Posted on 02/20/2008 8:55:27 PM PST by SUSSA
In the fight to reauthorize the warrantless wiretaps of Americans and to grant immunity to companies who helped the government spy on Americans, conservatives are backing Bush and pushing to grant not just immunity, but retroactive immunity to companies. Americans should be very worried about this.
With the likelihood that Hillary Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama will become President next year, conservatives should ask themselves; do they want a Craig Livingstone or a Janet (The Butcher) Reno to have that power? Do they want to give immunity to companies who help a Craig Livingstone or Janet Reno spy on Americans?
That prospect should chill any conservative to the bone.
Some people seem to have forgotten that during the Bill Clinton administration, Craig Livingstone, a thug who had been a bar bouncer before showing up as director of the White House's Office of Personnel Security, a job nobody in the administration ever admitted to hiring him for, requested and got more than 900 FBI files on Republican political figures.
Some of the conservatives pushing to give the government this power seem to have forgotten that Janet Reno’s thugs kidnapped Elian Gonzalez in violation of a then three-day-old decision of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that ordered Ms. Reno to keep Elian in the U.S. and denied her request for an injunction requiring Mr. Gonzalez to turn the boy over. They also seem to forget what she did to Pastor Koresh and his parishioners, including women and children, at their Mount Carmel church in Waco.
Now, they are ready to give that kind of people the additional power to spy on Americans without the oversight of a court just because George Bush says they should.
Democrats don’t trust Bush and his administration with these new powers and are holding up passage of the bill. They point to the admitted abuses of the grossly misnamed “Patriot” Act as reason enough to not erode the Fourth Amendment any more than they already did. Why should Republicans, especially conservative Republicans, be more trusting ofAndrew P. Napolitano either Hillary Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama with this power?
In spite of the administration’s abuses of the “Patriot” Act, and their blatantly criminal violations of the FISA law, most Republicans trust Bush and are willing to hand him more power to spy on Americans. Do the majority of Republicans think they can have an equal amount of trust in Clinton or Obama?
Senator Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho, told Rush Limbaugh and his millions of listeners: "There will come a day when there will not be a George W in the White House, and tragically enough, and I hope never, it could be a Hillary Clinton." Craig wondered aloud: "Who will be her attorney general, and what might he or she do to your liberties and mine? There's the question." The Idaho Republican told Limbaugh: "You know, I've been here a little while, and I remember Janet Reno, and I remember Waco and Ruby Ridge." "And I fear the day that we get a president, not this president, who has a very liberal attorney general and sees the opportunity, to leap through the holes that are crafted in the Patriot Act, that could tread on our civil liberties." If like Senator Craig, one fears Hillary or Obama would misuse the “Patriot” Act, why on earth would he want to give them even more power to spy on Americans?
Legal scholars from Professor Lawrence Tribe on the left to Judge Andrew Napolitano, on the right, have warned about the erosion of our Fourth Amendment protections. Americans of all political persuasions would do well to heed their warnings.
Over the next fifteen days, Republicans should thing long and hard about who they are handing this power to, Andrew P. Napolitano and then join the Democrats who are stopping this bad bill from passing. .
##
Michael Rodgers is a civil rights worker and activist living in Texas.
I’m not decided. What are the safeguards?
Bush admin spied on so many Americans that not one could even be mentioned in the article. The Clintons spied on Americans in spite of any and all laws. The law is irrelevant to commies.
900 raw data FBI files...no one got penalized....
We are not “spying on Americans”.
We are conducting surveillance of terrorists and their support network in this country.
That difference either eludes them, or they ignore it because they HATE BUSH
GET BUSH STOP BUSH IMPEACH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH
BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH BUSH!
The Bush Justice Department documented more than 1000 cases of domestic spying abuse by the FBI alone from 2002 to 2004. Don’t you believe them?
That doesn’t take into consideration the violations of the FISA law that prompted the push to change the law.
I don’t ask for a whole Hell of a lot. One thing I do ask for is to just forget about all the “civil rights” crap, and go back to the “inalienable rights” that are our birthrights.
Tellyawhat, folks, if this nation had been a democracy, back in the 60s, we would still have separate water fountains, but, we are a REPUBLIC, and THE CONSTITUTION says, “ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL”.
Just as soon as we started all of the “civil rights” crap, we turned our birthrights over to the Devil!
The average “democrat” only worries about how much free milk and cookies he can snag out of someone else’s wallet.
Sorry, but nobody should get a blank check. There needs to be judicial oversight. If the actions in question are so aggregious that they will not pass muster before a typically handpicked & friendly FISA judge, there is a problem. Most likely the action would be highly criminal.
Do you want to give such power to someone like Janet Reno or Wesley Clark? Just think how they would wield it.
Ain’t buying this.
However, it scares me to think what Slick Hillie or Hussein would do with greatly expanded government powers.
What safeguards? The AG has to sign off on it? You trust Janet Reno or someone like her to do that? Larry Craig doesn’t.
The Fourth Amendment is a Constitutional right. It shouldn’t be weakened.
Who are the foreign nationals the GOP/conservative figures are talking with?
Or are we going to go back to the old argument that the chief enemy of America is some “vast right wing conspiracy” of “anti-(socialist)-government” types, never mind the Isalmic theocracy tyrannts blowing up men women and children...
Hillary illegally held those FBI files.
Sandy Berger illegally stole and destroyed notes from the National Archives.
Laws don’t mean sh*t to the Clintons. Having “this power” or “not having this power” is a choice the Clintons make, not one based on any legal standing to claim that power.
It should scare everyone. Handing them this kind of unsupervised power is nuts.
I’ve never seen any of the documentation. You would think that such a thing would have been relevant enough to document in this article yet it wasn’t.
So you trust Hillary or Obama with this power?
‘We are not “spying on Americans”.
We are conducting surveillance of terrorists and their support network in this country.’
I remember the Clinton years. Conservative white Christians and people that just wanted left alone (separatists) were called terrorists. The Clinton administration ran a fear campaign, telling the citizenry that the militia members were out to kill them and pervert the American way of life. They became the FBI’s number one target. Billions were spent investigating them.
Well after the Clinton’s left office, shouldn’t those militias have killed us all?? Or was it all just lies?
I guess it all depends on your definition of “terrorist”.
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