Those WMDs

Recently, more and more has come out about WMDs in Iraq. Of course, the dem/leftists would have you believe that these weapons never existed, even though Saddam used them against his own population and Iran. ABC recently aired some tapes of Saddam, where he discusses WMDs and his nuclear program as late as 2000.

"News that Saddam had an ongoing enrichment program comports with the account of Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the nuclear physicist who ran Iraq's nuclear centrifuge program.

After turning himself in to U.S. forces in July 2003, Dr. Obeidi revealed that he had successfully hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints from U.N. weapons inspectors on Saddam's orders.

Despite the staggering implications of the audiotaped uranium revelation, only one mainstream media outlet had covered the news as of Monday morning.

Noting that Saddam's enrichment program was "totally unknown to U.N. weapons inspectors," the Washington Times editorialized on Monday: "It is apparent that the American public has much more to learn about . . . . precisely when Saddam's nuclear weapons programs actually stopped." "

There has been more reported on Iraq's attempts to enrich uranium using a technique called plasma separation.

There has also long been speculation that Iraq's WMDs were moved to a friendly country, Syria being the likeliest place.

""The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described today occurred.

He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles "a well-orchestrated campaign using two neighboring client states with which the Russian leadership had a long time security relationship." "

A former Iraqi General, Georges Sada also claims that Iraq's WMDs were moved to Syria and that Syria has given some of them to al-Qaeda. I have some reservations about his claims, as I do with anyone hawking a book.


Joe Mariani has an excellent article on this subject. You need to read, Iraq's WMD Redux. I will post an excerpt here. Also, be sure to see Joe's blog, Guardian WatchBlog.

"The idea that every inch of Iraq has been examined and pronounced clean is ludicrous. Reports are still coming in of storage sites that were completely ignored by the Iraq Survey Group, which concentrated heavily on previously known WMD storage sites. Simple common sense would tell anyone that a place marked on every inspector's map "WMD Storage Facility" might not be the best place to hide your WMDs. Instead, something like buried and locked concrete bunkers not marked on any map might be a more likely location. Lo and behold, several such sites were reported to the ISG, and totally ignored.

David Gaubatz, a former member of the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, was assigned to do intelligence research. He was shown four sealed underground concrete bunkers in southern Iraq with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. His sources told him that the facilities had contained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. He filed reports with photographs, grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. But the ISG never unsealed the bunkers. "We agents begged and begged for weeks and months to get ISG to respond to the sites with the proper equipment," Gaubatz told the New York Sun. Yet the ISG felt comfortable filing a final report, in effect closing the case."

Too bad none of these revelations fit into the world view of the MSM. Some good investigative reporting is really needed here. - Sailor

Some Good News

My son has informed me that he is getting married and that I am a proud grand dad. I have a grand daughter, her name is Annabelle. Pictures to follow as soon as I get them. - Sailor

Able Danger

Here is some commentary on the recent public hearings on the Able Danger project. Jack Kelly has some interesting things to say.

"Through computer scanning of some 2.5 terabytes of classified and unclassified data, the Able Danger team identified five "nodes" of al-Qaida activity. One was in Brooklyn, N.Y. Another was in the port of Aden in Yemen, where the USS Cole was attacked.

Able Danger linked Mohamed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers to the Brooklyn cell, said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who was the liaison between the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Able Danger team.

"It shocked us how entrenched a presence al-Qaida had in the United States," Mr. Kleinsmith said.

Lt. Col. Shaffer testified he tried three times to have Able Danger data on the Brooklyn cell presented to the FBI, but that on each occasion Pentagon lawyers forbade the meeting.

In a commentary in The Wall Journal last November, Louis Freeh, who was FBI director at the time, said that if he had been told about what Able Danger had learned, 9/11 likely would have been prevented.

In March 2000, Maj. Kleinsmith was ordered to stop all work on Able Danger, and, later, to delete all the information collected."

One has to wonder why this project was terminated and why the insistence that all of the data be deleted. Seems to me that data mining would be an excellent tool to co-ordinate all of the data collected by the various intelligence agencies. One also has to wonder why the 9/11 Commission did not look deeper into the data gathered by the Able Danger group. Further, as Jack Kelly wonders, why is the Bush administration seemingly covering up this fiasco. After all, this did occur under the watch of the Clinton Administration. A deeper investigation into this is certainly warranted. - Sailor

Those Cartoons

As you all have heard and seen by now, the Islamofacists are using some cartoons of Mohammed to inflame the Moslem street. Unlike the US media, who claim they do not want to offend Muslims, I will post those cartoons here and now. It is my opinion that the US media is just plain afraid to show these cartoons. What a bunch of cowards.

So here they are. I have seen far more offensive cartoon made about Christians and Jews. - Sailor

Close Guantanamo?

The a bunch of so called human rights "investigators" have told the UN that the prison at Gitmo should be closed immediately. Now did these "investigators" go to Gitmo? No. They rejected an invitation to inspect the facilities and the treatment of prisoners there. So exactly where did they get their "investigative" data from? Your guess is as good as mine. The New York Post has some ideas on where they got their data from.

"Says the U.N. team: What happens at Gitmo is nothing less than torture — and those responsible should themselves face the long arm of the law "up to the highest level of military and political command."

And how do these gumshoes know this?

Why, they read all about it in The New York Times and watched it on CNN. Oh, and they talked to former detainees.

What they did not do, however, is visit Guantanamo and see things for themselves.

After all, it's so much easier when you only need to get one side of the story.

Indeed, as Kevin Moley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.'s Geneva offices, wrote in a letter last month, the report "selectively includes only those factual assertions needed to support those conclusions and ignores other facts that would undermine those conclusions." "

Has anyone ever met a lawyer that said his client is guilty, unless of course he is planning adiminishedd capacity defense. As for the New York Times and CNN, well their reporting is slanted to their world view. How can anyone claim they have done an investigation, when they have not visited the facility in question? Looks to me that these "investigators" when and found datathatt supported their preconceived conclusion.Typicall of the UN.

Deroy Murdock makes the case for keeping Gitmo open, which I fully support.

""The process of assessing detainees is difficult and involves a certain degree of risk," says Pentagon spokesman Commander Flex Plexico. "Many detainees later identified as having returned to their terrorist activities falsely claimed to be farmers, truck drivers, cooks, small-scale merchants, or low-level combatants."

Plexico says that detainees "are required to sign a form agreeing that they will not take part in anti-U.S. or terrorist activities after release." It is a bit odd to suppose that the kinds of people who deliberately blow up Muslim weddings and applaud the stoning of adulteresses also obey contracts with people they aim to kill.

While staying mum on details, the Pentagon says that after leaving Guantanamo, former enemy combatants killed an Afghan judge as he departed a mosque. Others have shot at U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, while even more have been killed in action there."

As long as we are at war, and yes this is a war, it will be necessary to keep Camp Delta open. - Sailor

University of Washington Disses WWII Hero

In another example of how the left despises the military, two Student Senators tried to have a memorial to U of W graduate Marine Col. Greg "Pappy" Boyington shelved. To bad these two bimbettes have no knowledge of history. Had it not been for men like Pappy Boyington, they both would likely be speaking Japanese now. One has to wonder exactly what they teach in high school about the history of World War Two. It is obvious from the comment these two made that they are clueless. Ralph Kinney Barret over at Tech Central Station has a short biography of Pappy's exploits along with a dose of reality for Jill Edwards and Ashley Miller.

"In March 1944, Boyington was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His comrades thought it was a posthumous decoration. But Pappy survived the prison camp, was freed at the end of the war, and stood in the White House on October 5, 1945, still recovering from the physical and psychological effects of his imprisonment, as President Harry S Truman draped the nation's highest award for bravery around his neck.


Flash forward 61 years. A move is afoot, naturally enough, one would think, to honor Greg Boyington, Class of 1934, at his alma mater, the University of Washington. A resolution comes before the august Student Senate for a statue honoring the Medal of Honor winner. Not "a large statue, but rather something on a small scale" (according to the minutes of the senate).


Ahem.


A distinguished "Senator," Jill Edwards moves to table the matter. Discussion ensues on who this Boyington is and why he should be honored. One student says he had read about Boyington and thought the university should be proud of him.


Distinguished Senator Jill Edwards questions "whether it was appropriate to honor a person who killed other people."


She further wonders whether "a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce."


Another distinguished Senator, Ashley Miller, "commented that many monuments at UW already commemorate rich white men.""

Just a note to Ms. Edwards, do you think that freedom comes for free? It takes the blood of warriors to secure the liberties you so enjoy. Of course, it is those warriors that you disdain that allow you to make an ass of yourself. As for you, Ms. Miller, Pappy was part Souix, which makes him not totally white. And by the way, when did I miss the memo, that as a white man I am supposed to be rich?

I first saw this over at Neal Boortz, Neal's Nuze. Neal was right on top of this as usual. He has more on his site about this incident, including a proposal that Edwards make an apology, in writing.

Quite frankly, forcing an apology from either of these "geniuses" is a waste of time. I doubt they would be sincere about it, like so many of their ilk on the left, they too despise those that wear and have worn the uniform. - Sailor

More on Al Gore

The commentary on Al Gore's recent comments in Saudi Arabia continue. The Las Vegas Review-Journal calls Al's remarks bizarre.

"Mr. Gore said Arabs in the United States have been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."

This goes beyond being politically unwise. It is bizarre.

In an Arab world where torture, beheadings and the cutting off of hands are considered normal sanctions not just for real felonies but also for "heresy" and other thought crimes, what on earth must Mr. Gore's listeners have imagined he meant by "terrible abuses"? What must an audience familiar with prison conditions in Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia picture when Mr. Gore speaks of "unforgivable" conditions?

One doubts they were picturing a warm dry cot, indoor plumbing and three square meals a day while an illegal immigrant who had knowingly outstayed his visa waited for a scheduled court hearing.

In the excess of caution following Sept. 11, were a few American residents of Arab extraction interrogated or even picked up and held incommunicado? Yes. Is it acceptable to criticize such abuses? Of course. Go to it.

But Al Gore clearly has a problem. The son of a famous father, Mr. Gore is "deeply insecure about his ability, stature and credentials," political consultant Dick Morris wrote in the New York Post during the 2000 campaign, in an essay headlined "Why Gore lies."

"He feels that he needs to go the extra mile to burnish his image even if he has to make things up," wrote Mr. Morris -- himself no paragon of rectitude, let us hasten to add."

I have some serious concerns about the statr of Mr. Gore's mental health. One has to wonder about that. given his propensity to make wild eyed accusations and just plain idiotic comments.

Jack Kelly offers has a few things to say on Al's speech.

"Whatever Mr. Gore's speaking fee was, his hosts likely thought it a bargain, considering what the former vice president had to say. The U.S. committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs after 9/11, Mr. Gore said. Arabs were "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa and not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."

According to the Arab American Anti Discrimination Committee, about 1,200 Arabs were arrested after 9/11. Of these, 725 were held on immigration violations, 100 on unrelated criminal charges, and 360 for possible links to terrorism.

The Census Bureau says there are about three million Arabs in the United States. The number "indiscriminately rounded up" after 9/11 is much less than one tenth of one percent of that number.

Mr. Gore didn't say what he thought was "unforgivable" about the conditions in which the Arabs were held, but his source probably was a June, 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general, or, rather, erroneous news accounts of the report.

The Los Angeles Times said most detainees were held for months without charges. In fact, only 24 were held for more than a month before being charged, and 59 percent were charged within three days, the IG report said.

Most Americans remember that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis, but Mr. Gore seems to have forgotten. He deplored the cancellation of "Visa Express," the expedited program without background checks through which several of the hijackers entered the United States.

In a footnote on page 492 of its report, the 9/11 Commission said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the attacks, told interrogators most of the hijackers he selected were Saudis because they had the easiest time getting visas. According to statistics gathered by the Government Accountability Office, before 9/11 only three percent of Saudi applicants were interviewed prior to being issued a visa, and only one percent were refused."

Al made some wild assed accusations and Mr. Kelly easily refutes those accusations with facts, some thing Al has not been near in recent years. The 9/11 Commission specifically faulted the ease of immigration from Saudi Arabia as one of the conditions that permitted 9/11 to occur. How soon old Al forgets. Perhaps Al's ties to Occidental Petroleum had some thing to do with his memory loss.

Tom Bevans over at RCP has a couple of comments as well.

It is my opinion that Gore is sucking up to the far left of the dem party. The part of the party controlled by moveon.org, George Soros and supported by Kos and his ilk. Sadly, Al still thinks he is Presidential timber. Sorry to tell you this Mr. Gore, but what you are is just a pile of discarded wood with serious dry rot. - Sailor

More on Able Danger

More revelations continue to come from from the Able Danger project. (Hat tip to Froggie over at Chronwatch). The New York Post in an article, that Mohammed Atta's name surfaced 13 times in the data gathered by Able Danger. Congressman Curt Weldon(R-PA), held a news conference detailing the latest revelations. A full transcript is available at the Able Danger Blog. Here are some excerpts:

"Thank you for coming out. I'm Curt Weldon and I'm here to announce the hearing that everyone said would never occur, that will begin tomorrow."

It is about time that hearings were held on Able Danger. Rep. Weldon has been tireless in his efforts to see that these hearings occur.

"WELDON: Now, since this whole process began, you saw Louie Freeh, former FBI director, on "Meet the Press" in October respond to Chris Matthews and say publicly, "If I would have had the kind of information Able Danger had, we in the FBI may well have been able to stop 9/11 from ever occurring."

How the 9/11 Commission can call Able Danger historically insignificant is just beyond my imagination.

In addition, several months ago, General Hugh Shelton came out for the first time publicly and has said that he was the one who personally authorized the creation of Able Danger; that it was a top- secret, elite organization of approximately two dozen individuals whose total purpose was to identify Al Qaida operatives around the world and in the U.S.

So we have General Shelton testifying that he created it. You have Louie Freeh saying if he'd have had the information it could have helped stop 9/11, perhaps. And now we have information that will be testified to under oath that there were attempts to transfer information to the FBI on at least three occasions, and on all three of those occasions in September of 2000, lawyers within the administration denied those meetings from taking place.

I've learned some additional things that are new. You saw the Arlen Specter hearing in Judiciary that occurred in September. It's very troubling to me that it appears as though the DOD witness did not tell the truth.

We had testimony that all of the Able Danger data-mining material was destroyed. I now know that that's not the case. In fact, I now know there's data still available. And I am in contact with people who are still able to data mining runs on pre-9/11 data. In those data runs that are now being done today, in spite of what DOD said, I have 13 hits on Mohammed Atta, spelled Mu and Mo. Not Mohammed Attif, not Mohammed Attel; Mohammed Atta. Thirteen times we have hits in the data that's still available, that we were told was destroyed. That was pre-9/11 data, where Mohammed Atta's name was spelled two different ways, but it was Mohammed Atta.

It is outrageous to me that the Defense Department would say, as we will hear from Eric Kleinsmith tomorrow, that, yes, he did destroy the LIWA data, but the LIWA data wasn't all the data. There was other massive data mining that was collected, that we just don't know the whereabouts of."

Some one really needs to find out why the 9/11 Commission refused to even consider the Able Danger data. Having read the Commission's Report, it seems to me that they considered other less verifiable data. Of course, one also has to wonder why Jamie Gorelick was on that Commission, considering her involvement is creating the so called "wall" document. This document effectively kept intelligence organizations from sharing data.

If DOD witnesses were not forthcoming or truthful during the Specter Hearings, then this issue needs to be addressed as well. It will be very interesting to see what comes out of this set of hearings. Stay tuned! - Sailor

Please welcome the Able Danger Blog to my blogroll.

Al Gore Loses It...Again

It is not bad enough that Al Gore foams at the mouth when addressing lefties here in the States, now he is exporting his idiotic rhetoric overseas. Speaking at the Jiddah Economic Forum, old Al did his usual rant, this time tailoring it to his audience. Of course, as always, Al was long on accusations and short on specifics and proof. Typical Al Gore. The thought that this man was almost elected President is frightening. Investor's Business Daily has some comments on Al.

"The chief demon, of course, surely must be Gore's continuing quest for the presidency. Embittered he may well be by his loss of the highest office six years ago. But showing such supreme disloyalty to his country, as he did in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, cannot be condoned as an honorable means of pursuing the prize once more.

Speaking at the Jiddah Economic Forum, an event staged by oil-rich Saudi royalty, Gore indicted the American government for its "terrible abuses" of Arabs since the 9-11 attacks on New York and Washington. Such treatment, he charged, played into the hands of al-Qaida.

And just what was the nature of these abuses? Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."

Understand: Fifteen of the 19 al-Qaida hijackers on that fateful day, a day that saw 3,000 Americans go to their fiery deaths, a day that created thousands more orphans, were Saudi citizens. Those hijackers lived undetected in this country precisely because immigration authorities had been permissive.

So Gore believes the tightening of the rules, post-9-11, was one of a series of "terrible abuses"?

And just what, in Gore's theology, is "unforgivable"? His outburst came on the heels of an absurd United Nations report accusing the U.S. of torturing wartime captives at Guantanamo, where guards, struggling to keep hunger strikers alive, reportedly have resorted to intravenous feeding."

I guess I missed the big round up of Saudis. As for immigration, this country's immigration policy has been far too lenient. I shudder to think what Al's reaction to 9/11 would have been had he been elected.

I will have more on this bogus UN report later. What I will say, is that the people that created this report, were invited to see the conditions at Gitmo and not one of them bothered to go. So much for that report. - Sailor

Some Democrats Do Get It

It would seem that two leading Democrats, Jane Harman and Tom Daschle, have come out in favor of this so called "domestic" spying. Calling this domestic spying is a misnomer. One would be led to believe that there is wide spread electronic surveillance of US citizens. That is not the fact of the matter. If a known terrorist, whether al-Qaida or not, calls a number in the US, that is when some one in the US may be subject to these wire taps. It is only reasonable and within the bounds of presidential war time abilities to listen in on that sort of conversation.

In the case of Tom Daschle, it may just be political expediency, as Tom is considering a presidential run and the most recent polls show that the majority of Americans favor the NSA wire tapping.

David Limbaugh has some things to say on this in his column.

"They went on to mislabel the NSA intercepts where at least one party was not located in the United States as "domestic spying." Both words, "domestic," and "spying," were calculated to paint the president in a negative light and to taint what these Democrats now acknowledge is a program that is "necessary for fighting terrorism."

The "domestic" label was clearly misleading in that it implied that all parties to the communication were located on American soil, which is not the case. By coupling it with "spying," they intended to conjure up images of Dan Aykroyd impersonating a paranoid Richard Nixon mulling his enemies list in the Oval Office, then equating George Bush with this ugly practice.

It fit nicely with their long-running scheme to depict the president as the autocratic "King George," who acts unilaterally, beyond his constitutional authority and in derogation of the people's rights, to spy on innocent American citizens. This has always been a pernicious lie. The NSA surveillance program specifically excluded purely domestic communications and was never targeted at innocent citizens but at conversations where at least one party was a known or suspected terrorist."

This is the point that needs to be made. This is not domestic spying at all. It is the gathering of intelligence, with the focus on who may be working with known or suspected terrorists. Of course there are those dem/leftists that want you to believe it is, as well as there willing accomplishes in the MSM, most notably the New York Times. It is the NYT that broke this story and in doing so, has compromised the ability of the US to gather intelligence that may be crucial in stopping the next terrorist attack in the US. An investigation into whether the NYT has broken the law is indeed necessary. - Sailor

Roberts' Letter to the Committee on the Judiciary

Senator Pat Roberts has written and sent a 19 page letter (this is in PDF format and you will need Adobe Reader to view it), to Senators Specter and Leahy of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. The letter presents the Constitutional argument for the President's powers to use warrantless wire taps during time of war. Included in the letter are legal decisions that uphold those powers. It is worth the read with the upcoming hearings on this issue. - Sailor

Howard Dean's Egregious Comments on Terrorist Surveillance

Finally, some one from the GOP has taken Howard (Dr. Demento) Dean to take on his over the top comments on the NSA domestic wiretapping. Senator Pat Roberts has rebutted the DNC Chairman's exaggerations and out right lies. This is not, as Howie tried to portray it, domestic political wire tapping, nor is it Billy Clinton's ECHELON. Here are Senator Roberts' comments in full.

"February 3, 2006
Howard Dean's Egregious Comments on Terrorist Surveillance
By Pat Roberts

I was recently apprised of your assessment of the President's terrorist surveillance program - an "early warning" capability to intercept the international communications of al Qaeda terrorists to and from persons within the United States. With respect to this important program, you stated, "President Bush's secret program to spy on the American people reminds Americans of the abuse of power during the dark days of President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew." As Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, I find your statements to be irrational and irresponsible.

Any suggestion that a program designed to track the movement, locations, plans, or intentions of our enemy - particularly those that have infiltrated our borders - is equivalent to abusive domestic surveillance of the past is ludicrous. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson approved the electronic surveillance of Martin Luther King, those Presidents were targeting American citizens based on activities protected by the First Amendment. When President Richard Nixon used warrantless wiretaps, they were not directed at enemies that had attacked the United States and killed thousands of Americans.

I believe Americans understand that the careful and targeted program authorized by President Bush has no relation to the abuses of the past. Indeed, its closest antecedent is the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Attorney General Robert H. Jackson on the eve of World War II. With war looming and reports of lurking enemy saboteurs, President Roosevelt ordered the use of domestic electronic surveillance to target "persons suspected of subversive activities." As President Roosevelt noted, "It is too late to do anything about it after sabotage, assassinations and 'fifth column' activities are completed." Significantly, President Roosevelt's direction was issued despite a statute (Section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934) and Supreme Court precedent (United States v. Nardone, 302 U.S. 379 (1937)) that prohibited such wiretapping.

When President Bush exercised his constitutional authority and responsibility as Commander-in-Chief to target international communications between potential terrorists within this country and al Qaeda members overseas, he recognized, just like President Roosevelt, that after a terrorist attack occurs '[i]t is too late.' Our nation had been attacked on September 11, 2001, by foreign enemies. We were, and are still, at war with an enemy that Congress identified in an Authorization for Use of Military Force (Pub. L. No. 107-40 (Sept. 18, 2001)). Much of the war against al Qaeda is being fought overseas - Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq. But the war against terrorism is not confined to foreign lands. The war against terrorism is being fought every day in our own backyard. America is a battlefield.

In peacetime and especially when our nation is at war, our leaders, including the chairmen of our political parties, should be more careful and better informed before they criticize the intelligence programs that protect our nation. Vibrant debate is important in our free society, but that debate should be serious and rational, especially where national security is concerned. Too many are looking at national security issues through partisan lenses. I have seen it on the Intelligence Committee for the past three years. Our nation, and the men and women of the military, law enforcement, and the intelligence community, deserve better.

Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) is Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence."

SOURCE


Strikes me that if someone in the US is in phone contact with known al-Qaeda operatives, that constitutes probable cause. To me it is no different than a cop stopping a car on a traffic violationodoren smelling the oder of weed in the car. The Courts have held that that officer can do a warrantless search, based on that probable cause. It is the same with any of the various child protection agencies of the several states. The can, without a warrant, and without due process, enter a home and take the children away, based on as little as an anomynous phone call or calls. This country is at war, no matter what the left wishes to think. The President has the power to order these warrantless wire taps, under the Constitution. - Sailor