Posted on 07/12/2010 4:01:43 AM PDT by captjanaway
On December 16th 2005, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen published a column in the New York Times entitled “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," revealing the highly classified information that:
“Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.”
On June 23,2006 the same authors in the same newspaper wrote a column with a slightly less explosive title “Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror” where revealed secret government activities that monitored and traced Al Qaeda bank transactions by accessing the private banking records of “thousands of Americans and others.”
(Excerpt) Read more at familysecuritymatters.org ...
This is an extremely uncomfortable legal question, because it pits “experimental pragmatism” against civil rights.
9-11 gave a powerful impulse to prevent more terrorist attacks. However, it was hard to do this under existing laws. So there was a successful effort to change the law, to set aside civil rights to achieve greater protection from terrorism.
However, these changes were *speculative*. That is, civil rights were violated, because these violations “might” stop terrorism or catch terrorists. In truth, a large percentage of them were utterly useless at impacting terrorism or terrorists, but they effectively stripped away civil rights.
What made matters worse, was that many that were supposed to be used only against terrorism, have instead almost exclusively been used to “cheat” the law, and be used for everything but terrorism.
But this was not enough. It was made infinitely worse at the behest of the “imperial presidency”, when even congress balked at broad and grotesque civil rights violations, by just deciding to “do what was necessary”, by presidential fiat, despite those actions being clearly illegal.
And only after that had been leaked was the issue made that the leaking was criminal. No. Just no. No more than reporting a bank robbery in progress is somehow wrong.
The bottom line is that the US now has 16 separate major intelligence agencies and 40+ federal police agencies, and many of these are nearly independent of scrutiny and oversight. Above the law.
These agencies have to a great extent been given carte blanche, along with State and local authorities, to do “what is necessary” to prevent terrorism. But there is no distinction between anti-terrorism law and domestic law. If a practice can be used against terrorists, it can be used against jaywalkers.
And civil rights be damned. Yet 99.999% of what they do has nothing to do with terrorism at all. So the public loses an enormous amount of civil rights, with very little to show for it. What terrorist activities have been disrupted have almost exclusively been done through means that existed before 9-11. Good, old fashioned police work.
So realistically, every security law and policy made after 9-11 needs to be coldly reviewed. Only if its statistics prove that it has stopped terrorists and terrorist acts should it be retained. Otherwise it is an abomination and should be discarded. Likewise, if it is used solely against ordinary crime, just to evade civil rights protections, it needs to be cast on the ash heap.
And while we’re at it, we need to decide if we truly need 16 intelligence and 40+ federal police agencies. And whether they should continue to be allowed to do what they want to do, not just what they are told to do.
They found the money my Nigerian uncle was sending me every month.
That was then.
Now we have O spying on our computer conversations, our bank accounts, our phones, land and cell, monitoring our energy use, our credit card purchase, and the magazine subscriptions we purchase.
You are telling us that this reason applies to eight years of Bush presidency?
“You are telling us that this reason applies to eight years of Bush presidency?”
Do you have an instance where the leak came from a Republican?
No, I am not FBI.
The question was not by whom the leak was made but whether only Democratic administrations investigate them. Bush's administration was also not vigorous --- perhaps afraid to discover that the perps are Republican.
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