On December 17 the President of the United States appeared on national
television and told us he had broken the law by using the NSA to conduct
warrantless surveillance on Americans within America, that it was his
prerogative as president to break the law as he saw fit, that he would do so
again at the time of his choosing, that he as president was above the law, and
that the newspaper that broke the story (after spindling it for a year at his
request) was irresponsible and had endangered national security.
George W. Bush, by his own
admission, has violated the Constitution he swore under oath to preserve and
defend. He must be impeached,
tried, convicted, and removed from office. To advocate a lesser course of action is un-American and
irresponsible. To accept the
dubious justifications spawned by the terrorist threat is shameful, cowardly,
unpatriotic. The Bush
Administration has used the excuse of terrorist threat to erode civil liberties
it evidently sees as too extensive in America. For the past five years, the law has mattered little to Bush
policymakers. It is time the law
asserted itself.
This administration has already seriously damaged our good
reputation in the international community, and now it is proving itself a grave
threat to our national identity and the freedoms which are, or ought to be, the
hallmarks of American society.
Bush and Cheney cannot be trusted to steer this country
wisely. They have arrogantly
disregarded American law and must be impeached.
Find your representatives at the site below. Write a brief letter explaining that
you expect them to defend American civil liberties law by pushing for the
sternest action possible against this arrogant administration.
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NB:
I.-- During his December 17th press conference, President Bush
defended his 2002 establishment of warrantless surveillance as follows:
"[The]
people responsible for helping us protect and defend came forth with the
current program, because it enables us to move faster and quicker. And that's important. We've got to be fast on our feet, quick
to detect and prevent. . . . . [Obtaining warrants from the FISA court] is for
long-term monitoring. What is
needed in order to protect the American people is the ability to move quickly
to detect."
In short, the president says he set up his program of warrantless
surveillance because it is sometimes impossible to obtain a warrant in time to
spy on a particular threat. The
president must be able to order surveillance on his own, without a warrant,
because of the need, in certain cases, for fast action.
This is a bald-faced lie.
It is a lie because, as both the president and his legal advisors know,
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows him to order
surveillance on a target first, then obtain a warrant after the fact. In short, the law already allows the
president of the United States to order surveillance at the drop of a hat
without the need for any warrant beforehand.
Why, then, did the administration decide to establish a program
intended to bypass this law? Since
the need for prompt action against terrorists is obviously not the real reason,
what is the reason?
There are two logical answers:
1) The administration sought to set up a mechanism for spying on Americans that would have no external oversight whatsoever. With Bush's program, the administration in effect would have its own in-house surveillance service, under which anyone could be watched as if they constituted a national threat. This list of anyone could easily come to include anti-war activists, journalists investigating delicate stories, overzealous whistleblowers, etc. It could include these people because, after all, there is no oversight except the president and his minions.
2) The administration set up the program because it knew ahead of
time that the FISA court would not approve spying on the kind of people they
wanted to spy on: in short, American citizens who didn't really pose a terrorist threat, but who perhaps posed a political threat to the administration. Whether or not such abuse has actually
occurred in the use of warrantless surveillance up to this point is an
important question, but not the essential one. The fact is that the president has established a program
that could easily be used in such a way if the president so desired. The very act of setting it up is a
grave infraction against American civil liberties.
Note that in past uses of the FISA court the records show that
while thousands of requests for warrants were made, only four or five times did
the court refuse to grant a warrant.
The court, in other words, is not exactly stringent in its oversight
role. Why then should the Bush
Administration worry about the need to get a warrant? As long as the target was even feasibly a security threat, the FISA court could
be expected to grant a warrant promptly.
There must be something else that was worrying them.
The above two cited reasons are
the only logical ones for the establishment of warrantless surveillance. The Bush Administration wanted a
program that would allow it to conduct spying on Americans with no oversight
whatsoever. Is it American to
allow any president, under any circumstance, such a power? It is not.
II.-- Bush's Justice Department
has argued that the congressional Authorization to Use Military Force of 2001
gives a legal basis for the president's program of domestic wireless
surveillance. That bill authorizes
the president "to use all
necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or
persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
Then Senate majority leader Tom
Daschle has pointed out that the bill could not have been construed as an
authorization to conduct wiretaps inside the United States as a means of
preventing future terrorist attacks.
For one thing, the bill authorized force only against those who had
committed the attacks of September 11.
But more crucially, the administration had sought, and been denied, an
authorization to use such force inside the United States. Daschle wrote:
Literally
minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the
words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force"
in the agreed-upon text. This
last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise
expansive powers not just overseas--where we all understood he wanted authority
to act--but right here in the United States, potentially against American
citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this
extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.
The bill in question authorized military
force overseas against the September 11 attackers. It did not authorize domestic wiretaps without the need for
a warrant. In fact, Congress had
explicitly rejected allowing the president to include domestic activities in
the bill's purview. The Justice
Department seems to be arguing on very thin ice indeed.
Bush's 2002 order to establish his program of warrantless
surveillance constitutes a serious misuse of executive authority. Given that the need for prompt action
in spying on terrorists is obviously not the reason the program was set up, what other reasons
other than the two cited above might there be? There could be no practical reason for such a program of
domestic surveillance, and there was no legal basis for it.
As Sen. Russ Feingold, D-WI, has put it, the establishment of this
program "ought to send a chill down the spine of every American."
The Bush Administration has broken American law, undermined the Constitution, and broken the trust between itself and the American people. The patriotic course of action is to begin impeachment proceedings as promptly as possible. Contact your representatives and let them know that you expect them to fight this corrupt administration. Here: http://www.senate.gov/
E.M.
December 23, 2005
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The quote from Sen. Daschle is taken from a Washington Post article of December 22.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/22/AR2005122202119.html
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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