Since everyone is weighing in about President Bush's secret espionage program, I figure I may as well weight in on it too.

Bush's Press Secretary, Scott McClellan was on television yesterday spouting out rhetoric about how dangerous it was now that the terrorists know that we are spying on them. If they didn't know the federal government was watching them in the first place, we probably don't have to worry about these guys.

The president wants everyone to focus on the issue of safety, in that he says he is making America safer by conducting secret wiretaps and not informing any of the courts of his decision to do so. At issue, at least with me anyway, is not that he issues wiretaps, but how he issued them.

Just like a police detective, even the president is required, or so I'm told, to get a court order to issue wiretaps in order to spy on someone. What would have happened to the detective who had placed a wire tap on a suspect without permission from the courts to do so? First, any case made against the suspect using these wiretaps as evidence would immediately be thrown out, and second, the suspect would be walking free. And finally, the detective would be suspended, reprimanded, or whatever else his or her's superiors felt was necessary to do.

After Congress conducts all of the hearings I wonder what will happen to the president if they find out that he broke the law by issuing these wiretaps? Something? Nothing? Anything? All of the above? Who knows?

I can understand Bush's position that he is trying to make the country safer for us regular people, but why not just abide by the law to do just that? What not go to a court and get permission to set these wiretaps? What harm would that have caused? All of these questions are ones that Congress will hopefully ask when they convene sometime and then issue a 1,000 page book about their findings.

But what if these wiretaps actually did prevent a terrorist attack? That would be good wouldn't it? Even if Bush's decision was against the law, would it not be better to prevent another 9/11 by using these spying tactics? I would have to say yes, but even so if these tactics are against the law, is begs the question of whether or not we have become or are becoming a country like the former Soviet Union where we have little civil liberties to fall back upon.

There has to be a buffer zone between the government and its people. The government should support the people and the people should support the government, but the people should not have to sacrifice their freedoms to do so. We support our lawmakers enough by paying their salaries, so why give them everything else as well? They can already take our land for commercial zones. They can takes our land to build roads. Shouldn't there be something that is scared for us little people? Like our privacy perhaps.

This is a complicated issue for me. On one hand I have to believe that at least some part of this is wrong, and yet I can't morally fault the administration for doing what they have done. Bush has done enough things that I disagree with, maybe I'm just tired of disagreeing.