“Bush Authorized Domestic Spying”

[erik_kosberg]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...121600021.html

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the secret order may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity.

The law governing clandestine surveillance in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, prohibits conducting electronic surveillance not authorized by statute. A government agent can try to avoid prosecution if he can show he was "engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction," according to the law.

"This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration," said Martin, who has been sharply critical of the administration's surveillance and detention policies. "It is, I believe, the first time a president has authorized government agencies to violate a specific criminal prohibition and eavesdrop on Americans."

[realtraveller]

Alert the special prosecutor.

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/012571.php

[realtraveller]

Timing related to release of a book by the Times national security reporter. The book he submitted three months ago.

http://drudgereport.com/flash9nyt.htm

This is nothing new. I saw a story on this monitoring way before 9/11 on "60 Minutes". Morley or Ed went to a facility in England and they listened to a phone conversation in which one of the parties was Strom Thurmond. I remember Ed or Morley saying "You're listening in on a conversation with a United States Senator!"

The Justice Department said they foiled a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge doing this monitoring. But hey, what's one bridge and a few hundred people compared to this.

[erik_kosberg]

The John Bolton connection.

[realtraveller]

I found the "60 Minutes" transcript. The correspondent was Steve Kroft and they do talk about listening in to a conversation with Strom Thurmond.

It's dated February 27, 2000. Who was president then?

http://www.internetpirate.com/echelontranscript.htm

[poseidon]

realtraveller said

Who was president then?

I know this! I know this one! Pick me! Pick me!

[realtraveller]

Reading the "60 Minutes" piece from 2000, is revealing.

It sort of shrugs off the fact that the Clinton administration was listening in on Princess Diana's telephone calls and may have been listening into American politicians. There were no screaming headlines in the Washington Post then "Clinton Authorizes Spying On Princess Due To Her Anti-Land Mine Campaign".


Instead, it ends with a concern that the work of the NSA (which it points out was central in locating Carlos the Jackal and the bombers of Pan Am Flight 103) might be in danger due to fiber-optic cables and encryption technology. These "might erode the NSA's ability to gather the intelligence vital to national security."

Wouldn't the current Washington Post headline be more accurate to say "Bush Authorized Monitoring of Suspected Al Qaeda Telephone Calls". But then that wouldn't be slanted the way the media wants to slant it.

[erik_kosberg]

Been there, done that.

[erik_kosberg]

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitut...articleii.html

he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed

[erik_kosberg]

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_12_1...77867364497520

Look, the problem here, again, is not one of just spying on Americans, as repulsively totalitarian as that is. It's that the administration adopted John Yoo's theory of presidential infallibility. But, of course, it wasn't really John Yoo's theory at all; it was Dick Cheney's muse, Richard Nixon who said, "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal."

[drmomentum[$]]

C'mon people. We have to give up some of our...

Aw, nevermind.

[erik_kosberg]

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/17/protect-the-people/

For 24 hours, Bush and other top administration officials refused to confirm the existence of their secret domestic spying program, arguing that doing so would endanger the American people

. . .

This [Saturday] morning, President Bush not only confirmed the existence of the program but provided details about how it worked.

This demonstrates that the administration’s initial refusal to comment was not motivated by security concerns. If that was the case Bush still wouldn’t have been able to comment this morning. Rather, the refusal to comment was a public relations strategy. When they decided it wasn’t working, they scrapped it and tried something else.

[Joubert[$]]

All right. I've read all of this stuff (or a lot of it). There are links everywhere.

How about some conversation? What do YOU think about all of this? Come to The Symposium and talk about it. We all have CNN and blogs and stuff. I wanna know what you guys think -- I don't care what "they" think.

[AuntieEmma[$]]

We all have CNN and blogs and stuff.

Actually, I don't have cable TV.

Anyway, I like links. They often point me to stuff that I wouldn't have been aware of otherwise.

[erik_kosberg]

http://apnews.myway.com//article/200...D8EIVK701.html

Bush said the program was narrowly designed and used in a manner "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." He said it targets only international communications of people inside the U.S. with "a clear link" to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations.

Government officials have refused to define the standards they're using to establish such a link or to say how many people are being monitored.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called that troubling. If Bush is allowed to decide unilaterally who the potential terrorists are, he becomes the court," Graham said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"We are at war, and I applaud the president for being aggressive," said Graham, who also called for a congressional review. "But we cannot set aside the rule of law in a time of war."

Lindsey Freakin’ Graham. If a South Carolina Republican is openly talking about Bush like that, imagine what other Republican members of Congress are saying in private.

[rmthunter]

According to the administration's own information, the people with "clear links to al Qaueda" may number as many as 10,000. At any given moment, they are monitoring about 500 phone calls.

What many of us seem to forget is that we have these consitutional guarantees of certain rights and freedoms to protect us from the government. Not from someone else's government -- from our own. That's also why this sort of activity is specifically illegal by statute.

Let's just stop playing Clinton/Bush games here. If Clinton authorized the same thing, then he should also be prosecuted.

As for the press, they're more and more like a pack of sharks. After swallowing the administration's BS for five years, they smell a bloody wound, so of course they're going after him. (As if they let Clinton off scot free.)

I'd just like to see some sanity back in government, but I don't know where we're going to find it.

[erik_kosberg]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051219/...NlYwMlJVRPUCUl

...Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argued that Congress had essentially given Bush broad powers to order the domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"Our position is that the authorization to use military force which was passed by the Congress shortly after Sept. 11 constitutes that authority," said Gonzales.

There’s no there there. Wow, if that’s the best that Gonzales can come up with, he’s got nothing.

Gonzales defended Bush's decision not to seek warrants from the secretive Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, saying that "we don't have the speed and the agility that we need in all circumstances to deal with this new kind of enemy."

As Brian has already pointed out, that’s a flat-out lie.

[erik_kosberg]

Quotes of the Day

[erik_kosberg]

The latest on Bush's warrantless-search program

Sources knowledgeable about the program said there is no way to secure a FISA warrant when the goal is to listen in on a vast array of communications in the hopes of finding something that sounds suspicious. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said the White House had tried but failed to find a way.

One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it.

Yes, how burdensome. Judges want to know who you're spying on and why before granting a warrant. What kind of monsters do we let wear judicial robes?

Of course, the point is what happened next. The Surveillance Court wanted cursory information and the administration didn't (or couldn't) answer the questions. They then decided to do the surveillance anyway.

[poseidon]

The Supreme Court has never addressed the question of whether the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, is violated by electronic surveillance of people in the United States of the sort that President Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When the Supreme Court extended the protections of the Fourth Amendment to electronic surveillance in 1967, it specifically declined to say whether its reasoning applied "in a situation involving the national security."

In 1972, the court ruled that a judge's permission was required to satisfy the Fourth Amendment in cases involving domestic intelligence surveillance. But there, too, the court put off an important question. for another day. Its ruling, Justice Lewis Powell Jr. wrote, "requires no judgment on the scope of the president's surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country."

Lower courts since then have given mixed answers to the question of whether the president has the power to spy on Americans in connection with their international contacts. In 2002, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review seemed to accept the administration's argument that the president has "inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."

[erik_kosberg]

http://www.slate.com/id/2132983/

So, which is it? Does the Bush administration refuse to honor its legislative and constitutional bargains with Congress, the courts, and the American people because it believes we are all just getting in its way? Or does it sidestep us because it believes that all these trappings of a democracy—the courts and the laws and public accountability are broken and unfixable? The first possibility is grandiose and depressing. The latter is absolutely breathtaking.