Defiant Bush admits breaking law

[mr_genius]

I'm just trying to really dispel the "Well, I have nothing to hide" defense that some are attempting to use in this thread.  Nothing personal.

 

 

i agree

 

and no personal offense was taken

 

 

 

[kapkomet]

Why do you insist on a selfish perspective like that? 

 

"How does it affect ME as an individual?  Because if it doesn't affect me personally than I don't care.  Who cares if it affects thousands of other law-abiding Americans because I only matter."

 

Great attitude!

"THOUSANDS"? Yea. Whatever.

 

And why the Quakers? Seriously. Why?

[BigSqwert]

"THOUSANDS"?  Yea.  Whatever.

 

And why the Quakers?  Seriously.  Why?

 

Seeing that you actually have the list on who is being wiretapped and it only has 4 people on it I guess I should apologize.

 

Also, I wasn't the one who brought up the Quakers so I cannot respond to that.

[kapkomet]

If someone could give me more info (and not some made up s***) about the quakers, I want to read it.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

If someone could give me more info (and not some made up s***) about the quakers, I want to read it.

http://www.afsc.org/news/2005/government-spying.htm

 

Early last week, NBC reported the existence of a secret Department of Defense (DOD) database related to "potential terrorist threats." One example of identified "threats" is a group in Lake Worth, Florida that included five Quakers and a 79-year old grandmother who met at their local Quaker meeting house to discuss how to protest military recruiting at an area high school. Other examples of "threatening" events in the database included handing out literature in front of military recruiting stations and commemorating the second anniversary of the Iraq War.

 

At least four of the events listed were activities coordinated or supported by AFSC.

 

The report by NBC News was followed last Friday by a story in the New York Times that President Bush has secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the U.S. without court-approved warrants. The President and the DOD now admit they've been spying on thousands of people in this country for simply exercising their constitutional rights.

[BigSqwert]

The President and the DOD now admit they've been spying on thousands of people in this country for simply exercising their constitutional rights.

 

Oh snap kapkomet, I guess it's a little more than 4 people after all.

[kapkomet]

Oh snap kapkomet, I guess it's a little more than 4 people after all. 

I bet one of them's you. You better watch your back.

[Texsox]

If they ran my record they'd see Im a card-carrying Republican, NRA member, military guy and go "next". 

 

 

Which would be a mistake.

 

 

Just a couple guys that fit the same profile as you. Based on this, YOU should be followed and all your weapons confiscated. They killed many innocent people. By keeping you under observation, how many lives will be saved?

[southsider2k5]

Former Clinton Admin official saids wiretaps legal

 

Former Carter admin offical weighs in on wiretaps

 

Harvard prof/legal expert/admitted liberal saids "So that is if you put the Constitutional authority together with the statutory authorization, the president's on pretty good ground..."

[Balta1701]

Ok, so now we're just citing what other people say about this?

 

Former Nixon official: Bush committed an impeachable offense

[kapkomet]

Balta, you could come up with s*** that says "Bush said white", you'd find some article saying "Bush really said black". It's rather amusing.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Balta, you could come up with s*** that says "Bush said white", you'd find some article saying "Bush really said black".  It's rather amusing.

 

 

You read the rest of his website. I havent laughed that hard in a while.

[Rex Kickass]

Bob Barr weighs in, again, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

 

Bob Barr was a GOP Congressman. I thought this was interesting because in a lot of cases, I think it accurately describes what happens in this forum quite often.

 

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion...5/28edbarr.html

 

A critical component of White House Scandal Defense 101 is rallying the partisan base. This keeps approval ratings in territory where the wheels don't start falling off. The way to achieve this goal is you go negative and you don't let up. If you're always attacking your accusers, the debate becomes one of Democrat vs. Republican, rather than right vs. wrong. Anyone who questions the legality of the decision to wiretap thousands of Americans unlawfully is attacked, as either an enabler of terrorists or a bitter partisan trying to distract a president at war.

 

Yet another tactic is to shore up your congressional base in order to avoid or at least control pesky oversight investigations. A president's job here is made far easier if his party maintains a majority in one or both houses. Even if your party doesn't enjoy control of either the House or the Senate, you can still achieve your desired goal, as did Clinton — America's master scandal handler. You've just got to work harder at it.

 

The signs are everywhere that the Bush White House is busily implementing all parts of this defense strategy. It would be refreshing if it decided to clear the air and actually be honest about its post-Sept. 11 surveillance. However, that's unlikely. The problem this president faces, as did his predecessors, is that full disclosure would lead to the remedy stage. No president wants to fight that end-game.

[Balta1701]

The NYT Public Editor appears to be quite furious with the way the management @ the times handled this case (getting the leak before the election and holding it). And the editors aren't even bothering to talk to him about it.

 

THE New York Times's explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate. And I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.

 

For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making. My queries concerned the timing of the exclusive Dec. 16 article about President Bush's secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in the United States.

 

I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future...

 

The most obvious and troublesome omission in the explanation was the failure to address whether The Times knew about the eavesdropping operation before the Nov. 2, 2004, presidential election. That point was hard to ignore when the explanation in the article referred rather vaguely to having "delayed publication for a year." To me, this language means the article was fully confirmed and ready to publish a year ago - after perhaps weeks of reporting on the initial tip - and then was delayed.

 

Mr. Keller dealt directly with the timing of the initial tip in his later statements. The eavesdropping information "first became known to Times reporters" a year ago, he said. These two different descriptions of the article's status in the general vicinity of Election Day last year leave me puzzled.

 

For me, however, the most obvious question is still this: If no one at The Times was aware of the eavesdropping prior to the election, why wouldn't the paper have been eager to make that clear to readers in the original explanation and avoid that politically charged issue? The paper's silence leaves me with uncomfortable doubts.

[Balta1701]

According to the NY Times, even that Leftist-commie-pinko-gay-loving-osama-hugging John Ashcroft had some severe concerns about the program and was very reluctant to sign off on it, and almost all of his underlings at DOJ refused to do so.

 

And just so you understand...there's now officially reason to wonder what was done with this info...the NSA seems to have been willing to share the info obtained by these intercepts with a wide variety of other federal agencies, just as was done back in the 70's before Congress created the FISA courts.

 

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

 

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

 

The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.

 

....Accounts differed as to exactly what was said at the hospital meeting between Mr. Ashcroft and the White House advisers. But some officials said that Mr. Ashcroft, like his deputy, appeared reluctant to give Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales his authorization to continue with aspects of the program in light of concerns among some senior government officials about whether the proper oversight was in place at the security agency and whether the president had the legal and constitutional authority to conduct such an operation.

 

It is unclear whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr. Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting or moved ahead without it.

[BigSqwert]

the NSA seems to have been willing to share the info obtained by these intercepts with a wide variety of other federal agencies, just as was done back in the 70's before Congress created the FISA courts.

Big deal. As long as you have nothing to hide why would you care?

[FlaSoxxJim]

Quick updates on a couple of developing story line:

 

- The FISA court justices will get a briefing on the domestic surveilance program on Monday, as per last week's request from Jusge Kollar-Kotelly who happened to be the presiding Judge who was informed of the activities:

 

The members of a secret federal court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases are scheduled to receive a classified briefing Monday from top Justice Department and intelligence officials about a controversial warrantless-eavesdropping program, according to sources familiar with the arrangements.

 

Several judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said they want to hear directly from administration officials why President Bush believed he had the authority to order, without the court's permission, wiretapping of some phone calls and e-mails after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Of serious concern to several judges is whether any information gleaned from intercepts by the National Security Agency was later used to gain their permission for wiretaps without the source being disclosed. . .

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6010401864.html

 

- To coincide with the release of his book this week, NYT domestic spying story co-author James Risin was on the Today Show yesterday. He noted that this isn't a single whistleblower, but at least a dozen career NSA types who spent years in the system playing by a set of rules that stressed first and foremost that you needed to obtain warrants to engage in domestic spying who were all of a sudden ordered to forgo their obligations to uphold the law.

 

Well you know I think this was the most classic whistleblower case I’ve ever seen. Where people – You know, in a lot of stories people have mixed motives for why they talk to reporters, some people in some stories there’s a turf battle and they’re losing out on a turf battle, or whatever. In this case – I’ve been a reporter for about 25 years – this was the purest case of whistleblowers coming forward, people who truly believed there was something wrong going on in the government and they were motivated, I believe, by the purest reasons. . .

 

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/03/pure-whistleblower/

 

- Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee told President Bush Wednesday that the White House broke the law by withholding information from the full congressional oversight committees about a new domestic surveillance program. Using the definition of "covert act" from the National Security Act, she is correct.

 

WASHINGTON -

 

In a letter to Bush, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., said the National Security Act requires the heads of the various intelligence agencies to keep the entire House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States."

 

Only in the case of a highly classified covert action can the president choose to inform a narrower group of Congress members about his decision, Harman said. That action is defined in the law as an operation to influence political, economic or military conditions of another country.

 

"The NSA program does not qualify as a 'covert action,'" Harman wrote.

 

- A MSNBC online news story yesterday contained allegations that CNN's Christiane Amanpour has been a target of the domestic surveilance program, but they pulled key portions of the story once this aspect of the story got some legs. It will be interesting to watch this one develop.

 

MSNBC's statement:

 

Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on 'NBC Nightly News' nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry.

 

 

- A Washington Times story reminds us that at least one of the NSA whistleblowers has asked to testify before Congress:

 

A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

    Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.

    "I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency," Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times. . .

 

http://washingtontimes.com/national/200601...14052-6606r.htm

[Rex Kickass]

You beat me to the Amanpour story.

 

AMERICAblog which I usually don't read has a good summation about why this is so disturbing as an invasion of our privacy.

 

1. Such a wiretap would likely include her home, office, and cell phones, and email correspondence, at the very least.

 

2. That means anyone Christiane has conversed with in the past four years, at least by phone or email, could have had their conversation taped by the US government.

 

3. That also means that anyone who uses any of Christiane's telephones or computers (work or home) could also have had their conversation bugged.

 

4. This includes Christiane's husband, former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Rubin, who was spokesman for the State Department.

 

5. Jamie Rubin was also chief foreign policy adviser to General Wesley Clark's presidential campaign, and then worked as a senior national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

 

6. Did Jamie Rubin ever use his home phone, his wife's work phone, his wife's cell phone, her home computer or her work computer to communicate with John Kerry or Wesley Clark? If so, those conversations would have been bugged if Bush was tapping Amanpour.

 

7. Did Jamie Rubin ever in the past four years communicate with any elected officials in Washington, DC - any Senators or members of the US House? Any senior members of the Democratic party?

 

8. Has Rubin spoken with Bill Clinton, his former boss, in the past 4 years?

 

Anyone within a degree or two of separation from Amanpour might have been affected because she might have been tipped off about where something might happen sometime maybe in the future.

 

Your rights are like your arms, if you get one cut off - it's gone for good. If they sew it back on, it still will never be the same.

[sec159row2]

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/1/...1649.shtml?s=et

[Balta1701]

The Non-Partisan Congressional Research Service has issued a report saying that Bush's program "Does not seem to be well-grounded" in the law as the administration has suggested.

[kapkomet]

The Non-Partisan Congressional Research Service has issued a report saying that Bush's program "Does not seem to be well-grounded" in the law as the administration has suggested.

Of course not. Anything you will be looking for would never substantiate ANY reason that this could be legal.... "non-partisan" Congressional Research Service?

 

CONGRESSIONAL...

 

anyway...

 

next...

[FlaSoxxJim]

Of course not.  Anything you will be looking for would never substantiate ANY reason that this could be legal.... "non-partisan" Congressional Research Service? 

 

CONGRESSIONAL...

 

anyway...

 

next...

Well, I see the current NSA director thinks it's legal. Shocking. Other than that, though, you're not exactly tripping over all the legal and constitutional experts that have sided with BushCo on this one are you?

 

The Congressional Research Service IS non-partison.

 

If you read the piece you saw it said what we basically already know - namely that the presidential authority to order this surveilance can not reasonably be said to derive from statute. And it concludes again what we basically know - that the sole Bush argument is that the power derives from the "whereas" clause in the 9/18 Congressional Resolution and it's 'any and all reasobable and necessary means' or whatever the exact statement is.

 

The Research Service says that some courts might accept this argument, although the historic role Comgress has played in overseeing and shaping surveilance policy strongly suggests that Congress would not likely have all of a sudden decided it would cede all responisbilities in that regard to the executive.

 

And the fact that the BushCo argument all hinges on the "whereas" clause and not the "resolving" clause ('It is hereby resolved that. . .' ) is still really squirrely (sp?) It's fairly well accepted tthat the whereas statements are the tone-setters, but the resolving clauses are where the teeth usually reside.

 

The truth remains that the administration doesn't care that they do not have the authority to do what they are doing. It only concerns those of us in the "reality-based community," as the administtration has scornfully described those of us who feel the need to be bothered by trifflinng matters like the law and the Constitution.

[kapkomet]

Well, I see the current NSA director thinks it's legal.  Shocking.  Other than that, though, you're not exactly tripping over all the legal and constitutional experts that have sided with BushCo on this one are you?

 

The Congressional Research Service IS non-partison.

 

If you read the piece you saw it said what we basically already know - namely that the presidential authority to order this surveilance can not reasonably be said to derive from statute.  And it concludes again what we basically know - that the sole Bush argument is that the power derives from the "whereas" clause in the 9/18 Congressional Resolution and it's 'any and all reasobable and necessary means' or whatever the exact statement is.

 

The Research Service says that some courts might accept this argument, although the historic role Comgress has played in overseeing and shaping surveilance policy strongly suggests that Congress would not likely have all of a sudden decided it would cede all responisbilities in that regard to the executive.

 

And the fact that the BushCo argument all hinges on the "whereas" clause and not the "resolving" clause ('It is hereby resolved that. . .' ) is still really squirrely (sp?) It's fairly well accepted tthat the whereas statements are the tone-setters, but the resolving clauses are where the teeth usually reside.

 

The truth remains that the administration doesn't care that they do not have the authority to do what they are doing.  It only concerns those of us in the "reality-based community," as the administtration has scornfully described those of us who feel the need to be bothered by trifflinng matters like the law and the Constitution.

So the only people that are in "the right" are the ones who side with you, and you're the only "reality-based community"? I still say Congress doesn't have the power, nor do the courts, to stop it according to the Constitution. Now if Congress wanted to pull the money out of the NSA, that's another thing.

 

Why is it that I have heard no one say STOP THE PROGRAM, just a bunch of witch-hunting bulls*** from the Democrat leadership?

[Rex Kickass]

Actually, they have said stop the program and get the warrants. I think that was the whole point from the beginning.

 

If we're fighting to protect freedom and the rule of law, why is it acceptable to throw out both in the name of themselves?

[kapkomet]

Actually, they have said stop the program and get the warrants. I think that was the whole point from the beginning.

 

If we're fighting to protect freedom and the rule of law, why is it acceptable to throw out both in the name of themselves?

The way I view this is, if you're a murderer, you lost your rights. If you're on the phone with these bastards, you've lost your rights.

 

I know that there's all these witch hunt stories about how the Bush administration is using this for "HIS" political gain, which I think is pure bull s*** propaganda and unfounded, but makes a great story for the liberals to run around and scream "MY RIGHTS HAVE BEEN VIOLATED..." but again, if you are in this mess, it's probably for a pretty good reason, not a witch hunt like you all suggest.

 

Time will tell, I guess. In a way, I wish the Dems would grow some balls and bring it to a vote if they're serious (oh, I'm sure they can't because they are the minority, :rolly). Bring up the charges. Impeach the f***er. Let's get it on and over with. It won't happen, again, because no one is saying STOP it, they're just fanning the spew through the fan blades to see what's going to stick so they can run around trying to say "anything but Bush"... instead of coming up with REAL ideas about how we move forward as a country to defeat terrorism.