Tom Perriello on FISA, the Constitution and the War Against Terrorism

UPDATE: I've added Tom's website, Tom Perriello for Congress, to my blogroll. So, go over there and find out more about him. Sign up to volunteer and, even better, contribute some money to his campaign.

I 've recently had some communications from friends and acquaintances who are supporters of Tom Periello, 5th CD candidate for Congress. I've also seen a few diaries on Raising Kaine and other blogs about Periello and his commitment to progressive religious values. Since religion is one of my interests and I've written about the growth of the religious left, his candidacy sparked my enthusiasm.

Today, I did some poking around to learn more about the 5th CD race, Virgil Goode, and Tom Periello. I'll have more to say and I'll definitely be writing about this race, as well as the races in the 10th and 11th CDs over the coming few months.

But in my surfing the net, I came across this video, where Tom Periello talks about FISA. In addition to showing his strong commitment to basic constitutional rights, Periello does an astounding job of pointing out that bad intelligence, hampered by the lack of proper resources, is the problem that led to 9/11. In addition, Periello shows a fundamentally sound understanding of everything that is wrong about our invasion of Iraq and how it harmed our real efforts at fighting terrorism.

Anybody who has ever read anything I've written on Iraq and our foreign policy knows that I've been saying for years that Iraq was the wrong war. It was conceived and executed by the gang that couldn't shoot straight. If we truly wanted to fight terrorism effectively, we never would have diverted our resources from Afghanistan. That's where al Qaeda was holed up, at the invitation of the Taliban, itself a terrorist and extremist group. The Bush administration did a terrible disservice to this country when it all but abandoned Afghanistan to concentrate on occupying Iraq and hunting down Saddam Hussein. Not that Hussein was a good guy by any means. He just wasn't a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden.

Anyway, as I said, I was casually surfing around for more information about Tom Periello when I came across this YouTube video, where he essentially says exactly what I've known and believed since the beginning of the war in Iraq.

Periello also makes a stand on FISA, the Constitution, and individual rights, especially the right of U.S. citizens to be safe from their government spying on them. I'm going to let Tom Periello explain his position in his own words.





Considering how important issues like national security, foreign affairs, military matters, and privacy policy are going to be in the next Congress, this is the person I want in there, not Virgil Goode.