If this has already been posted, I apologize. But it's Molly!


So 9/11 Means it's OK to Spy on Americans?
by Molly Ivins

Uh-oh. Excuse me. I'm so sorry, but we are having a constitutional crisis. I know the timing couldn't be worse. Right in the middle of the wrapping paper, the gingerbread and the whole shebang, a tiny honest-to-goodness constitutional crisis.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country: Damn the inconvenience, full speed ahead. On his own, without consulting the Congress, the courts or the people, the president decided to use secret branches of government to spy on the American people. He is, of course, using 9/11 to justify his actions in this, as he does for everything else — 9/11 happened so the Constitution does not apply, 9/11 happened so there is no separation of powers, 9/11 happened so 200 years of experience curbing the executive power of government is something we can now overlook.

That the president of the United States unconstitutionally usurped power is not in dispute. He and his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, both claim he has the right to do so on account of he is the president.

Let's try this again. The president is not above the law. I wish I thought I were being too pompous about this, but the greatest danger to our freedom always comes when we are scared or distracted — and right now, we are both.

As an ACLU liberal, I would like to say how proud and honored I am to stand with so many American conservatives on this issue. You do credit to all your heroes. Barry Goldwater would be so proud.

One of the more annoying things about this usurpation of power is that it is both stupid and unnecessary. As large numbers of people have pointed out, it takes almost nothing to get a warrant to do what Bush has been doing illegally — it's almost pro forma.

Here is a curious fact about the government of this country spying on its citizens: It always goes wrong immediately. For some reason, it's not as though we start with people anyone would regard as suspicious and then somehow slip gradually into spying on the Girl Scouts. We get it wrong from the beginning every time. Never seem to be able to distinguish between a terrorist and a vegetarian.

The Department of Defense has just proved this yet again with its latest folly of mistaking a flock of Florida Quakers for a threat to overthrow the government. A few months ago, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth tried to check out a copy of Mao's "Little Red Book" and wound up being interviewed by two feds. Cointelpro and all those misbegotten Nixon-era spy programs were always making ludicrous mistakes.

The usual suspects, like that silly congressman Dan Burton, solemnly try to scare us with the dread specter of war, as though they alone are the hard-headed pragmatists, while only woolly minded liberals care about the Constitution. "Don't these people realize we're at war?" Well, yes. Why that justifies treating Unitarians like Islamofascists is beyond me.

This is the same pattern we have seen with Bush when it came to the Geneva Conventions for handling prisoners and to using torture. Not only does he consider himself above the law, he has surrounded himself with people who keep inventing perverse readings of the Constitution to justify him. Makes it especially nice to hear him go on about the importance of bringing democracy to Iraq.

Bush defended his actions Monday by saying it was part of "connecting the dots." A painful moment, since the 9/11 Commission just finished giving this administration grades of D and F in terms of preventing another terrorist attack — and it has jack-all to do with wiretapping. This administration has cried wolf so many times using the national security excuse it has lost all credibility.

Bush just could not resist that especially nasty little fillip at the end: blaming the people who reported the problem. As though the sin were telling the people of this country what is happening, what is being done in our name with our money, as though we have no right to know.

Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let the Dogs In?

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1221-26.htm

I can understand what you are saying for the most part, but I think you may have misunderstood the last paragraph that I wrote (I may not have explained myself very well either, so let me try again)

I don't think military and defense issues and/or actions should be able to be decided or carried out in a partisan way which includes current domestic wiretapping that is being done. My main point, is what is really happening that is causing the uproar? I know as well as you do that the concern about the way the law is written, and the wiretapping that has been done has nothing to do with the "War on Terror". I can see an exact parallel between the way Military and Defense issues are becoming distractions, partisan tainted investigations and the way Clinton's Presidency was brought down with distracting and embarassing investigations that were partisan driven as well. There were senseless questions into things that were hollow and meaningless thus creating a situation that weakened the office of the Presidency. So what now, is somebody trying to weaken our military and defense system in the same way? Neither Republicans and Democrats should be messing around with Military and Defense issues in a way that squares the Military into either corner. We just need to make sure that any new found power by any branch of the government, is not abused. I don't see the need to tear the whole system down and start over, as IMO doing this has the potential to put us in more jeopardy then we were before 9/11. If the whole thing it ain't broke, then don't fix it, just take care of the parts that aren't working right, and let the military function outside of partisan politics.

I'll tell you what, don't sink your teeth in too deep on this, I agree that there is some reason to be concerned, and the Senate Intelligence committee does need to review all wiretappings to make sure there was no abuse, which they are probably doing right now. IMO this controversy for the most part its hollow and meaningless. I thing the real concern should be getting all political partisianship away from the military asap.

http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsu...cs/13459028.htm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 22, 2005
News of Surveillance Is Awkward for Agency
By SCOTT SHANE
Testifying before a Senate committee last April, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then head of the National Security Agency, emphasized how scrupulously the agency was protecting Americans from its electronic snooping.

"We are, I would offer, the most aggressive agency in the intelligence community when it comes to protecting U.S. privacy," General Hayden said. "We just have to be that way."

It was one of General Hayden's favorite themes in public speeches and interviews: the agency's mammoth eavesdropping network was directed at foreigners, not Americans. As a PowerPoint presentation posted on the agency's Web site puts it, for an American to be a target, "Court Order Required in the United States."

In fact, since 2002, authorized by a secret order from President Bush, the agency has intercepted the international phone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds, possibly thousands, of American citizens and others in the United States without obtaining court orders. The discrepancy between the public claims and the secret domestic eavesdropping disclosed last week have put the N.S.A., the nation's largest intelligence agency, and General Hayden, now principal deputy director of national intelligence, in an awkward position.

While a few important members of Congress were informed of the special eavesdropping program, several lawmakers have said they and the public were misled.

The episode could revive old fears that the secret agency is a sort of high-tech Big Brother. It was such fears - based on genuine abuses before the mid-1970's, hyperbolic press reports and movie myths - that General Hayden worked to counter as the agency's director from 1999 until last April.

"The image of N.S.A. has been muddied considerably by this revelation," said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian who is writing a multiple-volume history of the agency. Mr. Aid said several agency employees he spoke with on Friday were disturbed to learn of the special program, which was known to only a small number of officials.

"All the N.S.A. people I've talked to think domestic surveillance is anathema," Mr. Aid said.

An agency spokesman, Don Weber, declined to comment, saying, "We don't discuss actual or alleged operational issues."

At a news conference at the White House on Monday, General Hayden also emphasized that the program's operations had "intense oversight" by the agency's general counsel and inspector general as well as the Justice Department. He said decisions on targets were made by agency employees and required two people, including a shift supervisor, to sign off on them, recording "what created the operational imperative."

An intelligence official who was authorized to speak only on the condition of anonymity said, "It's probably the most scrutinized program at the agency." The official emphasized that people whose communications were intercepted under the special program had to have a link to Al Qaeda or a related group, even if indirectly. The official also said that only their international communications could be intercepted. Other officials have said, however, that some purely domestic communications have been captured because of the technical difficulties of determining where a phone call or e-mail message originated.

But many questions remain about the secret program, including some Mr. Aid said were raised pointedly by his contacts at the agency:

¶Did agency officials volunteer to perform the eavesdropping without warrants, or did the White House order it over agency objections?

¶Why was it not possible to use warrants, as the law appears to require, from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which granted 1,754 such warrants last year and did not deny a single application?

¶Or, if the court was considered too slow or cumbersome, why did the agency not ask Congress to adjust the law and legalize what it wanted to do?

After all, officials who have been granted anonymity in describing the program because it is classified say the agency's recent domestic eavesdropping is focused on a limited group of people. Americans come to the program's attention only if they have received a call or e-mail message from a person overseas who is already suspected to be a member of certain terrorist groups or linked somehow to a member of such groups. And the agency still gets a warrant to intercept their calls or e-mail messages to other people in the United States.

Had the agency openly sought the increased power in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, "I'm sure Congress would have approved," said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel of both the N.S.A. and the Central Intelligence Agency.

By concealing the new program, she said, the N.S.A. breathed new life into the worst imaginings about itself. "This makes it seem like the movies are right about N.S.A., and they're wrong," Ms. Parker said.

For anyone familiar with the agency's history, the revelations recalled the mid-1970's, when the Senate's Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission exposed the agency's abuse of Americans' privacy.

Under one program, called Shamrock, the agency and its predecessors for decades collected copies of all international telegrams leaving or entering the United States from the major telegraph companies. Another, code-named Minaret, kept watch lists of Americans who caught the government's interest because of activism against the Vietnam War or other political stances. Information was kept on about 75,000 Americans from 1952, when agency was created, to 1974, according to testimony.

In reaction to the abuses, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which banned eavesdropping on Americans unless there was reason to believe they were agents of a foreign country or an international terrorist group. In such cases, N.S.A. - or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which usually takes the lead in domestic wiretaps - had to present its evidence to a judge from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which then issued a warrant.

Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian now teaching at Yale who served on the Church Committee staff, said the 1978 reforms were the result of lengthy bipartisan negotiations. "To pick up the paper and see that all of the carefully crafted language, across party lines, to put together FISA, has been dismissed by secret executive order is very disheartening," Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Johnson said he saw a link between the intelligence excesses of the 1970's and the N.S.A. program: fear. "Then the fear was of communism," he said. "Now it's terrorism."

Even after the overhaul of the surveillance act, the N.S.A.'s combination of secrecy, power and size continued to produce intrigue. Movies like "Enemy of the State" (1998), in which the agency is portrayed as an out-of-control surveillance operation that carries out political assassinations and destroys the life of a lawyer played by Will Smith, distorted the agency's purpose and capabilities. Exaggerated reports on an agency program called Echelon asserted that the agency and its counterparts in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia somehow intercepted all world communications.

But in real life, before the Sept. 11 attacks, N.S.A. officials, still stung by the Church Committee's findings, hewed closely to the law, according to many who worked there. "We used to say, 'Keep it simple: We don't collect against U.S. persons, and we don't do law enforcement,' " said Ms. Parker, the agency's top lawyer from 1984 to 1989.

In fact, the national commission on the 9/11 attacks criticized the agency for being too cautious about pursuing terrorists on United States soil. But by the time of the commission's report in July 2004, the eavesdropping program had been operating for roughly two years.

As recently as October, in a background briefing for a reporter for The New York Times on the agency's privacy safeguards, a high-level N.S.A. official said that warrants were always obtained before Americans in the United States were made targets. Whether the official knew of the domestic eavesdropping program is not clear.

The official, who was permitted by the agency to speak only on the condition of anonymity, quoted General Hayden as saying that the American people had to decide where to "plant the flag" - between civil liberties on the one hand, and national security on the other.

But the public, at that time, had no way of knowing that agency was already circumventing the rules the official described.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Sadly, California's Jane Harman is no friend to America's Constitution. This top Democrat on the House intelligence committee said the bill is needed "to track communications by e-mail and Internet, including the use of Internet sites in libraries, and to prevent and disrupt plots against us."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5121402051.html

Judging by this statement I would guess that Specter is already feeling the heat from the administration and their friends.

I'm getting sick and tired of seeing anonymous sources who are given permission to speak as long as they do so without identifying themselves. What is up with that!



This is what they are going for now. They want to change the law after the fact and pretend that this is what it is all about. BS

Judges on Surveillance Court To Be Briefed on Spy Program

By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 22, 2005; A01



The presiding judge of a secret court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases is arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges to address their concerns about the legality of President Bush's domestic spying program, according to several intelligence and government sources.

Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.

"The questions are obvious," said U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah. "What have you been doing, and how might it affect the reliability and credibility of the information we're getting in our court?"

Such comments underscored the continuing questions among judges about the program, which most of them learned about when it was disclosed last week by the New York Times. On Monday, one of 10 FISA judges, federal Judge James Robertson, submitted his resignation -- in protest of the president's action, according to two sources familiar with his decision. He will maintain his position on the U.S. District Court here.

Other judges contacted yesterday said they do not plan to resign but are seeking more information about the president's initiative. Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who also sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, told fellow FISA court members by e-mail Monday that she is arranging for them to convene in Washington, preferably early next month, for a secret briefing on the program, several judges confirmed yesterday.

Two intelligence sources familiar with the plan said Kollar-Kotelly expects top-ranking officials from the National Security Agency and the Justice Department to outline the classified program to the members.

The judges could, depending on their level of satisfaction with the answers, demand that the Justice Department produce proof that previous wiretaps were not tainted, according to government officials knowledgeable about the FISA court. Warrants obtained through secret surveillance could be thrown into question. One judge, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said members could suggest disbanding the court in light of the president's suggestion that he has the power to bypass the court.

The highly classified FISA court was set up in the 1970s to authorize secret surveillance of espionage and terrorism suspects within the United States. Under the law setting up the court, the Justice Department must show probable cause that its targets are foreign governments or their agents. The FISA law does include emergency provisions that allow warrantless eavesdropping for up to 72 hours if the attorney general certifies there is no other way to get the information.

Still, Bush and his advisers have said they need to operate outside the FISA system in order to move quickly against suspected terrorists. In explaining the program, Bush has made the distinction between detecting threats and plots and monitoring likely, known targets, as FISA would allow.

Bush administration officials believe it is not possible, in a large-scale eavesdropping effort, to provide the kind of evidence the court requires to approve a warrant. 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.

"For FISA, they had to put down a written justification for the wiretap," said the official. "They couldn't dream one up."

The NSA program, and the technology on which it is based, makes it impossible to meet that criterion because the program is designed to intercept selected conversations in real time from among an enormous number relayed at any moment through satellites.

"There is a difference between detecting, so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important to note the distinction between the two," Bush said Monday. But he added: "If there is a need based upon evidence, we will take that evidence to a court in order to be able to monitor calls within the United States."

The American Civil Liberties Union formally requested yesterday that Gonzales appoint an outside special counsel to investigate and prosecute any criminal acts and violations of laws as a result of the spying effort.

Also yesterday, John D. Negroponte, Bush's director of national intelligence, sent an e-mail to the entire intelligence community defending the program. The politically tinged memo referred to the disclosure as "egregious" and called the program a vital, constitutionally valid tool in the war against al Qaeda.

Benson said it is too soon for him to judge whether the surveillance program was legal until he hears directly from the government.

"I need to know more about it to decide whether it was so distasteful," Benson said. "But I wonder: If you've got us here, why didn't you go through us? They've said it's faster [to bypass FISA], but they have emergency authority under FISA, so I don't know."

As it launched the dramatic change in domestic surveillance policy, the administration chose to secretly brief only the presiding FISA court judges about it. Officials first advised U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the head of FISA in the fall of 2001, and then Kollar-Kotelly, who replaced him in that position in May 2002. U.S. District Judge George Kazen of the Southern District of Texas said in an interview yesterday that his information about the program has been largely limited to press accounts over the past several days.

"Why didn't it go through FISA," Kazen asked. "I think those are valid questions. The president at first said he didn't want to talk about it. Now he says, 'You're darn right I did it, and it's completely legal.' I gather he's got lawyers telling him this is legal. I want to hear those arguments." Judge Michael J. Davis of Minnesota said he, too, wants to be sure the secret program did not produce unreliable or legally suspect information that was then used to obtain FISA warrants.

"I share the other judges' concerns," he said.

But Judge Malcolm Howard of eastern North Carolina said he tends to think the terrorist threat to the United States is so grave that the president should use every tool available and every ounce of executive power to combat it.

"I am not overly concerned" about the surveillance program, he said, but "I would welcome hearing more specifics."

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2102326_pf.html

As we're moving further away from the thoughts of Kant; and as we gradually and slowly allow the destruction of the very constitution that included the famous
Declaration of Man and Citizen Rights from 1789, and as we destroy the freedom that has matured and already acquired over America's years of history, we'd only come face to face with doom over our horizon.

About Kant's thoughts:

http://www.geocities.com/haydnar/Kant_in_Hiroshima.html

File the Bin Laden Phone Leak Under 'Urban Myths'

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 22, 2005; A02



President Bush asserted this week that the news media published a U.S. government leak in 1998 about Osama bin Laden's use of a satellite phone, alerting the al Qaeda leader to government monitoring and prompting him to abandon the device.

The story of the vicious leak that destroyed a valuable intelligence operation was first reported by a best-selling book, validated by the Sept. 11 commission and then repeated by the president.

But it appears to be an urban myth.

The al Qaeda leader's communication to aides via satellite phone had already been reported in 1996 -- and the source of the information was another government, the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan at the time.

The second time a news organization reported on the satellite phone, the source was bin Laden himself.

Causal effects are hard to prove, but other factors could have persuaded bin Laden to turn off his satellite phone in August 1998. A day earlier, the United States had fired dozens of cruise missiles at his training camps, missing him by hours.

Bush made his assertion at a news conference Monday, in which he defended his authorization of warrantless monitoring of communications between some U.S. citizens and suspected terrorists overseas. He fumed that "the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak." He berated the media for "revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for" and thus helping "the enemy" change its operations.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that the president was referring to an article that appeared in the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 1998, the day after the cruise missile attack, which was launched in retaliation for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa two weeks earlier. The Sept. 11 commission also cited the article as "a leak" that prompted bin Laden to stop using his satellite phone, though it noted that he had added more bodyguards and began moving his sleeping place "frequently and unpredictably" after the missile attack.

Two former Clinton administration officials first fingered the Times article in a 2002 book, "The Age of Sacred Terror." Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote that after the "unabashed right-wing newspaper" published the story, bin Laden "stopped using the satellite phone instantly" and "the United States lost its best chance to find him."

The article, a profile of bin Laden, buried the information about his satellite phone in the 21st paragraph. It never said that the United States was listening in on bin Laden, as the president alleged. The writer, Martin Sieff, said yesterday that the information about the phone was "already in the public domain" when he wrote the story.

A search of media databases shows that Time magazine had first reported on Dec. 16, 1996, that bin Laden "uses satellite phones to contact fellow Islamic militants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa." Taliban officials provided the information, with one official -- security chief Mulla Abdul Mannan Niazi -- telling Time, "He's in high spirits."

The day before the Washington Times article was published -- and the day of the attacks -- CNN producer Peter Bergen appeared on the network to talk about an interview he had with bin Laden in 1997.

"He communicates by satellite phone, even though Afghanistan in some levels is back in the Middle Ages and a country that barely functions," Bergen said.

Bergen noted that as early as 1997, bin Laden's men were very concerned about electronic surveillance. "They scanned us electronically," he said, because they were worried that anyone meeting with bin Laden "might have some tracking device from some intelligence agency." In 1996, the Chechen insurgent leader Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile that locked in to his satellite phone signal.

That same day, CBS reported that bin Laden used a satellite phone to give a television interview. USA Today ran a profile of bin Laden on the same day as the Washington Times's article, quoting a former U.S. official about his "fondness for his cell phone."

It was not until Sept. 7, 1998 -- after bin Laden apparently stopped using his phone -- that a newspaper reported that the United States had intercepted his phone calls and obtained his voiceprint. U.S. authorities "used their communications intercept capacity to pick up calls placed by bin Laden on his Inmarsat satellite phone, despite his apparent use of electronic 'scramblers,' " the Los Angeles Times reported.

Officials could not explain yesterday why they focused on the Washington Times story when other news organizations at the same time reported on the satellite phone -- and that the information was not particularly newsworthy.

"You got me," said Benjamin, who was director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff at the time. "That was the understanding in the White House and the intelligence community. The story ran and the lights went out."

Lee H. Hamilton, vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, gave a speech in October in which he said the leak "was terribly damaging." Yesterday, he said the commission relied on the testimony of three "very responsible, very senior intelligence officers," who he said "linked the Times story to the cessation of the use of the phone." He said they described it as a very serious leak.

But Hamilton said he did not recall any discussion about other news outlets' reports. "I cannot conceive we would have singled out the Washington Times if we knew about all of the reporting," he said.

A White House official said last night the administration was confident that press reports changed bin Laden's behavior. CIA spokesman Tom Crispell declined to comment, saying the question involves intelligence sources and methods.

Busted!



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2101994_pf.html

WSWS : Book Review

Hack work, not scholarship: the decay of American liberalism

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in the Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff, Edinburgh University Press 2004
By Richard Hoffman
24 May 2005

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/tort-m24.shtml

Bush's false premise. That the U.S. "faces destruction at the hands of terrorism." is a view, propagated by the Bush regime and its allies in the press, but i"t is without factual foundation" - the premise being "without the slightest critical analysis of the true magnitude of the terrorist threat."

Note: Bush's spying is actually an act inspired by Cheney. Why? Perhaps Cheney is actually freaking out about everyone hating him and thus want to uncover his personal crimes. Remember how unpopular Cheney was when Halliburton was uncovered to charge exorbitant bills, and how unpopular he was when the first report on torture and abuse of prisoners by Halliburton's contractors, and then the missing money? So what does he do? Make sure he has a way to track those he suspects are coming too close to the truth about his crimes.

I was surprised to see this column coming from a columnist who previously treated the Plamegate case as much ado about nothing.

Trust Him With Our Rights? No.

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, December 22, 2005; A29



George Bush's problem is that Washington is not a courtroom. If it were, he or his lawyer (Dick Cheney?) could rise and object to the mention of his "previous convictions." That way, every offense against custom, law, international agreements and common sense could be treated in isolation. Too bad for Bush, he has a rap sheet.

It is his record of nonstop belligerence toward anything that would limit his powers that works against him as he tries to make a case for what in shorthand is called domestic spying. Any other president would have earned the solicitous attention and understanding of the country, including his critics. After Sept. 11, 2001, we were all willing to make some accommodations. If the president wanted to tap some phones, let him tap. Better that than another terrorist attack.

The trouble with Bush is that it is hard to separate the reasonable from the unreasonable. It seems reasonable to me to listen in on phone calls from overseas to people here -- Americans or not -- if there is any link at all to suspected terrorists. If, say, a cell phone is found with certain numbers on it, I would monitor them all. That might not meet a strict legal standard, but it does seem to be common sense. With all due regard to law, the highest law of all is "better safe than sorry."

But a reasonable stretching of the law in this respect becomes mighty suspect and somewhat scary when everything else is brought to mind. After all, the very same people who assure us that they are merely being prudent -- trust us -- are the same guys who held out until the last minute to retain torture as an option in questioning terrorist suspects and others. They are the same people -- Cheney in particular -- who are so tone-deaf to appearances, not to mention the opinions of the military, that they would publicly fight a restriction on torture. They do have a point -- not a persuasive one, mind you, but a point nonetheless -- but they see it as more important than anything else, even America's post-Abu Ghraib image.

Right after Sept. 11 the Bush administration announced that it had no use for the Geneva Conventions. It would apply them as it saw fit -- and it did not see fit when it came to terrorists. These terrorists, after all, made war by no rules. Why should we abide by any? The answer, as many military officers said, is that we still could hold our enemies to a standard of conduct toward prisoners. If we did not adhere to it ourselves, there was no chance they would. The Bush administration brushed aside these objections. It established a vast Siberia that could be anywhere and where a suspect could be held forever on charges that were never brought.

So an administration that makes something of a reasonable case when it comes to tapping the international phone calls of American citizens has its standing and veracity considerably weakened by what went before. The White House cannot explain why it did not ask Congress for this authority because, it is now clear, it does not want to ask Congress for anything. It will not explain why it could not seek warrants from a judge because, really, it does not want to seek warrants from a judge. This is the Louis XIV school of government: In matters of national security, Bush must say to himself, he is the state.

Such a president cannot be trusted. In Bush's case, the extra inch that would be given another president in wartime has to be measured out in increments of tenths. He is so suffused with his own sense of righteousness that he cannot imagine his laws being abused -- not by him, certainly, and not by his chummy group of nicknamed nincompoops, either. He listens to Cheney, who still smarts from post-Watergate reforms that made the Gerald Ford presidency less imperial than Richard Nixon's -- and on purpose. Cheney was Ford's chief of staff.

In courtroom trials, it does not matter what went before. The fact that the defendant had robbed does not necessarily mean that he has robbed again. But life is about rap sheets -- reputations and permanent records and personnel files. Read George Bush's and then ask yourself if it was exigency or ideology that prompted him to tap the international calls of American citizens without showing a court why. In his case, the record speaks for itself.

cohenr@washpost.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2102057_pf.html

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/fisher.php?articleid=8291

December 22, 2005
Congress to Probe Domestic Spying

by William Fisher
As those loyal to President George W. Bush circle the wagons to aggressively defend his program of conducting surveillance of phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens, a judge on the court set up to review requests for such actions has resigned, apparently in protest.

At the same time, a prominent Republican senator promised to hold public hearings, the House of Representatives Democratic leader and the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said they had objected to the program, and a California Democratic senator said a number of legal authorities had told her that the president's actions rose to the level of impeachable offenses.

The Californian, Sen. Barbara Boxer, was the first to use the "I" word (impeachment) in the political firestorm started by revelations in the New York Times earlier this week that, following the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., Bush authorized the highly secretive National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept phone calls and e-mails without warrants between U.S. citizens and what the administration said were foreigners with known ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

The administration said today that some internal U.S. communications might also have been intercepted by mistake.

The president, in a press conference on Monday following the Times' disclosures, defended the legality of the program, saying that he had to move too quickly to go to court for warrants and that he had both constitutional and statutory authority to use warrantless wiretaps to protect U.S. citizens.

Bush based his position on his inherent powers as commander in chief of the armed forces, his constitutional obligation to protect the U.S. people, and the post-9/11 congressional resolution that authorized him to wage war.

The president's position drew strong endorsements from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was the chief White House lawyer at the time the program was started, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who was national security adviser at the time), and numerous other administration and congressional officials.

However, the president's critics and a number of legal authorities disagreed. They pointed out that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. They also noted that the law establishing the court authorized to issue such warrants would have been able to act quickly on any request from the administration, adding that the law also permitted the president to act first and seek court authority after the fact.

The court being referred to is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established in the post-Watergate era of the 1970s, as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The highly secret 11-member Court is located in the Department of Justice (DOD), and its members are federal judges appointed by the chief justice of the U.S. The USA PATRIOT Act designates the FISA court as the only judicial body authorized to issue surveillance orders in terror-related investigations. Of the 5,000-odd requests it has received from the Justice Department, it is believed to have denied only a handful.

The controversy over the president's actions reportedly triggered the resignation of FISA judge James Robertson. Judge Robertson, a U.S. district judge, notified Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of his decision late Monday without providing an explanation.

But the Washington Post reported today that two associates familiar with his decision said Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.

The FISA court's presiding judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the spying program by the administration, raised the same concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department certify in writing that it was not occurring.

Robertson's resignation came as two Senate Republicans – Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine – called for congressional investigations. They questioned whether the program was carried out within the law and the extent to which the White House kept Congress informed.

Hagel and Snowe joined Democrats Dianne Feinstein of California, Carl M. Levin of Michigan, and Ron Wyden of Oregon in calling for a joint investigation by the Senate judiciary and intelligence panels into the classified program

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, promised hearings in the new year.

But not all Republicans agreed with the need for hearings and backed White House assertions that the program is a vital tool in the war against al-Qaeda.

"I am personally comfortable with everything I know about it," said Acting House Majority Leader Roy Blunt of Missouri.

While Bush said at his Monday press conference that the White House had briefed Congress more than a dozen times, briefings were conducted for only a handful of lawmakers who were sworn to secrecy and prevented from discussing the matter with anyone or from seeking outside legal opinions.

John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, said on Monday that he had written to Cheney the day he was first briefed on the program in July 2003, raising serious concerns about the surveillance effort.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California said she also expressed concerns in a letter to Cheney. She did not make the letter public.

Rockefeller said the secrecy of the briefings left him with no other choice. "I made my concerns known to the vice president and to others who were briefed," Rockefeller said. "The White House never addressed my concerns."

The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, criticized Rockefeller for making his letter public.

Skepticism about Rockefeller's letter was echoed by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who suggested that Rockefeller should have done more if he was seriously concerned. "If I thought someone was breaking the law, I don't care if it was classified or unclassified, I would stand up and say 'the law's being broken here.'"

During his 2000 campaign for the presidency, candidate Bush gave assurances that no surveillance of U.S. citizens would be conducted unless warrants had been obtained.

The NSA contretemps came just days after revelations that FBI counterterrorism investigators are monitoring domestic U.S. advocacy groups engaged in antiwar, environmental, civil rights, and other causes, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) charged as it released new FBI records.

"Our government is spying on Americans – unapologetically, unnecessarily and with no regard for the Constitution," the group said, urging its members to "Hold the Bush administration accountable for secretly authorizing the eavesdropping of Americans and others in the U.S., continue our nationwide efforts to expose and end unwarranted political spying and the criminalizing of dissent by the FBI, and oppose PATRIOT Act abuses of freedom in the courts, in Congress, and in the court of public opinion."

The ACLU documents, disclosed as part of a lawsuit that challenges FBI treatment of groups that planned demonstrations at last year's political conventions, show the bureau has opened a preliminary terrorism investigation into People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a well-known animal-rights group.

The FBI has also been charged with carrying out "anti-terrorist" investigations against peaceful antiwar, environmental, and other dissident groups.

In an e-mail to IPS, Bob Barr, a former conservative Republican congressman from Georgia, quoted Gen. Michael Hayden, then the head of the NSA and now the deputy director of national intelligence, telling a congressional hearing regarding wiretap targets in 2000, "If that American person is in the United States of America, I must have a court order before I initiate any collection against him or her."

Barr added, "If the president doesn't like the law, the solution should be to amend, not violate it."

(Inter Press Service)

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=10767

The Extra-Legal Executive
Bush wants to spread democracy abroad – and dismantle it at home.
By Matthew Yglesias
Web Exclusive: 12.20.05

Friday's three big news stories--the elections in Iraq, the president's flip-flop on John McCain's anti-torture amendment, and the revelation that the administration ordered the National Security Agency to conduct domestic surveillance without warrants--brought home in an unusually poignant manner one of the paradoxes at the heart of the past several years: The same group of people who've decided they're on a historic mission to spread democracy and liberal values around the world seem, based on their conduct at home, to have a very weak grasp of what those values entail.

The surveillance matter is disturbing not only, or even especially, for the casual disregard for civil liberty and Anglo-American tradition it entails. Rather, the main point here is about the law. It was universally understood on September 10, 2001, that, wisely or unwisely, intelligence agencies could not conduct this sort of operation without first gaining approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Nothing happened the following day to change that reality. To be sure, events occurred that caused many people to re-evaluate American policy in a number of regards, arguably including domestic surveillance policy, but the fact remains that the law is the law and there's a specified procedure for changing the law. As we recall from Civics class, bills are supposed to be introduced in the two houses of Congress, voted on in committee and then before the full body, sent to the White House, and then either signed or vetoed.

Faced with the pesky need to get warrants, however, the Bush administration chose another path--they simply issued a directive saying the old policy was out and a new policy was in. On hand to help rationalize things was John Yoo, the very same lawyer who provided the rationalizations required when the president wanted to start ignoring domestic and international law with regard to torture without getting any of the laws changed.

And if it was Yoo's work that made McCain's effort to close down Bush-created loopholes in torture law, then it's the continuation of the Yoo mentality that makes me pessimistic about how much good McCain will do. The president, quite clearly, didn't surrender to McCain's view at the end of last week because of a genuine change of heart. Instead, as in his previous surrender to the Arizona senator over campaign finance reform, he dropped what he had previously portrayed as a point of high principle for reasons of crass political expediency. Thus, we still have in office a president who believes in the utility and overriding moral necessity of torture, and a president who feels that--at least in matters of national security--he's not bound by the law. The debate over the torture amendment has obscured this fact, five years ago no serious person believed torture was permitted under American law. It happened not because it was legal, but because the president chose to believe the law was no constraint, or that insofar as it was a constraint it was a constraint to be waived off through such expedients as holding prisoners in the legal null zone of Guantanamo Bay, off-the-books facilities in Eastern Europe, or secretly shipping people off to Syria.

Meanwhile, the common thread in Bush's three nominees for the Supreme Court has been an extreme deference to executive authority or, in the case of the unlamented Harriet Miers, simple deference to the person of George W. Bush. This is important not merely for its practical implications over the remaining years of Bush's presidency, but as a further reminder of the mindset prevailing in the White House--one which says that the American government is unduly troubled by the need for the president's actions to be legal, rather than merely grounded in the officeholder's much-touted moral clarity.

Problems in Iraq probably can't be directly traced to the administration's disdain for liberalism at home. Rather, the issue is that when the president says he wants to bring the blessings of democracy to the Middle East, he seems to have something rather different in mind from what normal people would espouse. Last January, it became a bit of a cliché to observe of Iraq that one election does not a democracy make. The administration, however, actually does seem to espouse the straw-man view that the key difference between democracy and its absence is whether or not people go to the polls to vote from time to time. By this standard, of course, Vladimir Putin counts as a hero of freedom. This may go some way toward explaining Condoleezza Rice's bizarre claim in a recent op-ed that the Bush administration is building "a balance of power that favors freedom" in alliance with, among others, China and Russia. Certainly it helps one to understand why they think an Iraqi election whose results will pit a coalition of Baathists against a coalition of would-be theocrats into competition to form an alliance with two Kurdish parties who've elected to divide Kurdistan into two fiefdoms rather than compete at the polls will result in the dawning of a new day for liberty.

The United States, fortunately, has longstanding traditions and institutions and despite the best efforts of The National Review and Fox News, people are reasonably attached to a more robust view of democracy where laws get followed and the president doesn't get to just make things up. Iraq is not so blessed, so while the insurgency almost certainly won't "win" and take over the country, neither will democracy be blooming for quite some time in any recognizable form.

© 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/5793639.html
Bruce Schneier: Unchecked presidential power
Bruce Schneier
December 21, 2005


This past Thursday, the New York Times exposed the most significant violation of federal surveillance law in the post-Watergate era. President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to engage in domestic spying, wiretapping thousands of Americans and bypassing the legal procedures regulating this activity.

This isn't about the spying, although that's a major issue in itself. This is about the Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search. This is about circumventing a teeny tiny check by the judicial branch, placed there by the legislative branch, placed there 27 years ago -- on the last occasion that the executive branch abused its power so broadly.

In defending this secret spying on Americans, Bush said that he relied on his constitutional powers (Article 2) and the joint resolution passed by Congress after 9/11 that led to the war in Iraq. This rationale was spelled out in a memo written by John Yoo, a White House attorney, less than two weeks after the attacks of 9/11. It's a dense read and a terrifying piece of legal contortionism, but it basically says that the president has unlimited powers to fight terrorism. He can spy on anyone, arrest anyone, and kidnap anyone and ship him to another country ... merely on the suspicion that he might be a terrorist. And according to the memo, this power lasts until there is no more terrorism in the world.

Yoo starts by arguing that the Constitution gives the president total power during wartime. He also notes that Congress has recently been quiescent when the president takes some military action on his own, citing President Clinton's 1998 strike against Sudan and Afghanistan.

Yoo then says: "The terrorist incidents of September 11, 2001, were surely far graver a threat to the national security of the United States than the 1998 attacks. ... The President's power to respond militarily to the later attacks must be correspondingly broader."

This is novel reasoning. It's as if the police would have greater powers when investigating a murder than a burglary.

More to the point, the congressional resolution of Sept. 14, 2001, specifically refused the White House's initial attempt to seek authority to preempt any future acts of terrorism, and narrowly gave Bush permission to go after those responsible for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Yoo's memo ignored this. Written 11 days after Congress refused to grant the president wide-ranging powers, it admitted that "the Joint Resolution is somewhat narrower than the President's constitutional authority," but argued "the President's broad constitutional power to use military force ... would allow the President to ... [take] whatever actions he deems appropriate ... to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters."

Even if Congress specifically says no.

The result is that the president's wartime powers, with its armies, battles, victories, and congressional declarations, now extend to the rhetorical "War on Terror": a war with no fronts, no boundaries, no opposing army, and -- most ominously -- no knowable "victory." Investigations, arrests and trials are not tools of war. But according to the Yoo memo, the president can define war however he chooses, and remain "at war" for as long as he chooses.

This is indefinite dictatorial power. And I don't use that term lightly; the very definition of a dictatorship is a system that puts a ruler above the law. In the weeks after 9/11, while America and the world were grieving, Bush built a legal rationale for a dictatorship. Then he immediately started using it to avoid the law.

This is, fundamentally, why this issue crossed political lines in Congress. If the president can ignore laws regulating surveillance and wiretapping, why is Congress bothering to debate reauthorizing certain provisions of the Patriot Act? Any debate over laws is predicated on the belief that the executive branch will follow the law.

This is not a partisan issue between Democrats and Republicans; it's a president unilaterally overriding the Fourth Amendment, Congress and the Supreme Court. Unchecked presidential power has nothing to do with how much you either love or hate George W. Bush. You have to imagine this power in the hands of the person you most don't want to see as president, whether it be Dick Cheney or Hillary Rodham Clinton, Michael Moore or Ann Coulter.

Laws are what give us security against the actions of the majority and the powerful. If we discard our constitutional protections against tyranny in an attempt to protect us from terrorism, we're all less safe as a result.


Bruce Schneier is chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security and the author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World."



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Copyright 2005 Star Tribune. All rights reserved

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1222/p01s03-uspo.html


from the December 22, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1222/p01s03-uspo.html

Tug of war over presidential powers
The domestic spying program is renewing debate among the three branches of government.
By Linda Feldmann | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - The revelation that President Bush secretly authorized a domestic spying program after 9/11 is fueling the already heated debate over presidential power.

From the administration's treatment of suspected terrorists to its drive for secrecy in deliberations over energy policy, Mr. Bush's five years in office have been marked by efforts to expand the executive branch's unfettered reach.

The tug of war among the three branches of government is as old as the Republic. But the convergence of three factors makes this struggle arguably unparalleled in the modern era: an administration that came to office determined to reclaim what it saw as the executive branch's diminished place; Republican control of the White House and Congress, raising questions about checks and balances; and the 9/11 attacks, which put America on the kind of war footing that historically opens the path to extraordinary action by the president.

"I think 9/11 opened a lot of doors," says Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. "It set a fire going within Bush so that he's not just a competent executive who's really going to get things done. He has a fervor that he didn't have - a fervor for fulfilling a historical mission."

Suddenly, the MBA president had become the war president - and all campaign-era talk of conducting a "humble foreign policy" ceased. The consensus behind an urgent need to prevent further attacks resulted in the Sept. 14, 2001, passage by Congress of a joint resolution authorizing the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force" to protect the country - a document the administration now uses to justify the warrant-less eavesdropping program. The antiterror Patriot Act, passed soon thereafter, also enhanced the government's power to pursue alleged enemies.

Behind the president stood Vice President Cheney, whom analysts see as the real ideological force for restoring the executive branch to its rightful position, as he sees it. From his perch as President Ford's chief of staff in the 1970s, Mr. Cheney saw first-hand the effect of a presidency reined in - a consequence of laws aimed at preventing the abuses of power that resulted in President Nixon's resignation.

This week, the normally taciturn vice president spoke expansively to the press pool traveling with him abroad about his philosophy on presidential power.

"A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the '70s served to erode the authority, I think, the president needs to be effective especially in the national security area," Cheney said Tuesday.

Cheney cited the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires the president to obtain congressional approval within 90 days after introducing troops into hostilities, and the Budget Control and Impoundment Act of 1974, which was a slap at Nixon's practices around the impounding of funds for programs he did not like.

Cheney also offered a treatise on how presidential power has waxed and waned through history, calling the presidency a weak institution in the late 1800s, which then got stronger under Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt, he said, established a sense of the "modern presidency." Then came Vietnam and Watergate, and the limitations on presidential power that resulted. "But I do think that to some extent now, we've been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency," Cheney concluded.

The only problem with Cheney's analysis, says Bruce Fein, a constitutional scholar and former Reagan administration lawyer, is that these limitations on presidential power had been gutted long before Cheney assumed the vice presidency.

The demise of the legislative veto in 1983 and Congress's general reluctance to cross the president's wartime powers has rendered these "museum pieces," says Mr. Fein. "So what's the continuing push on executive power to greater and greater heights here?"

The answer is politics. Republicans in Congress have been loath to challenge a Republican president. But that is now changing, analysts say, with the president struggling with low job-approval ratings (still below 50 percent, despite the recent uptick), the continuing unpopularity of the Iraq war, and with the 2006 midterms looming large for members seeking reelection - or with possible presidential aspirations.

Congress passed legislation banning torture of detainees over the White House's objections, including lobbying efforts by Cheney. And now the administration faces the expiration of some elements of the Patriot Act over some senators' concerns for civil liberties.

But in general, Congress's inclination on matters of national security is to defer to the president. "They'd rather be on the safe side," says historian Herbert Parmet, biographer of the first President Bush.

The unspoken bargain at play is who would face blame, should there be another terror attack on American soil. No one wants the finger pointed at them - which, in the post-9/11 world, has made Congress less inclined to challenge the president, and the president more inclined to be seen doing whatever it takes to protect the nation.

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Judges on Surveillance Court To Be Briefed on Spy Program

By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 22, 2005; A01



The presiding judge of a secret court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases is arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges to address their concerns about the legality of President Bush's domestic spying program, according to several intelligence and government sources.

Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.

"The questions are obvious," said U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah. "What have you been doing, and how might it affect the reliability and credibility of the information we're getting in our court?"

Such comments underscored the continuing questions among judges about the program, which most of them learned about when it was disclosed last week by the New York Times. On Monday, one of 10 FISA judges, federal Judge James Robertson, submitted his resignation -- in protest of the president's action, according to two sources familiar with his decision. He will maintain his position on the U.S. District Court here.

Other judges contacted yesterday said they do not plan to resign but are seeking more information about the president's initiative. Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who also sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, told fellow FISA court members by e-mail Monday that she is arranging for them to convene in Washington, preferably early next month, for a secret briefing on the program, several judges confirmed yesterday.

Two intelligence sources familiar with the plan said Kollar-Kotelly expects top-ranking officials from the National Security Agency and the Justice Department to outline the classified program to the members.

The judges could, depending on their level of satisfaction with the answers, demand that the Justice Department produce proof that previous wiretaps were not tainted, according to government officials knowledgeable about the FISA court. Warrants obtained through secret surveillance could be thrown into question. One judge, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said members could suggest disbanding the court in light of the president's suggestion that he has the power to bypass the court.

The highly classified FISA court was set up in the 1970s to authorize secret surveillance of espionage and terrorism suspects within the United States. Under the law setting up the court, the Justice Department must show probable cause that its targets are foreign governments or their agents. The FISA law does include emergency provisions that allow warrantless eavesdropping for up to 72 hours if the attorney general certifies there is no other way to get the information.

Still, Bush and his advisers have said they need to operate outside the FISA system in order to move quickly against suspected terrorists. In explaining the program, Bush has made the distinction between detecting threats and plots and monitoring likely, known targets, as FISA would allow.

Bush administration officials believe it is not possible, in a large-scale eavesdropping effort, to provide the kind of evidence the court requires to approve a warrant. 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.

"For FISA, they had to put down a written justification for the wiretap," said the official. "They couldn't dream one up."

The NSA program, and the technology on which it is based, makes it impossible to meet that criterion because the program is designed to intercept selected conversations in real time from among an enormous number relayed at any moment through satellites.

"There is a difference between detecting, so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important to note the distinction between the two," Bush said Monday. But he added: "If there is a need based upon evidence, we will take that evidence to a court in order to be able to monitor calls within the United States."

The American Civil Liberties Union formally requested yesterday that Gonzales appoint an outside special counsel to investigate and prosecute any criminal acts and violations of laws as a result of the spying effort.

Also yesterday, John D. Negroponte, Bush's director of national intelligence, sent an e-mail to the entire intelligence community defending the program. The politically tinged memo referred to the disclosure as "egregious" and called the program a vital, constitutionally valid tool in the war against al Qaeda.

Benson said it is too soon for him to judge whether the surveillance program was legal until he hears directly from the government.

"I need to know more about it to decide whether it was so distasteful," Benson said. "But I wonder: If you've got us here, why didn't you go through us? They've said it's faster [to bypass FISA], but they have emergency authority under FISA, so I don't know."

As it launched the dramatic change in domestic surveillance policy, the administration chose to secretly brief only the presiding FISA court judges about it. Officials first advised U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the head of FISA in the fall of 2001, and then Kollar-Kotelly, who replaced him in that position in May 2002. U.S. District Judge George Kazen of the Southern District of Texas said in an interview yesterday that his information about the program has been largely limited to press accounts over the past several days.

"Why didn't it go through FISA," Kazen asked. "I think those are valid questions. The president at first said he didn't want to talk about it. Now he says, 'You're darn right I did it, and it's completely legal.' I gather he's got lawyers telling him this is legal. I want to hear those arguments." Judge Michael J. Davis of Minnesota said he, too, wants to be sure the secret program did not produce unreliable or legally suspect information that was then used to obtain FISA warrants.

"I share the other judges' concerns," he said.

But Judge Malcolm Howard of eastern North Carolina said he tends to think the terrorist threat to the United States is so grave that the president should use every tool available and every ounce of executive power to combat it.

"I am not overly concerned" about the surveillance program, he said, but "I would welcome hearing more specifics."

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.


© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Ted Kennedy (my esteemed senior Senator ) has his say about Bush's illegal spy program, in an op-ed column in today's Boston Globe.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...itution?mode=PF

and right you are to be proud Rox.....I also support him and am on his mailing list......I guess you know I am from Fall River....I spent a lot of time on the Cape as a girl.....

I listened to him speak on the vaccine apportionment to the defense bill last night
fiery as ever....!!!

I'm pretty proud of the entire MA congressional delegation.

Speaking of which....Kerry was on Ed Shultz yesterday......and dropped a tiny bombshell.....he said there is every reason to think that his campaign may have been compromised by the "spying"

He also talked quite a bit about the hackable voting machines. First time I've heard him speak publicly in such detail about that.

More Bush lies on domestic spying.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/21/14120/907

http://www.democraticleader.house.gov/pres...sReleaseID=1339

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexa...at_b_12730.html

http://www.dailymail.com/news/News/2005122236

While the Bush Administration is dead wroong in the domestic spying case, I
also think the democratic party leadership in Congress is shooting itself in the foot with over-kill on its resistance to indivvidual acts of the President's mis-mannagement of the so-called war on teriorism rather than confront the unjustifiable and demeaning neocon and neolib foreign policy which gives rise to
all these symptomatic problems. The end resuts is to appear to condone the administration's war mongering in theory and pick it to death and make it fail
in practice. It is time to confront the President's basic premise that, "The country
is at war."

This is so typical of contemporary management style not only in government and the military but in corporations and universities.

While these managers pontificate upon the virtues of the democratic process their behavior reflects a profound distrust of democratic process. The hypocrisy is astounding. This administration has transformed Congressional oversight of the intelligence community into manipulation of both Congress and the intelligence community.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1671984,00.html