Probable Cause for Dismissal

The words of the 4th Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon PROBABLE CAUSE..." Now here's an excerpt from a national press conference (http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/news/2006/intell-060123-dni01.htm) by the man who formerly headed the NSA program (i.e., the man who issues warrantless wiretaps on American citizens) and now heads the CIA. You can't really tell how smug and know-it-all arrogant General Hayden was from the excerpt, but you'll get the point. He was extremely confident the words "probable cause" were not in the 4th Amendment. QUESTION: I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use -- GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. QUESTION: But the -- HAYDEN: That's what it says. QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure. QUESTION: But does it not say probable -- HAYDEN: No. The amendment says -- QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard -- HAYDEN: -- unreasonable search and seizure. An audio/video clip is attached here. The conservative viewpoint from The National Review can be seen here. It appears that the Conservatives (and Hayden by default) are trying to split hairs about whether or not the "probable cause" and "search and seizure" sections are connected. The court case referenced says that warrants are not required for all government searches. The issue (as I see it) involves the definition of "reasonable". Is it "reasonable" to place wiretaps on American citizens without the requirement to show that there is any cause? What burden of proof is required before the CIA can invade an citizen's privacy? Should we allow one branch of the government to invade personal privacy at will, without any "check and balance" that is traditionally applied to keep the government in line? I have included a quotation below that is a pre-amble to a rights essay written by a friend of mine. It has very good insight into the value of "rights" in the United States. In any moral discussion he who controls the definitions of the terms controls the outcome. Presently the term “rights” is too often used with a kind of glibness and imprecision that gives it a nearly unbreakable elasticity. And if a word can mean anything it inevitably means nothing. Using the original Jeffersonian conception of “rights,” borrowed from Locke and decorating the pages of founding-era patriots like Paine, persons in America have no rights, but instead merely an elaborate network of revocable allowances issuing from the state. This is hardly a bold or innovative conclusion. Even the simplest study of the history of the Supreme Court, honestly conducted, makes the idea plain. In the Declaration of Independence Jefferson is emphatic that essential to the definition of the rights legitimating the American Revolution is that they are “inalienable.”(1) By this he meant that they are an innate and integral part of a person’s identity (given by the “Creator,” he tells us) and for this reason it is beyond the competence of government to at any time justly take them away. It is because George III, with his regal arrogance, presumed to alienate the colonists from their certain inalienable rights that the revolution became a moral imperative.(2) This conception of inalienable rights, however present in ghostly form in popular political rhetoric and the classroom, does not meaningfully exist in American jurisprudence as a practical matter. It never has. Rights have always been deliciously alienable when the Court has determined the interests of the state so require. When opinions are being written Justices look at civil liberties issues as if placed on a kind of continuum with absolute state power as one extreme pole and perfect liberty on the other, the Court’s job being to find the Aristotelian golden mean. Each decision, as the Court sees it, is a matter of balancing the needs of the state against an individual’s personal entitlement to freedom from government interference. To alienate rights—literally, to make them foreign to the person—is, of course, in practical effect to eradicate them. And by this balancing approach individual rights—any one of them, all of them—are made eradicable to the extent the government can convince the Court that it has a “compelling” reason for doing so.(3) The federal government has, with varying degrees of success, been making this argument, and thereby seeking to negate even the most basic civil liberties, from its inception.(4) (1) “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the imperishable language of the Declaration goes, “that all men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” Jefferson: Writings, pp. 19. Library of America, 1984 (2) Cf. Jefferson’s original, unedited version of the Declaration, in which the many crimes against the rights of colonists are enumerated in their fullest detail. Id. 19. (3) There seems to be, perhaps, one exception to this zero-sum analysis. The Court has often described the freedom to believe what one wishes, short of any speech or conduct, as absolute and beyond any state intrusion. In West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v.Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), for instance, Justice Jackson, writing with his usual eloquence for the majority, recognizes a “sphere of intellect and spirit…which it is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control. Id. 642. This writer once tried to explain this opinion to a prison inmate. “You mean I can think whatever I want,” he said, “but, if I get out, I might not be able to say it or do anything about it without being put right back in here? That’s what they call liberty?” (4) Cf. The Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, the Espionage Act of 1917, explained below, and the Smith Act of 1940, each severely prohibitive of political speech and each affirmed as constitutional by the federal courts, are generally considered among the more egregious examples. If any doubts linger check out the story below about an AP journalist who's been imprisoned 5 months without even the most basic due process. His crime, as best he or we can tell, is taking improper photographs. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2456285 The conservatives demagogues are using hair-splitting justification for an act that the majority of the population would consider an affront (if it was done to them). Is this what people expect from a group that is helping us return to "Traditional American Values"? Can we allow such people to be our leaders?