Have you studied FDR during WWII and Lincoln during the civil war?

I guess in your mind it's better for France to be better at protecting their homeland. I think it's an embarrasment.

Is this intent or coincidence?

The classification of terrorists seized in Afghanistan and elsewhere as enemy combatants was originally an alternative to calling the prisoners of war, not to designating them criminal defendants. Military tribunals were authorized in a half-hearted attempt to show that terrorists who had already committed some egregious crime got some kind of trial, but years went by without their being used, and this was before Rasul. Finally the surveillance conducted by the Bush administration evidently involves data mining from amongst many thousands of phone calls and other communications rather than listening in on specific communications -- in other words, it uses newer technology in a legally problematic way. It is unlikely that this was intended as an imitation of the French practice.

This is one area in which I take Bush administration officials at their word. While the French use all the resources given to the state by their judicial system to deal with terrorism as a particularly dangerous sort of crime, the Bush administration sees terrorism fundamentally as a special kind of war. To the French approach, military force is mostly irrelevant; to the American, judicial processes are essentially beside the point.

The significant advantage the Frogs have is that they are not incumbered with people who don't see terrorism as a national threat. They (the citizens) have concluded that, to maintain a certain lifestyle of freedom, some secret conversations with "lovers" may be heard by the government. Whoopie! The question remains, what are Liberals so affraid of being exposed? THe phrase "its only illegal if you get caught" may now have new meaning to them.

Peter Chalk and Bill Rosenau at RAND did an interesting report on this very subject last year, comparing the domestic security services in UK, France, Canada, and Australia. Worth reading when thinking about this subject and a bit deeper and more methodologically sophisticated than the Perelman article.

Here is the link:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG100/index.html

Gawfer, I'm quite willing to believe that there's nothing you could be blackmailed over. Very likely you're somebody who spends a lot of time on the internet (and away from embarrassing porn sites), and you likely don't have much of a life. No personal insult intended, I'm just going by probabilities.

But I'm pretty sure there are lots of Republicans who have things they could be blackmailed over. Particularly lots of Republican legislators. J Edgar Hoover had the reputation for doing that, a long time ago.

Don't be sure when a Republican says "Hey, I'm not scared, I'm clean, there's nothing wrong with searching everybody" he might lying. Don't be sure he isn't getting blackmailed into saying that.

The FISA court is a rubber stamp. If they "need" to do things for which they can't get warrants from it- even retroactively!- it can only be because they're up to no good. End of story. I guess it's time once again to call the wingers' attention to that dangerous radical Ben Franklin's dictum: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

Interesting, I want to read the whole article. I paper comparing French and U.S. counterterrorism law this fall for a future colleague of yours at Fletcher. The French have a much longer history of dealing with terrorism going back to the 1950's in the Algerian War.

What I really think distinguishes the French approach from the U.S. post-9/11 approach is its law enforcement approach (as opposed to a 'national security' CIA/DoD approach). That wasn't always the case and the French have gone through a number of different systems, including courts not unlike our military tribunals. They've also done some stupid things, like a long period of 'sanctuary' where they allowed terrorists to operate freely on their soil (so long as they didn't attack French interests).

I believe there is, perhaps, more to learn from the French mistakes over the years and their trial and error in a context which is not unsimilar to ours.

Since I've been "haunted" by the thought for a couple years now and kept an eye out for someone else to confirm and formulate it incisively, to no avail, here's an all-points call for response: Beyond the 'protectionism' of their foreign economic policies, hasn't the Bush administration followed or created its own version of the 30's criminal 'protection racket' as exemplified by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and other underworld worthies who terrorized storekeepers into paying so as not to get attacked? Isn't there a parallel between nurturing a war on terror and then intimidating the American people into acceptance of suspension of constitutional rights by litanizing "to protect the American people" whenever questioned? Whether all the evidence pointing to 9/11 as avoidable suggests a quasi-Reichstag-burning welcoming of that disaster has any truth to it, scrutiny of Cheney's non-convening of his committee to alert us before the fact of 9/11, in concert with Rice's ignoring of denotative intelligence pointing in that direction gives the seemingly incredible a certain credibility. The Reichstag analogy is speculative; the protection racket parallel is explicit.