Bush refuses to answer questions about spying on Americans....

Mr. "All the airplanes would crash if we didn't have the FAA to regulate & protect us" finally releases his inner Libertarian.

Congratulations!

 

i am not a US citizen.

i used to love the country and going there till 9/11.

i always claimed that i love the US people and only had a problem with the current administration. after reading through the posts in this thread, i've changed my stance, sadly.

 

Good. Too bad the Hollywood looney's didnt keep word on their promise and join you in NOT being US citizens.

 

You are sounding more and more like Scott McClellan.
You did not answer the question.

 

How about Campus Watch dddooo?? This Zionist organization is spying on American University professors and students who sympathize with the Palestinian cause?

 

Well, I'm not Bush or Gonzales, so please forgive me for not answering you to your satisfaction.

Clearly FISA is still being utilized, as talking heads have been noting the thousands of warrants that have been approved since 9/11; Assistant AG Moschella's letter to Congressional Intelligence Committee members three days ago also states that FISA is being made "full use of" and "has proven to be a very important tool, especially in longer-term investigations."

Also clear, at least to me, per Assistant AG Moschella's letter, is that Bush and his advisors feel that there are limitations in FISA as they apply to the operational aspects of how the NSA is monitoring Al Qaeda. Whether we will ever know what those operational aspects are is highly doubtful as the government isn't about to go into the details of how exactly it monitors Al Qaeda for obvious reasons (well, obvious if you think it isn't a good idea for Al Qaeda to know such details).

I will guess, though, that those who trust Bush about as far as they can throw him, or for lesser reasons (i.e. political), will demand that the NSA does divulge some of its operational aspects, without regard if doing so results in it making it more difficult to track Al Qaeda and possibly prevent other attacks.

 

The Paranoid Style In American Liberalism

by William Kristol

No reasonable American, no decent human being, wants to send up a white flag in the war on terror. But leading spokesmen for American liberalism-hostile beyond reason to the Bush administration, and ready to believe the worst about American public servants-seem to have concluded that the terror threat is mostly imaginary. It is the threat to civil liberties from George W. Bush that is the real danger. These liberals recoil unthinkingly from the obvious fact that our national security requires policies that are a step (but only a careful step) removed from ACLU dogma.

On Monday, December 19, General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and now deputy director of national intelligence, briefed journalists. The back--and--forth included this exchange:

Reporter: Have you identified armed enemy combatants, through this program, in the United States?

Gen. Hayden: This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.

Reporter: General Hayden, I know you're not going to talk about specifics about that, and you say it's been successful. But would it have been as successful-can you unequivocally say that something has been stopped or there was an imminent attack or you got information through this that you could not have gotten through going to the court?

Gen. Hayden: I can say unequivocally, all right, that we have got information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.

Now, General Hayden is by all accounts a serious, experienced, nonpolitical military officer. You would think that a statement like this, by a man in his position, would at least slow down the glib assertions of politicians, op--ed writers, and journalists that there was no conceivable reason for President Bush to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. As Gary Schmitt and David Tell explain elsewhere in this issue, FISA was broken well before 9/11. Was the president to ignore the evident fact that FISA's procedures and strictures were simply incompatible with dealing with the al Qaeda threat in an expeditious manner? Was the president to ignore the obvious incapacity of any court, operating under any intelligible legal standard, to judge surveillance decisions involving the sweeping of massive numbers of cell phones and emails by high--speed computers in order even to know where to focus resources? Was the president, in the wake of 9/11, and with the threat of imminent new attacks, really supposed to sit on his hands and gamble that Congress might figure out a way to fix FISA, if it could even be fixed? The questions answer themselves.

But the spokesmen for contemporary liberalism didn't pause to even ask these questions. The day after Gen. Hayden's press briefing, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee blathered on about "the Constitution in crisis" and "impeachable conduct." Barbara Boxer, a Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted there was "no excuse" for the president's actions. The ranking Democrat on that committee, Joseph Biden, confidently stated that the president's claims were "bizarre" and that "aggrandizement of power" was probably the primary reason for the president's actions, since "there was no need to do any of this."

So we are really to believe that President Bush just sat around after 9/11 thinking, "How can I aggrandize my powers?" Or that Gen. Hayden-and his hundreds of nonpolitical subordinates-cheerfully agreed to an obviously crazy, bizarre, and unnecessary project of "domestic spying"?

This is the fever swamp into which American liberalism is on the verge of descending.

Some have already descended. Consider Arlene Getz, senior editorial manager at Newsweek.com. She posted an article Wednesday-also after Gen. Hayden's press briefing-on Newsweek's website ruminating on "the parallels" between Bush's defense of his "spying program" and, yes, "South Africa's apartheid regime."

Back in the 1980s, when I was living in Johannesburg and reporting on apartheid South Africa, a white neighbor proffered a tasteless confession. She was "quite relieved," she told me, that new media restrictions prohibited our reporting on government repression. No matter that Pretoria was detaining tens of thousands of people without real evidence of wrongdoing. No matter that many of them, including children, were being tortured-sometimes to death. No matter that government hit squads were killing political opponents. No matter that police were shooting into crowds of black civilians protesting against their disenfranchisement. "It's so nice," confided my neighbor, "not to open the papers and read all that bad news."

I thought about that neighbor this week, as reports dribbled out about President George W. Bush's sanctioning of warrantless eavesdropping on American conversations. . . . I'm sure there are many well--meaning Americans who agree with their president's explanation that it's all a necessary evil (and that patriotic citizens will not be spied on unless they dial up Osama bin Laden). But the nasty echoes of apartheid South Africa should at least give them pause.

Yup. First the Bush administration will listen in to international communications of a few hundred people in America who seem to have been in touch with terrorists abroad . . . and next thing you know, government hit squads will be killing George W. Bush's political opponents.

What is one to say about these media--Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media.

Too bad we have neither.

 

From Capitol Hill Blue

What Price Freedom?
Government spying on Americans goes far beyond what Bush admits
By Staff and Wire Reports
Dec 24, 2005, 09:11

The National Security Agency (NSA) has conducted much broader surveillance of e-mails and phone calls -- all without court orders -- than the Bush administration admits and intelligence experts say the spying goes far beyond just monitoring phone and email communications.

The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications say current and former government officials.

President Bush claims his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al-Qaida but NSA technicians routinely comb through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic searching for patterns that might lead to terrorists.

In addition, NSA employs "data mining," a technique of comparing huge amounts of travel, financial and related information to build a pattern of behavior on American citizens.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunications data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House admits.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications firm who, for obvious reasons, asks not to be identified, says companies have been storing information on calling patterns since the Sept. 11 attacks, and giving it to the federal government.

“We have a police state far beyond anything George Orwell imagined in his book 1984,” says privacy expert Susan Morrissey. “The everyday lives of virtually every American are under scrutiny 24-hours-a-day by the government.”

Paul Hawken, owner of the data information mining company Groxis, agrees, saying the government is spending more time watching ordinary Americans than chasing terrorists and the bad news is that they aren’t very good at it.

“It’s the Three Stooges go to data mining school,” Hawken says. “Even worse, DARPA is depending on second-rate companies to provide them with the technology, which only increases the chances for errors.”

One such company is Torch Concepts. The Department of Homeland Security provided the company with flight information on five million passengers who flew Jet Blue Airlines in 2002 and 2003. Torch then matched that information with social security numbers, credit and other personal information in government databases to build a prototype passenger profiling system for the government's Terrorist Information Awarness (TIA) network developed by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency in cooperation with the NSA.

Jet Blue executives were livid when they learned how their passenger information, which they must provide the government under the USA Patriot Act, was used and when it was presented at a technology conference with the title: Homeland Security – Airline Passenger Risk Assessment.

Privacy Expert Bill Scannell didn’t buy Jet Blue’s anger.

“JetBlue has assaulted the privacy of 5 million of its customers,” said Scannell. “Anyone who flew should be aware and very scared that there is a dossier on them.”

But information from TIA and NSA will be used by DHS as a major part of the proposed CAPSII airline passenger monitoring system. That system, when fully in place, will determine whether or not any American is allowed to get on an airplane for a flight.

JetBlue requested the report be destroyed and the passenger data be purged from the TIA computers but TIA refuses to disclose the status of either the report or the data.

Although exact statistics are classified, security experts say the U.S. Government has paid out millions of dollars in out-of-court settlements to Americans who have been wrongly accused, illegally detained or harassed because of mistakes made by TIA and NSA. Those who accept settlements also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and won’t discuss their cases.

Hawken refused to do business with DARPA, saying TIA was both unethical and illegal.

"We got a lot of e-mails from companies – even conservative ones – saying, ‘Thank you. Finally someone won’t do something for money,’" he adds.

Those who refuse to work with TIA include NSA specialists in Fort Meade, MD. TIA uses NSA’s technology to listen in on wireless phone calls as well as the agency’s list of key words and phrases to identify potential terrorist activity.

“I know NSA employees who have quit rather than cooperate with DARPA,” Hawken says. “NSA’s mandate is to track the activities of foreign enemies of this nation, not Americans.”

 

By David Corn

December 26, 2005
Bush the Liberal?

I thought that Bush administration officials believed in narrow and restrained interpretation of the law. At least, that's what they say when it comes to selecting judges. And some Bush allies in the judicial wars believe in literally interpreting the Constitution: if the words aren't there, the ideas are not. Anyone who attempts to read into the text--or who seek to apply the ideas behind the text to modern situations that could not have been foreseen by the guys who came up with the Constitution--is accused of committing the sin of "judicial activism." Of course, conservative judges often engage in such activism themselves when they impose their views (narrow or broad) upon the implementation of laws passed by legislative bodies. Still, it is the rightwing, with Bush shouting "Amen," that has made the end of liberal judicial activism a holy cause.

That's why I have been bemused in recent days by the Bush administration's attempt to justify Bush's order that instructed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without seeking warrants--not even after-the-fact in emergency circumstances (as is permitted by existing law). In a letter sent to Congress, Bush's Justice Department acknowledged that Bush's snooping order did not comply with "the 'procedures' of" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which set up a secret intelligence court and made it a crime to conduct electronic surveillance without obtaining a warrant form that court, except in certain situations authorized by the law. But in that letter, Assistant Attorney General William Moschella claimed that Congress implicitly established an exception to FISA when it passed a resolution days after 9/11 that authorized Bush to use military force in response to the that attack. This law contained not a single reference to surveillance. Yet Moschella claimed that NSA snooping was covered by this authority.

How liberal of the Bush Justice Department. At that time, Bush was free to ask specifically for such authority. And if it had been shoved into the Patriot Act, it probably would have won congressional approval. Moreover, Tom Daschle, who was then Senate majority leader, notes that the Bush White House did indeed ask for war-making authority "in the United States" and that Congress rejected that formulation. If true, this undercuts Bush's case that Congress essentially granted his administration permission to snoop domestically without a warrant within the United States.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been pushing this implied-powers argument, too. He has pointed to a 2004 Supreme Court decision--a four-member plurality--that declared that the 2001 resolution did implicitly permit Bush to detain American citizens suspected of terrorism. But that ruling did note that such detainees must be given access to the courts--that is, that there had to be some degree of due process. The Court maintained that the president could not do whatever he wanted in this matter. Gonzales, who has previously pushed a president-is-king position--is practically saying that this Supreme Court decision allowed the president rewrite or ignore any law he wishes to if he can say he is doing so to prosecute the war on terrorism. Now that's legal activism. Gonzales' recent statements also echoes a Justice Department memo regarding torture that claimed Bush was not bound by existing law when he takes actions as commander-in-chief--a memo that Gonzales did disavow when the White House was under fire for seeming to justify the use of torture. Clearly, Gonzales still believes in the intellectual underpinnings of that memo.

The Bushies--with Dick Cheney beating the drum--are mounting the most extensive power-grab seen in decades. Yes, there is a war. Yes, Abraham Lincoln did suspend habeus corpus. Still, this band is fiercely challenging the general constitutional balance, and, worse, they are doing it in secrecy. Consequently, they are trying to prevent citizens from seeing and debating the arguably unconstitutional actions they are taking, supposedly in the name of protecting the citizenry. This is hardly traditionalism; this is radicalism.

 

What an incredibly naive statement.

Their stated mission: the protection of U.S. information systems and the production of foreign signals intelligence information.

If Al Qaeda is talking to someone in the US, that is still "foreign intelligence information."

If Americans are communicating with Al Qaeda and abetting them, they too are enemies of this nation.

I suppose John Lindh should get a free pass because he is an American citizen?