacting - that’s an appropriate response to a major voice in the media making such an elementary mistake.  No one with standards that low should be employed by a major outlet, unless of course the outlet’s standards were that low as well.  UPDATE:  Klein provided his own update here in which among other things he calls the controversy over basket warrants “relatively obscure and unimportant technical details”.  He’s also still in favor of telecom amnesty.  Memo to self: When issuing a correction, set the record straight and shut up.  Or as a wonderful bit of folk wisdom has it, when you’re in a hole the first rule is to stop digging.

The NSA’s wiretapping program continues to be illegal.  Here is this week’s evidence.  And Bush’s mania for secrecy continues to be a bad idea in practice.  It hiders our ability to prosecute terrorists.  Where do you think this fits in the “with us or against us” framework?

Finally, the government continues to chip away at the Fourth Amendment (hat tip digby):

One of the things that clearly unsettled residents of Greenport was that the immigrants were arrested in their homes, without warrants, an immigration enforcement tactic that has been used more and more since 2005.

And if you think it doesn’t apply to you because you aren’t a suspected illegal immigrant then 1) never underestimate this government’s ability to suspect you and 2) don’t imagine that’s where the intrusions end (hat tip Raw Story).