28 December 2005 (# 23)
We were all greeted with this headline in the early hours of November 6, 2002. Remember:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a historic night for the GOP and President Bush, Republicans seized control of the Senate, held onto their majority in the House and savored wins in two hot gubernatorial races, CNN projected early Wednesday.
Returns were still coming in early Wednesday morning, but it appeared possible that Republicans could build on the six-seat majority in the House they held going into the elections.
No matter what the margin, Republicans were poised to control both the House and the Senate for the remainder of Bush's first term.
Link: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/11/06/elec02.main.day The Republican 108th Congress was nothing but a compliant servant to Bush. We all know that.
So, why did Bush circumvent them and break the law?I have been struggling with that question since Risen and Lichtblau published their (more than a year late) article in the
New York Times on December 16, 2005. As they noted:
Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.
The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant -- intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be ''an agent of a foreign power,'' which includes international terrorist groups -- and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved.
And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.
Link: http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00F1FFF3D540C758DDDAB0994DD404482 For starters, I don't think it's because Bush was lazy; just didn't want to be bothered with procedure.
Quite a lot of ink has been spilled in the intervening weeks about just how efficient the FISA court has been and, in a previous letter to you, I quoted Larry Johnson regarding the ability to adhere to FISA and the 4th Amendment and capture with alacrity a real bad guy (
http://tinyurl.com/7us7r).
We know - and Bush, Cheney, Rice and others all knew - that the FISA system worked. They continued using it during Bush’s post 9/11 war on terror. He owned the 108th Congress.
And yet, rather than having the FISA law changed, he opted to break the law and violate the Constitution. Why?
Why did he not request the 108th Congress to either eliminate FISA and replace it, or modify it?
Risen and Lichtblau inform us of the following details:
Several senior government officials say that when the special operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.
In mid-2004, concerns about the program, expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.
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A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.
All the bunk we’ve been hearing from Bush and his apologists about “needing to move quickly” is obviously just more lies. If all they needed to do was to move more quickly, they hardly would have been worried about someone finding that that was the only reason they converted the NSA into their private super-snoop. These folk got weak-kneed in the mid-2004 when they suddenly realized someone might get a glimpse of just whose communications they were intercepting.
Just what were Bush, Cheney and Rice having the NSA do?We’ve had information from various sources – spanning Bob Woodward to
Raw Story – that Hans Blix, and members of the UN Security Council, office and home phone calls, as well as, email were being intercepted. But, I doubt that this activity would have been the reason Bush avoided the FISA Court. I also doubt that if Bush needed to modify FISA to expand surveillance of UN diplomats that he would have had any difficulty getting the 108th flying rubber stampers to deliver.
And, the traditional media, the vaunted
4th estate – they all just looked the other way even when they were told. As we know, Katherine Gun’s leaking of the infamous “Koza email” describing US spying on members of the UN Security Council received scant notice in the US press, a fact that Norman Solomon highlighted yesterday:
Despite all the news accounts and punditry since the New York Times published its Dec. 16 (2005) bombshell about the National Security Agency's domestic spying, the media coverage has made virtually no mention of the fact that the Bush administration used the NSA to spy on UN diplomats in New York
before the invasion of Iraq.
Link: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122705Y.shtmlJust what were Bush, Cheney and Rice having the NSA do that they were afraid even to ask their Republican Congressional lapdogs to enable, legislatively? Just what was so totally over the top that they realized they had to suspend their activities prior to the 2004 National Election?
Whatever it was, their actions in mid-2004 (as noted above), more than adequately reveal that Bush and his fellow neoconsters knew they were breaking the law, and they did not want what they were doing uncovered should they lose the election.
One can only imagine how much evidence of what they were doing was already being destroyed in the summer of 2004. But, it is essential for the DNC to draw unrelenting attention to their sudden shift in mid-2004, and urge all those who do know what they were doing to come forward and testify.
Ironically, among the consequences of their illegal activities is the fact that every defense attorney with a client that may have had the NSA illegally snooping on them could face malpractice charges if they don’t advise their client of all the legal options now available to them because the President of the United States of America broke the law(s).
The opportunities for the DNC to bring these issues to the attention of every American voter, in the weeks and months ahead, are too rich to not be mined exhaustively.
Thank you for your continued leadership,
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