[Janos]

How do you know that hasn't already happened Janos? This whole Iraq thng could be a cover story.

It has happened a smaller scale.

Iraq war was just based on lies, and now that they are being called on it they just say "well oops we were wrong but he didn't prove that he had no WMDs so we invaded heh sry guys".

This stuff is on different things, like the entire NSA spying stuff (which doesn't interest me as much as Iraq war, but at least Iraq war was seemingly just really, really stupid and retarded, not an embodiment of malevolent, pure evil).

[karajorma]

I meant the entire Iraq war being a cover story conconcoted between Bush and Saddam to cover a war somewhere else

[Janos]

I meant the entire Iraq war being a cover story conconcoted between Bush and Saddam to cover a war somewhere else

hehehehehe

[Ace]

Bush is fighting the martians! Didn't you see War of the Worlds?

[ionia23]

Okay, so activist groups were put under surveillance, wiretaps were put in place with warrants, politicians lied to further their own agendas.  This should come as a surprise to no one.

[Janos]

Okay, so activist groups were put under surveillance, wiretaps were put in place with warrants, politicians lied to further their own agendas.  This should come as a surprise to no one.

Does it make it right or just?

[Ford Prefect]

I don't believe Iraq is a real country. Its history sounds concocted, and it sort of sounds like someone just came up with the name by changing one letter in "Iran".

[starfox]

Like, that "China doesn't exist" thing ?

[ionia23]

Does it make it right or just?

I don't think it's a moral issue, just a statement of fact. 

[Unknown Target]

So what's the progress on this, by the way?

[Mefustae]

So what's the progress on this, by the way?

Trust me, in a month, all of this will have been thorougly forgotten. Swept under the rug, if you will.

[Kosh]

So what's the progress on this, by the way?

Trust me, in a month, all of this will have been thorougly forgotten. Swept under the rug, if you will.

But if he was a democrat, he'd be in jail by now.

[ionia23]

That's because it has taken this long for Democrats to realize the true nature of their opponents.  The diehard Bush-followers are an interesting lot as they only understand power.  To a group used to resolving issues through debate, this is a hard concept to wrap the mind around.

Those who voted Bush into power are to be pitied from a great distance.  They cannot help their own ignorance.  You'd have to be suffering from serious brain damage to buy any of his b.s.  So yes, pity them, but don't ever turn your back on them.  Fanatics are deadly, no matter what flag they happen to be following.

[Mefustae]

Those who voted Bush into power are to be pitied from a great distance.

What? All 8 of them?

[Flipside]

hehehehe

Thing is, Bush officially declared the Iraq War as over quite some time ago, so saying he is still at war is.....a blatant lie.

[Unknown Target]

Shh...nobody'll notice.

[Janos]

Shh...nobody'll notice.

reported for terrism

[DeepSpace9er]

First off, there are billions of phone converstations nation wide every day. It would be impossible to have any sort of reasonable ammount of people sift through them: "oooohh.. mr jones isnt born again.. increase his taxes!"

The only people they would consider usign algorithms to scan phone converstations are those that they have great suspision of collaberating with terrorists. And getting a warrent from some judge with a wacko agenda would blow the operation. Just because the president is republican doesnt mean that every person who works for the government are his yesmen. Im sure if terrorist attacks happened because the president DIDNT follow through with this information would cause an uproar of why he didnt. Bueracracy is not your friend.

[WMCoolmon]

The only people they would consider usign algorithms to scan phone converstations are those that they have great suspision of collaberating with terrorists.

Watergate?

[aldo_14]

First off, there are billions of phone converstations nation wide every day. It would be impossible to have any sort of reasonable ammount of people sift through them: "oooohh.. mr jones isnt born again.. increase his taxes!"

The only people they would consider usign algorithms to scan phone converstations are those that they have great suspision of collaberating with terrorists. And getting a warrent from some judge with a wacko agenda would blow the operation. Just because the president is republican doesnt mean that every person who works for the government are his yesmen. Im sure if terrorist attacks happened because the president DIDNT follow through with this information would cause an uproar of why he didnt. Bueracracy is not your friend.

Ever heard of Echelon? They'll use a cluster of supercomputers to do voice recognition + keyword filtering (possibly selecting some subset of calls based on previous intelligence, participation at protest meetings, library records or from random sweeps - if they can't process all of them).  Granted, even military (because these things could well be significantly better than commercial/public technology) voice recognition wouldn't be perfect, but it's likely they'd use a combinatorial approach of recognising xx 'trigger' words together (like 'Allah', 'nuclear', etc in close temporal proximity) to highlight the call for manual analysis.  Perhaps using a neural net approach; they're very good for speech (i.e. pattern) recognition, IIRC, and you could have a huge training set just from the CIA/FBI/NSA/etcs old transcripted wiretaps.