Trust Him With Our Rights? No. By Richard Cohen Thursday, December 22, 2005; A29 George Bush's problem is that Washington is not a courtroom. If it were, he or his lawyer (Dick Cheney?) could rise and object to the mention of his "previous convictions." That way, every offense against custom, law, international agreements and common sense could be treated in isolation. Too bad for Bush, he has a rap sheet. It is his record of nonstop belligerence toward anything that would limit his powers that works against him as he tries to make a case for what in shorthand is called domestic spying. Any other president would have earned the solicitous attention and understanding of the country, including his critics. After Sept. 11, 2001, we were all willing to make some accommodations. If the president wanted to tap some phones, let him tap. Better that than another terrorist attack. The trouble with Bush is that it is hard to separate the reasonable from the unreasonable. It seems reasonable to me to listen in on phone calls from overseas to people here -- Americans or not -- if there is any link at all to suspected terrorists. If, say, a cell phone is found with certain numbers on it, I would monitor them all. That might not meet a strict legal standard, but it does seem to be common sense. With all due regard to law, the highest law of all is "better safe than sorry." But a reasonable stretching of the law in this respect becomes mighty suspect and somewhat scary when everything else is brought to mind. After all, the very same people who assure us that they are merely being prudent -- trust us -- are the same guys who held out until the last minute to retain torture as an option in questioning terrorist suspects and others. They are the same people -- Cheney in particular -- who are so tone-deaf to appearances, not to mention the opinions of the military, that they would publicly fight a restriction on torture. They do have a point -- not a persuasive one, mind you, but a point nonetheless -- but they see it as more important than anything else, even America's post-Abu Ghraib image. Right after Sept. 11 the Bush administration announced that it had no use for the Geneva Conventions. It would apply them as it saw fit -- and it did not see fit when it came to terrorists. These terrorists, after all, made war by no rules. Why should we abide by any? The answer, as many military officers said, is that we still could hold our enemies to a standard of conduct toward prisoners. If we did not adhere to it ourselves, there was no chance they would. The Bush administration brushed aside these objections. It established a vast Siberia that could be anywhere and where a suspect could be held forever on charges that were never brought. So an administration that makes something of a reasonable case when it comes to tapping the international phone calls of American citizens has its standing and veracity considerably weakened by what went before. The White House cannot explain why it did not ask Congress for this authority because, it is now clear, it does not want to ask Congress for anything. It will not explain why it could not seek warrants from a judge because, really, it does not want to seek warrants from a judge. This is the Louis XIV school of government: In matters of national security, Bush must say to himself, he is the state. Such a president cannot be trusted. In Bush's case, the extra inch that would be given another president in wartime has to be measured out in increments of tenths. He is so suffused with his own sense of righteousness that he cannot imagine his laws being abused -- not by him, certainly, and not by his chummy group of nicknamed nincompoops, either. He listens to Cheney, who still smarts from post-Watergate reforms that made the Gerald Ford presidency less imperial than Richard Nixon's -- and on purpose. Cheney was Ford's chief of staff. In courtroom trials, it does not matter what went before. The fact that the defendant had robbed does not necessarily mean that he has robbed again. But life is about rap sheets -- reputations and permanent records and personnel files. Read George Bush's and then ask yourself if it was exigency or ideology that prompted him to tap the international calls of American citizens without showing a court why. In his case, the record speaks for itself.
ZZZZzzzzz Post BARF ALERT for those that don't want to waste time reading his Opinion Editorials taken from every LEFT WING RAG Newspaper in the United States.
ZZZZZzzzzz let me explain how this works. You started this thread, posting Op Eds, you do not OWN a thread, and anybody can comment and post. So, if others with differing opinions bother you. Don't post and start a thread. And anybody can copy and paste stuff, you act a little like "Wild" the poster years ago that posted a bunch of anti - American Stuff from the Guardian. You post articles that are not properly labeled from the source Newspaper. If an Op ED is posted, people like to know what newspaper it comes from and I like to know the point of view of the author of the article. Others like this information too. If Baron has a problem with my posts I'm sure he will say something to me. You need to get a little thicker skin, you have been a lot more active posting than I have, and posted more than I have, I think my total posts are around 300 or so, for the 4 plus years I have been here. So I am hardly a stalker.
The issue that I have with Bush is that he has completely ignored, disrepected, and violated the FISA ACT in regards to following the LAW and specific legal procedure. Our Democracy is founded on "checks and balances". I do not support the position of ABSOLUTE power that President Bush has assumed in this case. All he had to do was have the attorney's representing the NSA appear in front of the 11-member FISA Court within 72 hours of the initial wire-tapping/monitoring. This is merely an ex post facto exercise. No big deal. Again, the FISA ACT gives the President a tremendous amount of power and authority to conduct the wire-tapping that the NSA believes to be important in dealing with imminent threats. I have no problem with this at all. The procedure is there, and it is pretty basic with hardly any restrictions whatsoever, especially since it is ex post facto. Yet, Bush the Cowboy decided that he didn't need to follow the law, or its procedure that is fundamentally grounded in our Democracy. I find that very troubling. All of us should.
My god, the horror..... For this extrememly serious mistake, I will therefore forever disregard anything she says.....
I respect your opinion, although what I'm reading and hearing is that what the President did was legal. Here's a Democrat lawyer who happened to be associate AG under Clinton who believes Bush didn't break the law: Bush had legal authority to OK taps By John Schmidt Published December 21, 2005 President Bush's post- Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents. The president authorized the NSA program in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. An identifiable group, Al Qaeda, was responsible and believed to be planning future attacks in the United States. Electronic surveillance of communications to or from those who might plausibly be members of or in contact with Al Qaeda was probably the only means of obtaining information about what its members were planning next. No one except the president and the few officials with access to the NSA program can know how valuable such surveillance has been in protecting the nation. In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad. Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant. In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the ... courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority." The passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 did not alter the constitutional situation. That law created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that can authorize surveillance directed at an "agent of a foreign power," which includes a foreign terrorist group. Thus, Congress put its weight behind the constitutionality of such surveillance in compliance with the law's procedures. But as the 2002 Court of Review noted, if the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches, "FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power." Every president since FISA's passage has asserted that he retained inherent power to go beyond the act's terms. Under President Clinton, deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick testified that "the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes." FISA contains a provision making it illegal to "engage in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute." The term "electronic surveillance" is defined to exclude interception outside the U.S., as done by the NSA, unless there is interception of a communication "sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person" (a U.S. citizen or permanent resident) and the communication is intercepted by "intentionally targeting that United States person." The cryptic descriptions of the NSA program leave unclear whether it involves targeting of identified U.S. citizens. If the surveillance is based upon other kinds of evidence, it would fall outside what a FISA court could authorize and also outside the act's prohibition on electronic surveillance. The administration has offered the further defense that FISA's reference to surveillance "authorized by statute" is satisfied by congressional passage of the post-Sept. 11 resolution giving the president authority to "use all necessary and appropriate force" to prevent those responsible for Sept. 11 from carrying out further attacks. The administration argues that obtaining intelligence is a necessary and expected component of any military or other use of force to prevent enemy action. But even if the NSA activity is "electronic surveillance" and the Sept. 11 resolution is not "statutory authorization" within the meaning of FISA, the act still cannot, in the words of the 2002 Court of Review decision, "encroach upon the president's constitutional power." FISA does not anticipate a post-Sept. 11 situation. What was needed after Sept. 11, according to the president, was surveillance beyond what could be authorized under that kind of individualized case-by-case judgment. It is hard to imagine the Supreme Court second-guessing that presidential judgment. Should we be afraid of this inherent presidential power? Of course. If surveillance is used only for the purpose of preventing another Sept. 11 type of attack or a similar threat, the harm of interfering with the privacy of people in this country is minimal and the benefit is immense. The danger is that surveillance will not be used solely for that narrow and extraordinary purpose. But we cannot eliminate the need for extraordinary action in the kind of unforeseen circumstances presented by Sept.11. I do not believe the Constitution allows Congress to take away from the president the inherent authority to act in response to a foreign attack. That inherent power is reason to be careful about who we elect as president, but it is authority we have needed in the past and, in the light of history, could well need again. ---------- John Schmidt served under President Clinton from 1994 to 1997 as the associate attorney general of the United States. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...3632.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed
maybe cuz americans dont give a shit about elections 8000 miles away and do give a shit about being spied on...
You're smarter than this. You disagree with the Iraq war - fine. But now you disagree with monitoring communications between Al Qaeda and their contacts in the US? Diga me que no es verdad....