Judging from the dearth of comments (it’s Dec. 8 and mine is the second), no one’s been watching the watchdogs.
  Actually, what we have here is an intentional failure to communicate. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight board has some pages on the White House Web site. It had a press release announcing the public meeting to be held at Georgetown University Tuesday—but the press release didn’t say what city Georgetown University is in. Does that say something about why public attendance at the meeting was low?
  Libertarians’ primary criticism of the board is that it has no teeth because it serves at the pleasure of the president. Why would a Republican-controlled Congress put a body assigned the task of monitoring civil-liberties violations by the government in the hands of the person who is authorizing such violations? (OK. So that was a rhetorical question.)
  Tuesday’s was the first public meeting—all previous meetings have been private. The board does not have the security clearance to look at specific details of an agency’s operations, so it apparently receives only sales pitches from federal spy agencies about how they are at once protecting our person and our civil liberties from those who, as Dick Chaney would say, “hate our freedoms.”
  The chairman of the board is a Bush-family friend and crony of Alberto Gonzales, and another board member is the relative of someone who was killed on one of the hijacked planes on Sept. 11—a clear conflict of interest when the nominal goal of the board is to monitor civil-liberties violations, not win the “War on Terror.”
  Finally, the board’s first-annual report to Congress is scheduled for March. That’s March 2007—a year after is was sworn in, and more than two years since the board was mandated by Congress. Can our civil liberties can hold out that long?
  I’ve been covering the board on the above Web site since March.

The person named Webb answered the president the right way when he said “that is between me and my boy, this administration is not at all for the people, you must remember when they wave the flag and say things like must finish the job and a lot of other sayings what they are not saying is we would like democracy to flounder, because they have bought out the press, have made voting not a privilage for all but only for those on their side, people have died for voting rights and now this administration looks at those who are not rich as having no brains.  When voting rights are silenticed and women’s rights are being ignored and the poor be dammed, we are no better than a banana republic.

Margaret from Vancouver, Washington