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Lots of Questions
Bush acknowledges to have authorized the NSA spying within the United States on U.S. citizens.
Bush said the program was narrowly designed and used "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution."
This is about as "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution" as torture is.
Like that issue and the "enemy combatant", this on will come down to a constitutional conflict about the Yoo Doctrine.
Does the president have the right to break laws and/or order laws to be broken? Under what circumstances might he have those? In a case of war, might it be declared on drugs, poverty of terror, can he just overrule Congress and the courts?
Who did the NSA listen too? Is there a connection with the NSA intercepts Bolton received? The old Newsweek story about Bolton talks about 10,000 names and intercepts – not just a small band of would-be terrorists.
To fill the plate even more, we should not forget the scandalous NYT that did hold back the information until it was sure to come out in a book anyhow. Could you have published something before the 2004 election Mr. Sulzer?
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Related links:
The original NYT story:
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts
Additional information from the Post:
On Hill, Anger and Calls for Hearings Greet News of Stateside Surveillance (confusing)
A bit on the legal conflict:
Behind Power, One Principle as Bush Pushes Prerogatives
New details in today’s papers:
Eavesdropping Effort Began Soon After Sept. 11 Attacks
The security agency surveillance of telecommunications between the United States and Afghanistan began in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the officials said.
The agency operation included eavesdropping on communications between Americans and other individuals in the United States and people in Afghanistan without the court-approved search warrants that are normally required for such domestic intelligence activities.
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But after the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban government in late 2001, Al Qaeda lost its sanctuary, and Osama bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders scattered to Pakistan, Iran and other countries. As counterterrorism operations grew, the Bush administration wanted the security agency secretly to expand its surveillance as well. By 2002, Mr. Bush gave the agency broader surveillance authority.
In the early years of the operation, there were few, if any, controls placed on the activity by anyone outside the security agency, officials say. It was not until 2004, when several officials raised concerns about its legality, that the Justice Department conducted its first audit of the operation. Security agency officials had been given the power to select the people they would single out for eavesdropping inside the United States without getting approval for each case from the White House or the Justice Department, the officials said.
The Padilla case would bring the contitutional question about a President above law to the Supreme Court. But we can´t have that court decide, can we?
Justices Are Urged to Dismiss Padilla Case
It would be “wholly imprudent” for the Supreme Court to hear Jose Padilla’s challenge to his military detention as an enemy combatant, the Bush administration told the court in urging the justices to dismiss Mr. Padilla’s case as moot now that the government plans to try him on terrorism charges in a civilian court.
In a brief filed late Friday, the administration argued that Mr. Padilla’s indictment last month by a federal grand jury has given him the “very relief” he sought when he filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in federal court. Any Supreme Court decision now on his petition, which a federal appeals court rejected in September, “will have no practical effect” on Mr. Padilla, the brief said.
Bush claims he informed Congress about the NSA spying. Not so:
Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers
Bush’s constitutional argument, in the eyes of some legal scholars and previous White House advisers, relies on extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Bush said yesterday that the lawfulness of his directives was affirmed by the attorney general and White House counsel, a list that omitted the legislative and judicial branches of government. On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president’s war-making powers in legal briefs as “plenary” — a term defined as “full,” “complete,” and “absolute.”
A high-ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge said in an interview yesterday that Vice President Cheney, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, then a lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, briefed four key members of Congress about the NSA’s new domestic surveillance on Oct. 25, 2001, and Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after Bush signed a highly classified directive that eliminated some restrictions on eavesdropping against U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
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Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers “no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States” — and no mention of the president’s intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy,” Graham said, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches. He believed eavesdropping would continue to be limited to “calls that initiated outside the United States, had a destination outside the United States but that transferred through a U.S.-based communications system.”
Graham said the latest disclosures suggest that the president decided to go “beyond foreign communications to using this as a pretext for listening to U.S. citizens’ communications. There was no discussion of anything like that in the meeting with Cheney.”
There is more in that piece.
NSA is spying on U.S. citzens, the military is with CIFA, the FBI is with “national security letters.” All goes into databases, and is never deleted. The information is shared all over the governemnt and contractors.
OpEd: This Call May Be Monitored …
Let’s be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.
This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.
The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush’s order, and that is nonsense. The existing law already recognizes that American citizens’ communications may be intercepted by chance. It says that those records may be retained and used if they amount to actual foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material. Otherwise, they must be thrown out.
Editorial: Bigger brother
Last week may come to be seen as a tipping point in the public’s attitude, one that will cause the administration to reverse its encroachment on rights in the name of security. The report of the NSA’s unsupervised eavesdropping program helped defeat an extension of certain controversial provisions of the Patriot Act in the Senate on Friday.
Now even sympathetic lawmakers can be expected to view the Patriot Act more skeptically. The revelations about the NSA raise two fundamental questions about the administration’s rationale for increased powers: If it’s already spying on its own citizens, then why does it need the Patriot Act? Alternatively, if it’s already spying on its own citizens, how can it be trusted with the Patriot Act? This administration has yet to fully acknowledge that with greater powers must come greater accountability.
As for the Defense Department’s counterterrorism database, the Pentagon was forced on Thursday to acknowledge that it hadn’t followed its own guidelines requiring the deletion of information on American citizens who clearly don’t pose a security risk. Imagine that: a domestic military intelligence program that failed to abide by its own safeguards.
Pandagaon has some freeper voices on the issue.
Posted by: b | Dec 18 2005 10:14 utc | 18
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