Eavesdropping, Gagging, and the Constitution
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 24 May 2006
(excerpt)
Good News and Bad News
The good news is that many officials still serving in the national security parts of our government have found ways to expose crimes like kidnapping "suspected terrorists," torturing them or "rendering" them to other countries to be tortured, holding them incommunicado without the required notice to the Red Cross, warrantless eavesdropping.... The list goes on.
The bad news is that administration officials and those in Congress who do their bidding seem determined to intimidate those like Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) from exercising our First Amendment rights to speak out against that which we should speak out against: What the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime" of initiating a war of aggression. Especially considering that, as Nuremberg stressed, such a war contains the "accumulated evil of the whole." Just like the evils mentioned above, which are still going on.
It is abundantly clear that the George W. Bush administration - enjoying abroad "sole-remaining-superpower" status, and at home effective control of all three formerly independent branches of government - believes it has carte blanche to continue these abuses under the rubric of the "Long War" on terror. So, rather than addressing these abuses, the executive branch and its courtiers in Congress have been fixated on stemming the flow of revelations to the press.
much more at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052406Z.shtml