Posted on 12/02/2001 8:13:07 AM PST by OKCSubmariner
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:49:36 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The Bush administration is asking Congress for a second major expansion of federal surveillance powers that legal experts say would radically change laws that have long protected the rights of Americans.
A Justice Department proposal would eliminate the chief legal safeguard in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). A CIA proposal seeks legal authority to gather telephone and Internet records from domestic communication companies.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Just like criminal law and civil law are quite different, laws applicable to war are different. We are in a war and the battlefield is main street and wall street. The USSC has held that a citizen can be tried by military tribunal for an act of war against the U.S. I believe they will also concur that any person engaged in such conduct is also not protected by other due process.
If we have a citizen, an alien, or an illegal – on U.S. ground – suspected of aiding, abetting or executing an act of war against this country then no, I agree with the USSC and absolutely do NOT extend constitutional rights to them, nor a need for a grand jury, probable cause, discovery or appeal. In my view, they have forfeited the right to due process by acting violently against the entire body of citizens.
I’m not afraid of these new laws. If the legal tools of war are abused, they will be partially overturned in federal court – as they have been in the past.
And, as in the past, the USSC will come down in favor of due process for a citizen or legal alien not engaged in an act of war - even a very disgruntled citizen who resents government at all.
I disagree with you and neither of us will convince the other - so I now shall disengage from this debate. It's been interesting. Thanks for sharing your views!
Hello my friend. A war on terrorism can never be over, and the government terrorists will never "restore" what they have taken because of the blindness of the American people to force such action. Americans believed what they were told by the established communist media outlets concerning their government in general, politicans, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the income tax, withholding, the IRS, social security, wars, the drug war, asset forfeiture, emergency and executive order tyranny, the environment, universities, government education, Hollywood, attorneys, the courts and judicial mechanisms, the many economic depressions, etc. Primarily, they just want a Lazy-Boy with a sophisticated remote control, and, they only want to know what their payments are going to be on their personal debt, and, the public debt is owed by the tooth fairy. Perhaps less than 5% of Americans have read the Constitution and understand it. The rule of law is dead The fall of the once great Republic is coming. The elite have crafted its collapse. Americans were too busy with soap operas, Oprah, Jerry Springer and sports to notice. I'll tell you something else. Americans don't have a clue how devastating "debt" will be for this country. They will find out.
"The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest."
Benjamin Franklin
SECRETS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE
On September 30, 1941, before the same Committee, Governor Eccles was asked by Representative Patman: "How did you get the money to buy those two billion dollars worth of Government securities in 1933?
ECCLES: We created it.
MR. PATMAN: Out of what?
ECCLES: Out of the right to issue credit money.
MR. PATMAN: And there is nothing behind it, is there, except our Government’s credit?
ECCLES: That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money."
On June 17, 1942, Governor Eccles was interrogated by Mr. Dewey.
ECCLES: "I mean the Federal Reserve, when it carries out an open market operation, that is, if it purchases Government securities in the 167 open market, it puts new money into the hands of the banks which creates idle deposits.
DEWEY: There are no excess reserves to use for this purpose?
ECCLES: Whenever the Federal Reserve System buys Government securities in the open market, or buys them direct from the Treasury, either one, that is what it does.
DEWEY: What are you going to use to buy them with? You are going to create credit?
ECCLES: That is all we have ever done. That is the way the Federal Reserve System operates.
The Federal Reserve System creates money. It is a bank of issue."
At the House Hearing of 1947, Mr. Kolburn asked Mr. Eccles:
"What do you mean by monetization of the public debt?
ECCLES: I mean the bank creating money by the purchase of Government securities. All is created by debt--either private or public debt.
FLETCHER: Chairman Eccles, when do you think there is a possibility of returning to a free and open market, instead of this pegged and artificially controlled financial market we now have?
ECCLES: Never. Not in your lifetime or mine."
There is no returning, perhaps in theory, not in reality.
"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
God bless, Uncle Bill.
I'm afraid you're correct again, Uncle Bill. Super post. Thanks for weighing in.
We're watching the beginning of the Fourth Reich and many people here just think it's dandy.
I don't - they can watch you and Alamo-Girl. It'll make you feel all warm and squishy, and safe (ewwwwww, the magic word - "SAFE" - just rolls off you tongue, like "Seig Heil")
Government never gives back what it takes - NEVER. Anyone who thinks so is delusional.
prambo
In the Patriot Act the government has amendments to this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and to the Nation Security Act of 1947.
The Partiot Act NOW INCLUDES Citizens in some of the amendments to these Acts.
Here is a great article about the FISC
Inside America's Secret Court: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
by Patrick S. Poole
Introduction
In a highly restricted room inside the Department of Justice Building in Washington D.C. resides a federal court that meets in complete secrecy. Even though the rulings this secret court issues may result in criminal charges, convictions and prison sentences for US citizens, their writs and rulings are permanently sealed from review by those accused of crimes and from any substantive civilian review. This is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which considers surveillance and physical search orders from the Department of Justice and US intelligence agencies. During the 20-year tenure of the FISC the court has received over 10,000 applications for covert surveillance and physical searches. To date, not a single application has been denied.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)<1> was passed in 1978, during the days of increased terrorist activity against American citizens around the world. The Cold War and American involvement in the Middle East raised fears both about increased spying on US government, military and business facilities and personnel and about terrorists planning attacks in the US and against Americans overseas. In this atmosphere, federal law enforcement and intelligence administrators requested Congress to increase surveillance powers to combat these growing trends. The FISA statute was also a regulative response to the allegations of domestic spying by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies during the 1960s and 70s.
However, with the FISA legislation passed, the process was cloaked in absolute secrecy. While few Americans are even aware of the court's existence, the FISC routinely hears applications for surveillance and physical searches from federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The FISA court issues more surveillance and physical search orders than the entire federal judiciary combined.
Many constitutional scholars and civil liberty advocates note that the overly broad powers of the FISA statute and court authority are in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and general warrants. With such a powerful weapon against citizens' Constitutional liberties, many opponents of the court argue that Congress should conduct extensive oversight of the court. But congressional oversight of the FISA court is virtually non-existent.
The only information required by FISA to be provided to congressional oversight committees is the number of surveillance orders approved each calendar year and brief semi-annual reports. The entire 1997 report on the FISC's activity totaled two paragraphs. But what those brief annual reports do chronicle is the exponential rate of growth of surveillance orders issued by the FISC.
Recent criminal cases proceeding from evidence gathered by FISA surveillance orders have raised many questions regarding the constitutionality of FISA searches and surveillance and the assumption of enormous powers by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Defense attorneys for those charged for crimes with evidence gathered under a FISA order maintain that the FISA court stands as a "court of last resort" for zealous prosecutors unable to obtain a criminal indictment from other federal courts. Some of the orders approved by the FISC have proven to be government "fishing expeditions" aimed at circumventing citizen's Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted searches.
Origins of the Court
With the collapse of the Nixon Administration following the Watergate scandal, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (otherwise known as the Church Committee) discovered that the federal government had been engaged in widespread domestic surveillance for several decades.
In response, several members of Congress set about to devise a plan to limit the surveillance power of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In the wake of the subsequent public outrage and out of fear warrantless surveillance would be outlawed altogether, President Ford supported the FISA bill to limit the "inherent authority" of the President to conduct warrantless surveillance in the interest of national security.
Prior to that time, most presidents claimed to have implicit constitutional authority to approve warrantless surveillance for national security purposes under the executive branch's Constitutional power to conduct foreign policy. But that power had been used by government agencies to justify domestic spying against law-abiding anti-war demonstrators and many of the leaders of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s despite First and Fourth Amendment protections prohibiting such activity.
The FISA bill was a product of closed-door negotiations lasting several months between legislators and the Justice Department. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who had attempted to regulate the power of warrantless surveillance in four different sessions, sponsored the FISA legislation.
The FISC concept was a compromise between legislators who wanted the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA), the only two agencies affected by the FISA statute, to follow the standard procedure for obtaining a court order required in criminal investigations and legislators. The federal agencies believed that they should be completely unfettered in conducting their foreign intelligence surveillance work inside US borders. Hence, the FISC was born.<2> FISA was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on October 25, 1978. Executive Order 12139,<3> signed by President Carter several months later, officially chartered the FISC. The legislation established an authorization procedure for the FISC to issue surveillance orders without probable cause. It also set up a "minimization" procedure for communications by US citizens inadvertently intercepted by the agencies. With the passage of FISA, the NSA was bound for the first time to a process of judicial review before initiating domestic surveillance operations.
Catherine Herridge:
This is a new war we are fighting as you have said many times, What will you consider the terms of victory for Homeland Defense?
Tom Ridge:
That's a wonderful question because as we equate victory with previous wars. We saw our enemy surrender..a..we saw a variety of very visible and tangible things that said that we've won. I think obviously we asses victory differently because these are shadow enemies, shadow soldiers.
We may not know the victories we enjoy on the battlefield because in many instances if we disrupt their activity, if we take them down before an incident has occurred, If we pushed our perimeter for far off the border and beyond the oceans, that we get them and they are arrested, incarcerated and dealt with in other parts of the world a the American public may never know of those successes.
I guess when we have more countries united with us and we've improved our infrastructure as we do every single day and we just say to ourselves we done everything we can in America to reduce the risks and protect ourselves we'll feel good about that, but we'll never achieve complete and total visible victory as long as there is one person out there that could potentially attach some a explosives, or do something to disrupt our way of life. It may not even necessarily be an external terrorist. It may be a Timothy McVeigh, an anarchist, someone from this country, but I think America wants us to be more secure as we're prepared to invest in greater security and I think that they ought to take a great deal of comfort that every single day that's what their president wants done, that's what the citizens want done, that's what the congress wants done and basically that's what America is doing.
Right. That's why we still have the draft, WWII price controls, WWII censorship, WWII rationing, WWII civil defense regulations (blacked out windows near coasts, beaches patrolled by armed soldiers, etc.) and WWII 'excess profits' taxes on corporations.
( / sarcasm)
Suggestion: if you can't grow up limit yourself to sites without people old enough to remember when this country won its wars ... bigtime.
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