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December 18, 2005
WB: It’s a Free Country
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No president before Bush mounted a frontal challenge to Congress’s authority to limit espionage against Americans. In a Sept. 25, 2002, brief signed by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Justice Department asserted “the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority.”
The brief made no distinction between suspected agents who are U.S. citizens and those who are not. Other Bush administration legal arguments have said the “war on terror” is global and indefinite in scope, effectively removing traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.
Plus a nice quote:
Bush’s assertion that eavesdropping takes place only on U.S. calls to overseas phones, [legal scholar] Stone said, “is no different, as far as the law is concerned, from saying we only do it on Tuesdays.”
Quote of the day:
The Enlightenment coincides with the first determined breakthrough into scientific instrumentality and the “conquest of Nature”; God survives the onslaught for another century but finally… succumbs around 1899. Nature is silent; God is dead. Ideology is rational and scientific; the dark ages are over. If we can say that the 18th century brought us the betrayal of Nature, and the 19th century the betrayal of God, then the 20th century has certainly produced the betrayal of… ideology.
-Hakim Bey
Posted by: Anonymous | Dec 18 2005 11:23 utc | 2
Here’s what one commentator had to say about EU reaction to the “secret CIA prisons” story. Keep it in mind as Congress reacts to the “secret NSA wiretaps” story:
There’s been a lot in the news lately about ‘secret’ CIA prisons which practically every European government hosted. It’s a situation which reminds me of a scene in Casablanca:
Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Renault: I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
A croupier comes out of the gaming room and hands Renault a roll of bills.
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Renault: Oh, thank you very much. Everybody out at once!
The audience could at least be relied on to spot the contradiction.
Posted by: Pat | Dec 18 2005 15:05 utc | 4
The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. . . . . When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes.
Vladimir Bukovsky, “who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities,” explains how America’s use of torture “will destroy your nation’s important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East.”
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 18 2005 15:50 utc | 5
Is the Bush WH the primary target of these leaks? Not if they’re wedge-drivers.
It isn’t about exposing executive branch criminality (a la Watergate) but rather knowledge of and complicity in highly controversial clandestine programs on the part of other governments and US office-holders.
Maybe I’m giving too much credit to the leakers, but if it’s a political ‘insurgency’, they know their game.
Posted by: Pat | Dec 18 2005 15:54 utc | 6
“then the 20th century has certainly produced the betrayal of… ideology.”
Denying the existence is a ‘performative contradiction,’ because the denial is a performance of reason.
This is an inextricable contradiction for the ‘postmodernist.’
Posted by: slothrop | Dec 18 2005 16:54 utc | 7
meant: denying the existence of reason is a rational performance
Posted by: slothrop | Dec 18 2005 16:55 utc | 8
meant: denying the existence of reason is a rational performance
Posted by: slothrop | Dec 18 2005 16:57 utc | 9
Pat- can you explain what you mean by political insurgency? I don’t understand.
It seems to me that the timing of this leak is very neat…as McCain etc. want a “kinder, gentler” version of torture on the books (i.e. it will be done, but not by law, if deemed necessary, aka biz as usual) along with the extension and passage of the Patriot Act.
This spying has direct implications on the Patriot Act…it’s not simply that Bush and his rat-fuckers want to strip the Constitution of its protections for Americans…Bush and his rat-fuckers don’t care what the constitution says about individual rights to freedom of thought, assembly, etc.
This follows with the story that has circulated on the internet, if not in the MSM, about the three ppl who have been quoted repeating Bush’s remark that the constitution is just a piece of paper.
I wouldn’t be surprised to know that r’giap’s favorite conservative, Paul…whazzisname, and other conservatives like Ron Paul, etc. have common cause with people like the ACLU and Feingold, etc.
Perhaps this is the point at which Bush is a uniter, as he claimed, because he is uniting various ideological factions, plus a majority of the population against his form of govt.
Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 18 2005 18:30 utc | 10
fauxreal >> thats a good one, best case scenario where american (patriotic) ideal is redefined out from under the illusion of america bush has defined from without.
Posted by: anna missed | Dec 18 2005 20:19 utc | 11
political ‘insurgency’
As I understand it, and jdp has expressed elsewhere, some elite folkes with power have said “enough”.
Pinch Sulzberger lauched the piece now to sabotage the renewal of the Patriot Act and to bring up the decision fight about the constitutional powers of a president “at war” to a culmination before Alito gets on the Supreme Court. (After that, SCOTUS would probably take Bush’s position.)
Pinch is not acting on his own behalf, not in a situation like this. The leakers for the NSA piece and the “old guard” from the CIA and Pentagon have agreed. The money men already did get all they ever could get from Bush. Why stick to him any longer?
Besides that, everyone in the elite asks “am i next?”
The constitutional question coming up now is Cheney’s(Bush’s) biggest fight ever. They will lose it.
b- surely yes, agreed that there has been a sustained attack from one section of the elite against this one now wielding power. What gets me is if this is a so-called “elite” what took them the fuck so long to realize the lunatics had taken over the asylum? Poppy no doubt was buttering Junior’s bread at the table of the big mo-fos, hoping to make shinola out of Junior shit.
What everyone knows but no one will say is that Bush will use this power to spy on internal “political enemies,” which, as his administration has shown, is anyone with an opposing point of view. People are not even allowed to speak the words “but it may be…” in Bush’s presence.. In the same way that Texas used Homeland Security to track the democrats over the redistricting.
the guy whose the mouthpiece for one faction…W…sorry, I’m suffering from post-traumatic semester disorder…anyway, for Powell, came out against them last month. Then the dem. that’s in with the generals.
the sick thing is that the Bushistas frame this as an all or nothing scenario to the American people. If we do not stick to the Bush “doctrine” then all is lost…
But from Pat’s post, I thought she might have been referring to politics in Canada and the issue of “rendering” in Europe.
the sick part is that all along the Bushistas have used tactics like votes at 3 in the morning or no discussion of one issue or another or riders on bills that let the patriot act creep into legislation. Hell, Bob Barr, not exactly an arch liberal, called that one at least a couple of years ago.
Maybe the nation is at the point where small planes and all that will be turned on those who, let’s say, could Wellstone someone.
At first I didn’t believe Wellstone could have been murdered, but now it seems entirely thinkable, based upon so many odd little convenient deaths and other ways to shut people up or shut them out. They sure wanted Coleman in that seat.
Baer the ex-NSA guy scared the screenwriter of Syriana so much with tales of how easy it is to sabotage a small plane that the writer said he would never fly in a small aircraft again. (saw him on Charlie Rose a few days ago.)
So, yeah, I hope this is resolved as a constitutional question, and then an impeachment question, and an indictment question at the top level of the Bush junta.
I wonder if anyone is trying to broker deals or if they’re fighting to the death, so to speak. I would imagine Cheney, et. al are fighting to the death. If Gonzalez has to defend his readings of law, how would his interpretation differ from, say, Pincochet’s hatchet men?
Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 18 2005 22:08 utc | 13
fauxreal,
EU governments regularly use the CIA as a third party, and I don’t know of a one that denies the Agency accomodation.
Raising the political price of doing business – with this administration – is what the ‘insurgency’ seeks.
Posted by: Pat | Dec 18 2005 22:40 utc | 14
constitutional question coming up now is Cheney’s(Bush’s) biggest fight ever
Well, that would require a Congress willing to go after the sumbitch.
Or a federal judge.
Posted by: slothrop | Dec 18 2005 23:03 utc | 15
@Pat,
W seems to have the “elitist insurgency” by the balls somehow because they’ve been complaining from a safe distance for ages but not willing to actually pull him off the horse. The Plamegate case is the closest thing to that and even then it seems Cheney is the target because he was considering running against Jeb in 08.
I am reminded of all the former president Bush’s advisors making public statements against Junior’s war before the war. In the end, just hot air. And Senior’s public slap of Junior in his eulogy remarks about Reagan. Nothing came of it. Any of Junior’s former appointees who criticized him were smeared so nothing came of all those either.
I wonder if these timed leaks are just more hot air. I wonder if the fact that he permits corporate theft of the US treasury is the only thing protecting him from all the elitist insurgents. That, and he is Poppy’s son and Jeb’s brother, after all.
Posted by: gylangirl | Dec 20 2005 3:55 utc | 16