posted on February 5, 2006 10:59:33 AM new
WELL KNOWN REPUBLICAN SEN. ARLEN SPECTER BELIEVES BUSH AND HIS GANG BROKE THE LAW.
Specter Believes Spy Program Violates Law
Sunday, February 5, 2006 12:39 PM EST
The Associated Press
By HOPE YEN
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' explanations so far for the Bush administration's failure to obtain warrants for its domestic surveillance program are "strained" and "unrealistic," the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said Sunday.
Sen. Arlen Specter, whose committee has scheduled hearings Monday on the National Security Agency program, said he believes the administration violated a 1978 law specifically calling for a secretive court to consider and approve such monitoring.
Specter, R-Pa., said he might consider subpoenas for administration documents that would detail its legal justification for the program.
"The president could've taken this there and lay it on the line," Specter said, citing the special court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
"That court has an outstanding record of not leaking. They would be pre-eminently well-qualified to evaluate this program and say it's OK or not OK," Specter told NBC's "Meet the Press."
Under the NSA program put in place after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government has eavesdropped, without seeking warrants, on international phone calls and e-mails of people within the United States who are deemed to be a terrorism risk.
The administration has defended Bush's decision to bypass the FISA law, saying it is too cumbersome to deal with in a post-Sept. 11 world of heightened security threats. It also said Bush had authority as commander in chief and under a 2001 congressional resolution authorizing force in the fight against terrorism.
"The president's authority to take military action — including the use of communications intelligence targeted at the enemy — does not come merely from his constitutional powers. It comes directly from Congress as well," in that post-Sept. 11 resolution, according to Gonzales' prepared testimony for the hearing. The Associated Press on Saturday obtained a copy of his scheduled remarks.
Specter was skeptical.
"I think that contention is very strained and unrealistic. The authorization for use of force never mentions electronic surveillance," Specter said.
In response to written questions submitted to him by Specter before the hearing, Gonzales gives an explanation why the administration bypassed the FISA court: "The delay inherent in the FISA process is incompatible with the narrow purpose of this early warning system."
Specter, however, said that response "was not entirely responsive. ... His answer wasn't really clear." The senator said there is no reason why the administration could not have consulted with the spy court or Congress, who could have changed the law if it was too cumbersome.
But Gen. Michael Hayden, the No. 2 intelligence official in the government, said the FISA process "doesn't give us the speed and agility to do what this program is designed to do."
The program's intent is to "detect and prevent attacks. This is not about long-term surveillance to gather reams of intelligence against a stable and a fixed target," Hayden said on "Fox News Sunday."
Specter's committee has asked the administration to Justice Department documents detailing the legal justification for the NSA program.
Asked about the possibility the committee might subpoena the administration for the material, Specter said he first wanted to hear from Gonzales.
"If we come to it and need it, I'll be open about it," Specter said. He added, "If the necessity arises, I won't be timid."
WHEN THE TRUTH COMES OUT ON YET ANOTHER BUSH MESS. AMERICA WILL SEE THE NSA LISTENED INTO MUCH MUCH MORE THAN YOUR ARE SAYING NOW.
posted on February 5, 2006 12:47:48 PM new
Wiretap This
February 4th, 2006
She wasn’t much for knocking. With her figure, she didn’t need to be. She swept into my office on a perfumed wave of good posture and practiced indignation, looking like six feet of perturbed. I put down the Wall Street Journal and pulled my feet off the desk, admiring her hair.
Her blouse was demurely buttoned and her skirt was executive length, but the look in her eye was the one that had earned my squad more pushups than I cared to remember when I’d gift-wrapped it for a drill instructor in my wastrel youth.
I hadn’t shined my shoes and it was too late to look busy. She didn’t care. It wasn’t my idleness that had furrowed the skin over her perfect nose.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
“I think George Bush is after me,” she said. “I think he tapped my phone.”
“Would this be George ‘Impeachable Offense’ Bush, or somebody I haven’t heard of?”
“The President is who I mean.” Her brown eyes flashed warning. “I’m not kidding.”
“Didn’t think you were,” I said, wondering whether she’d played college volleyball back in the day. Doubtless she was close to forty now, but slender. Still enough line in her calves and ankles for a tone poem, as Raymond Chandler used to say. I keep phrases like that on hand. In California, you actually get to use them sometimes.
“What do you want with a private detective? I’m strictly small-time.”
She sat in my guest chair, folding one elegant leg over the other.
“The police would laugh at me. They don’t seem to care that Homeland Security opens personal letters. I saw one news report about a retired professor from Kansas. Goodman, I think his name was. Eighty-one years old. He has a pen pal in the Philippines. Homeland Security went through his mail.”
“I saw that, too. But it sounded more like stupidity than malice. Reminds me of that Christmas story in the Tribune about CIA agents who got busted for felony stupid while taking an Egyptian cleric out of Italy. The cops found the spooks because they forgot to pull the batteries out of their cell phones..”
She wasn’t mollified. “The feds might be stupid, but I’m sick of George Bush breaking the law and getting away with it. Even John Dean says Bush is worse now than Nixon ever was.”
“Watergate John Dean?”
“The very one. He says Nixon wiretapped in the name of national security, too.”
“Yeah, Nixon said something like that. Not that you’re old enough to remember. But his ‘Enemies List’ was short on Muslim names. Hell, his enemies list didn’t even have Viet Cong names.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just my snide way of saying that ‘national security’ means different things to different people. Sometimes it’s actually at stake.”
“The New York Times says an acting attorney general raised objections to what Bush is doing with the National Security Agency,” she volunteered.
I was impressed. “You read a lot. Did you catch the part about how the White House listened to those objections, revamped the program, and then got the revamped program certified by the AG?”
“The Times didn’t say anything about that.”
“They wouldn’t. Probably didn’t mention that the White House has been briefing Congress all the while, either. But let’s get back to you. Why would the President be after you?”
“Because I’m against this stupid war, and I’ve said so publicly.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“It is on Bushworld.”
I didn’t know her name, but the woman across my desk was beginning to remind me of why I kept a whiskey bottle in the bottom drawer.
“Just a minute, darlin’” I always seem to get Southern and condescending at the same time. She jerked backward.
I hooked a thumb at my phone. “Do you know what a pen register is?”
“No.”
“It’s a surveillance device that captures phone numbers dialed on outgoing telephone calls. If you want to gather numbers for incoming calls, that’s a trap and trace. You follow?’
“Guess I came to the right detective.”
“Point is, neither a pen register nor a trap and trace reveals the actual content of a phone call. And you don’t need a warrant for a pen register. There’s no expectation of privacy in ‘envelope’ type information, even if it’s normally read only by machines, not human beings.”
“Are you trying to be comforting?”
“No, ma’am, I’m just sharing information. I’m saying there are reputable people who disagree with John Dean. Cass Sunstein, for one. He teaches law at the University of Chicago.”
“I know what a FISA court is, and Bush bypassed those, too, even though they rubber-stamp requests from the president.”
“First Nixon, then Carter. You major in American history, or something?”
“Women’s Studies, if you really want to know.”
“Doesn’t matter. The rubber stamp business is agitprop. Ever hear of Zacarias Moussaoui? That jerkoff was supposed to be the twentieth hijacker on 9/11. FBI agents in Minneapolis had his laptop computer a month before his buddies took the Twin Towers down, but couldn’t do anything with it for lack of a warrant, FISA or no FISA. What I’m saying is that J. Edgar Hoover was the guy who made a career out of spying on people, not George W. Bush.”
“What about checks and balances?” She was indignant.
“Put down the New York Times and pick up the Weekly Standard. If you’re saying that no branch of government should act in critical times without approval from another branch of government, then you’re forgetting that the Founding Fathers also had a thing for separation of powers. Read the Federalist Papers: ‘energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.’ Or if you think Hamilton was a fascist, try Jefferson. Old Tom said: ‘[w]here different branches have to act in their respective lines” they may give the Constitution “different and opposite constructions.’”
“You wouldn’t give me all that crap about historical precedent if you didn’t like the President.”
“I’m not talking about the President. I’m talking about executive branch and the FISA courts. While New York Times guys try to split the difference between ‘good leaks’ and ‘bad leaks,’ a Seattle paper put the rubber stamp myth to rest. I didn’t have any presents to wrap Christmas Eve, so I spent more time than I should have poking around the Internet. You know what I found?
“Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court’s approval. A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.”
“I didn’t come in here to be lectured,” she reproached me.
“I’m sure that’s so, but unless you’re calling some old flame named Achmed in Syria, I’m betting it’s probably not the NSA on your phone, so there’s no point in drinking Democratic Kool-Aid just because the can has pictures of Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy on it. We are at war, after all.”
“I’m not convinced. But what’s your rate?”
“Now you’re talking. You want a cup of coffee?”
Published with the permission of “Rogue Voice,” a hardscrabble, print-only literary journal published from a tool shed in Cayucos, California, in whose February 2006 edition this originally appeared.
"“More Iraqis think things are going well in Iraq than Americans do. I guess they don’t get the New York Times over there.”—Jay Leno".
[ edited by Bear1949 on Feb 5, 2006 12:50 PM ]
posted on February 5, 2006 01:39:18 PM new
Watch Bear make a fool of himself. Poor man can't face reality that many of his leaders are crooks and failures.
Copy and Paste all you want Bear. Your empty foolish words doesn't change the fact your conservative form of government is in big trouble.
ITS GREAT FUN WATCHING PEOPLE LIKE BEAR AND LIAR_K MAKE FOOLS OF THEMSELVES WHILE THEIR FORM OF GOVERNMENT CRUMBLES.
posted on February 5, 2006 08:40:01 PM new
Colin goes BLAH,BLAH,BLAH and doesn't even know when (R)Sen. Specter is up for reelection.
Being uninformed is nothing new for Colin. He and Bush suffer from the same condition its called arrested development. Most likely caused by poor life style choices they made like over drinking and drugs.
