Jim

I remember the first Apple my folks bought - spent about $6k and it had no hard drive.

I'll try to find this article which did give a lot of context. I'm kind of a literalist though and I'll admit to being a little bugged that the language in the constitution is overlooked. It should mean something... heh, otoh, it's not for me to say. I also do think we may need something other than an "on/off" switch for wartime powers if we are going to be in a war that will last for the rest of our lives.

I had a better article on DOWs that I can't find this weekend. I'll see if I can't find it tomorrow. Essentially, it was saying that the DOW process is an anachronism. Hamdi sure seems to allow a president wartime powers even in the absences of a DOW. Excepting Hamdi, I'm not sure if there is any recent case law on the distinction.

I'm not saying yours is an unreasonable position but it is hard to square with the 2004 US supreme court decision of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld written by Justice O'Connor. I just don't think that declarations of war are required any more to fight wars. All of this said, a war against not a government but against an amorphous and shadowy group of people does concern me. On the one hand, we need to treat this as a war and Carl Rove's comments that we must not have a pre-9/11 mentality are absolutely correct. On the other hand, although the concern re the NSA program was way overblown, we do need to start having the discussion as to how much power a president is given in this kind of "war" against terrorism I do think the war against Saddam was justified although I also think that it was unnecessarily oversold. I'm not referring to WMDs here - they did exist and something happened to them. Bush's mistake was after it was obvious the WMDs had been "lost" by Saddam, in too directly linking the success or failure of the war to the creation of a working democracy. That objective is all too easy to frustrate. The actual facts did not require the installation of a democracy to declare victory: (1) Saddam invaded a strategically important US ally, lost and agreed to account for his WMDs, (2) Saddam violated his agreement to account for the WMDs, (3) Saddam was very unstable and capable of grave miscalculations (the initial invasion, attempting to assassinate Bush Sr and then not accounting for the WMDs even as the US gathered forces to invade), and (4) Saddam was not adverse to the methods of terror and not going to change his stripes and, eventually, would have acquired WMDS or relocated the ones he somehow "lost." As a side note, I think the message we sent in this invasion was very significant if we do not dilute it with weakness now - invade a US ally and we own you. You certainly are not going to be allowed to play games with whether you do or do not have WMDs. This strategy has already caused the dismantling of a highly advanced chemical, biological and nuclear program. In March of 2003, about the same time the war in Iraq began, Libya approached the United States to voluntarily disclose that it had chemical, biological and an advanced nuclear program which had nuclear material and centrifuges. Libya’s nuclear program was much further advanced that the United States intelligence had believed. Libya has now worked with the International Atomic Energy Agency and signed an additional protocol to permit greater IAEA inspections of its nuclear programs. This one factor alone justifies the cost, both economic and humanitarian, of the war. In short, I wish our rationale had been more keyed to the removal of Saddam as opposed to what kind of WMDs we found at the precise moment of invasion or the installation of a working democracy.

Ramsey, Michael D., "Presidential Declarations of War" . UC Davis Law Review, Forthcoming Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=449021 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.449021 I couldn't find a full article available for public view but here is the abstract: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=449021

Er, no. The distinction between a formal declaration of war and what we have now with the authorization of force resolution. We haven't had a formal declaration since WWII.

Are you certain the distinctions you are making are legally valid?

You've really lost me here. You think that it is illegal for the NSA to monitor suspected communications by the enemy in a war even where the communications are entirely in a foreign country? Therefore, the enigma program in WWII was illegal?

Again, I've not the energy this Friday evening to dig into this issue as I'm sure it would require hours to understand. However, please note that this is not the first time someone has claimed that the sanction program violated the First Amendment: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3791/is_199904/ai_n8843463/pg_2 See also, Teague v. Regional Commissioner of Customs, 404 F.2d 441, 445 (2d Cir. 1968), cert. denied, 394 U.S. 977, 89 S. Ct. 1457, 22 L. Ed. 2d 756 (1969) (regulations governing book imports from China and North Vietnam had only incidental First Amendment effect, with primary purpose to restrict dollar flow to hostile nations); American Documentary Films, Inc. v. Secretary of Treasury, 344 F. Supp. 703 (S.D.N.Y. 1972) (rejecting TWEA First Amendment challenge when government refused to issue retroactive license, because film distributor would not divulge sources of Cuban film)); But see RAMON CERNUDA & EDITORIAL CERNUDA, INC. v. HEAVEY, 720 F. Supp. 1544 (S.D. Fla 1989). Again, I've not the energy to dig into how the 2004 change in regulations fit into all of this context. Apparently, the rules were relaxed in 4/04 to exempt scholarly articles, thought to be restricted in early 12/04 and then "clarified" more liberally in later 12/04. Any way you slice this, I'm confident that the actual history does not support a conclusion of "so much for the First Amendment."

It appears that even before the 12/04 rule clarification, the OFAC had issued a rule that "exempts peer review, editing and publication of scholarly manuscripts submitted to IEEE by authors living in countries that are under U.S. trade embargoes, such as Iran and Cuba." http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/newsinfo/OFACruling.html This is stuff I found with five minutes of research on google. I bet I could find some real subtleties to this issue if I dug in deeper. Anytime I see an article which trumpets the falling of the sky these days, from the left or right, my instinctive reaction is to doubt. Any other response is dangerous given the hype that comes out from both sides these days.

You seem to contradict yourself. On the one hand, you seem to argue that considering what the world would look like sans Saddam is relevant only to reinforce my personal ideologies. On the other hand, you offer your own personal ideology that the war wasn't justified by his removal. I do not see how you can conclude that Saddam's removal is not "good enough to justify the war" without first considering the "hypothetical world" which would exist if he had not been removed. *scratches head* As a practical matter, we will be debating both questions for some time to come: 1. Was the war justified? 2. What do we do now? Bush's propsals re #2 have less credibility if he blew it bigtime re #1. Therefore, I think that #1 is a legitimate topic of debate. Bush's problem with #1 is that he is asking people to weigh the actual human loss of action against the hypothetical loss which might have occurred without action. Hopefully not too many people will blow past this question without thought.

Actually, it's not difficult to know that we are in the pan. It feels like hard iron and is getting hotter every day. The more difficult intellectual challenge is to try to visualize the alternate universe (or the "fire" we escaped) where Saddam was still in Iraq (or, if Kerry had been president in 1991, still in Kuwait). We know that Saddam invaded a strategically important US ally, lost, agreed to account for his WMDs, reneged on that agreement, attempted to assassinate a former US president, compensated families who gave their children to terrorist campaigns and continued to refuse to account for the disposition of his WMDs even as the US forces gathered to strike. We know all of this but the hard part is to project what might have happened were he still in power.

I'm making the limited point that some good comes out of the war to balance against all of the known problems. Is this controversial?

Yeppers.

Dang, wish I had remembered that!

I wouldn't mind discussing the morality of ending WWII with the Bomb; however, I'd hate to get into that if feelings are already sore on the subject. There are fundamental differences between Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor in that (i) the Japanese, unlike us, were unprovoked and (ii) Hiroshima intentionaly involved the killing of children. Actually, I also think that we are fairly gentle in our historical perspective of the Japanese in their conduct in WWII. We won't fight any global wars that do not kill civilians and WWII was a bloody mess that needed to end. The more difficult moral question is whether it was appropriate to use the bomb for geopolitical reasons. It is easy to condemn Truman for using the bomb to show the Russians we were for real; otoh, the policy which the bomb initiated did keep the world safe not just from nukes but also from a disasterous repeat of a world war. It's hard to say what history would look like if there had never been a demonstration of the power of the bomb and the willingness of the US to use it. As harsh as this sounds, we are lucky as a species that the first nuke was dropped at a time when no one was able to strike back. Had it occurred ten years later, none of us might exist. This is the most troublesome issue to me.

I think the question was whether they would stay however long it took which does ask for a much more open ended commitment.

Ummmm.. no. Bias can be logically relevant. If a salesman comes to my office and claims that his product will improve my secretaries' efficiency by 100%, it would be logical for me to consider his profit motive to puff the sale. The bias of the salesman does not mean that I automatically reject the claim but it does mean that I am wise to skeptically examine the details. If I sense something fishy in the claim, and certainly if he makes inconsistent statements, that is all the more reason to view the claims more skeptically than a similar claim made by a disinterested party. On the other hand, if the salesman claims that the product comes in the color red, and brings a sample of the red item for me to examine, it would be illogical for me disbelieve the salesman's statements merely because of bias. In this case, the claim of Zogby is very murky and their bias is relevant to a logical analysis. I gave two arguments to buttress the bias issue: 1. The question asked is slanted in that the only non-open ended answer a soldier could give is that he wants to stay indefinitely and 2. the results seem inconsistent in that it is hard to square with so many who would view a rapid withdrawal as unpatriotic. The devil in this kind of expert testimony is in the details of which very few are given. Further evidence of bias is the way the 72% claim is trumpeted and other, significant, information favorable to the Bush position is relegated to the bottom half of the article. You do not respond to any of my substantive arguments. Ummm.... no again. I "found" this and other arguments in my previous posts.

Not likely. It's good to remind ourselves that even though the WMDs were probably hidden in Syria and even though the road to a democracy is difficult, if not impossible, some good has come from this war.