I don't believe it

[SmokinDVM]

Will the draft be reimplemented? It may be, I don't know, but there are no indications coming from anywhere that will happen. Charlie Rangel and Ernest Hollings tried to use that scare tactic in 2004, remember? Bills to implement the draft were introduced and overwhelmingly defeated.

Not my point at all. What I was discussing was, as the Military continues to fall drastically short of recruiting goals, and as that trend continues to worsen, will the draft be implemented to make up for the troop deficits, will we pull the troops out when it becomes obvious (more than it is already) that the objective (whatever the hell that is) can’t be accomplished with the present troop numbers, or will we leave them in until the last man is dead? If we continue to leave troops in Iraq for 3 and 4 tours, we’ll soon run into one of the above scenarios.

Would resources be better utilized for intelligence operations? You Betcha! And they are. But the democrats want to tie the hands of the current administration by limiting surveillance abilities and demanding public details of methodology being used by the intelligence communities. That is something that just doesn’t make sense to me, and every fiber of me says that it is a democratic effort to make the current administration look like the secret police. Do you think the Brits would have been able to uncover the plot to blow up 10 aircraft had they had their hands tied by the ACLU, or had the NY Times reporting their methodology? Even worse, had the terrorists succeeded in downing the planes, any evidence of how they accomplished it would be lost at the bottom of the ocean. Without surveillance ability, who knows if the Brits would have uncovered the plot and whether it would have been used again due to lack of sufficient clues to determine how it was accomplished in the first place.

Limiting surveillance abilities = preventing the neocons from spying on U.S. Citizens illegally. And, they’re demanding OVERSIGHT of activities within the United States, not an unreasonable request IME. The NY Times? The ACLU? Whether you want to admit it or not, you’re pulling that shit straight off of fox, and they’re pulling it straight out of their ass. Dumbya had publicly discussed tracking bank records long before the Times reported such. Interesting how no one had a shit-fit about that. And the ACLU, although they do get carried away sometimes, does a very necessary service for the citizens of this country.
BTW, the British were tipped off by a Pakistani who had noticed some suspicious activity from some of the accused terrorists. The British then used conventional, and what would be perfectly legal means, even in the U.S., to track the activities of the terrorists. Without that tip, the planes may have went down. And to top it all off, dumbya comes out with the term Islamo-fascist, just to piss off all of the Muslims he possibly can, just to see if he can keep them from helping the next time.
So let’s stop pretending that there was some “special surveillance technique” that the British were able to use, and we wouldn’t because of that damned Bill of Rights section of the U.S. Constitution.

Why did I think you felt we could negotiate with terrorists? It was an assumption I made since you were citing Paul Pillar in a previous post who is well known for his feelings on the subject. I assumed that since you used his opinion as supporting documentation, you probably agreed with the ideas that influenced his opinions. I am glad I was wrong on that one.

I have no love for terrorists, and am not of the belief that they can be negotiated with in any meaningful way, any more than any other criminal. I don’t, however, think that any of the recent hostilities in the Middle East, involve negotiating with terrorists to help garner some peaceful resolution of at least the current actions.