Machiavelli, the famous Renaissance political philosopher, had a low opinion of his fellow man. In
The Prince , he advised rulers to make free use of deception in their quest for power. "Men are so simple that the deceiver will always find those ready to be deceived." The average run of humanity, fools that they are, judge by appearances rather than realities. For instance, "a certain contemporary ruler is forever preaching peace and good faith," and, since people go by words instead of deeds, he is believed. His deeds, however, show him to be an "an enemy of both, who has never honored either one."
Per Leonard
12.30.2005 "Russian Money to So-Called "Conservatives?" Seeing the Forest In the meantime, if the president believes the current legal architecture of our country is insufficient for the fight against terrorism, he should propose changes to our laws in the light of day.
see also "Pentagon Domestic Spying" William M. Arkin
12.24.2005 "Alito Backed Immunity for Wiretapping -- A 1984 memo on a suit against a Nixon-era official may complicate his confirmation."
12.22.2005 "Judges on Surveillance Court To Be Briefed on Spy Program"
12.22.2005 "Bush Backs Down on Patriot Act"
12.20.2005 emptywheel "I'm suggesting the real issue was they couldn't defend tapping all those numbers at once since the only thing that connected them was a pattern of similarity, not probable cause."
12.20.2005 "Move Over Supreme Court: Rice Anoints Gonzales As “The Highest Legal Authority In The Country”
12.20.2005 Samuel A. Alito, Jr. argued for immunity for Attorney General Mitchell during the Nixon years in a wire tap case. DemFromCT
12.20.2005 Finally, the FBI begins to investigate the Vegans.
12.19.2005 Jonathan Alter: The NY Times withheld certain tchnical information about this program in their story last week because of alleged national security concerns. Now that the president has admitted to authorizing it and he and his flunkies have been babbling incoherently about "moving fast" and "long term monitoring" I think it's now imperative that they tell the public the whole story. "If that's true, he doesn't need the Patriot Act because he can just make it up as he goes along. I tell you, he's President George Bush, not King George Bush. This is not the system of government we have and that we fought for," Feingold told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. And we fell for it, big time. Voters could have gone to the polls on Election Day, Nov. 4, 2004, knowing that Bush was spying on Americans, that a key White House aide was charged with felonies, and that the initial rationales for Iraq were bogus. And so it turns out that the media had the power to alter this country's disastrous direction back in 2004, after all. And we didn't even have to click our heels three times. We'd only needed to do our job.
12.16.2005 A.P. President Bush has personally authorized a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States more than three dozen times since October 2001, a senior intelligence official said Friday night.
WaPo: The law governing clandestine surveillance in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, prohibits conducting electronic surveillance not authorized by statute. A government agent can try to avoid prosecution if he can show he was "engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction," according to the law.
"This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration," said Martin, who has been sharply critical of the administration's surveillance and detention policies. "It is, I believe, the first time a president has authorized government agencies to violate a specific criminal prohibition and eavesdrop on Americans."
Hilzoy:
See Also: "Domestic Spying Criminal Penalties and Civil Liability"
On a day where Bill Moyers is being quoted as saying "There has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy," the administration has set an order that on its surface looks like it creates some mechanism for review of governmental FOIA compliance. A quick glance seems to indicate that this will improve the fulfilment of the public right to know. Does it merely insert a layer of Bush document shredders between any request and the public? ...
Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's (Delay's) former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).
12.24.2005 "Power We Didn't Grant" By Tom Daschle
If the stories in the media over the past week are accurate, the president has exercised authority that I do not believe is granted to him in the Constitution, and that I know is not granted to him in the law that I helped negotiate with his counsel and that Congress approved in the days after Sept. 11. For that reason, the president should explain the specific legal justification for his authorization of these actions, Congress should fully investigate these actions and the president's justification for them, and the administration should cooperate fully with that investigation.
12.24.2005 "Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report"
The Senate deal that ended the filibuster threat extends the act only for six months and provides critics with clear openings to debate contentious provisions, particularly those that permit the
FBI to conduct "sneak-and-peak" searches of private homes and businesses, to wiretap telephones and examine of emails, and to obtain secret warrants for library, medical, business and personal records of Americans who are not suspected of committing crimes.
12.21.2005 "Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest"
I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting,
but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.
12.19.2005 Digby:The administration may even be fooling itself that it needs all this "wartime" power to "protect America." But the real purpose of a government spying on its own citizens is only really about one thing --- political power. If there's anything we know about the modern Republican party it's that everything that can be done to feed the machine will be done. They are the very definition of why the founders created this ridiculously byzantine system of checks and balances --- to keep people like Ted Olsen and Karl Rove from turning this country into the tyranny like the one from which we had just freed ourselves.
12.19.2005 Digby: "Checks And Balances"
The only thing we can assume from the information we have is that they didn't want anyone, not even a rubber stamp secret court, to know who they were monitoring. Now why would that be?
12.17.2005 AP Feingold said it was "absurd" that Bush said he relied on his inherent power as president to authorize the wiretaps.
12.17.2005 Glenn Greenwald: Bush's unchecked Executive power v. the Founding principles of the U.S. (as expressed in the Federalist papers and in an opinion of Justice Scalia -- Read the whole thing)
"This absolute power claimed and enthusiastically exercised by George Bush violates not just specific Constitutional limitations, but the core principles of the Constitution: that we are a nation of laws not men; that each branch shall be "co-equal" to the others and checked and limited by the other two; and that the people shall retain ultimate power by vesting in them the right to enact supreme laws through the Congress which shall bind all other citizens, including the President."
12.16.2005 The Big Stall: How Bush gamed the media to get re-elected in 2004
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Both the Bush Administration’s theory of its own unchecked power and its indiscriminate and aggressive use of that power to violate Congressional law contradicts every constitutional principle created to ensure that we do not live under unchecked Executive tyranny. If the President is allowed to get away with secretly decreeing that he can violate the law and then doing exactly that, then there really are no remaining checks on Executive power -- and we have, without hyperbole, arrived at the very definition of tyranny.
12.16.2005 What do you call reporters who don't report?
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Simply put, the Bush White House gamed the media in 2004. They used every trick in their playbook: Manipulating the comatose post-9/11 media and its gullible trust in authority, playing on kneejerk protection of sources, and when that failed, either resorting to bullying (as in the case of CBS) or pleading national security on barely defendable grounds.
NYT: 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.
ReddHedd:
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The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
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Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal.
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A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.
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Mr. Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." (entirely consistent with his positions on torture)
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The official said that, since October 2001, the program has been renewed more than three dozen times. Each time, the White House counsel and the attorney general certified the lawfulness of the program, the official said. Bush then signed the authorizations.
Here is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Its Section 1809a makes it a criminal offense to "engage in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute."
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As I noted above, the law specifically allows for warrantless surveillance in emergencies, when the government needs to start surveillance before it can get a warrant. It explains exactly what the government needs to do under those circumstances. It therefore provides the flexibility the administration claims it needed.
They had no need to go around the law. They could easily have obeyed it. They just didn't want to.
Under 36 USC 1805, the Attorney General may authorize emergency surveillance (including wiretapping and other regulated surveillance methods) for up to 72 hours, so long as application for approval by the FISA supervisory court is made before that time expires. The Administration already had all the emergency measures it needed to do surveillance without illegal encroachment on American civil liberties.
Martin Garbus: "The Federal Communications Act criminalizes surveillance without a warrant. It is an impeachable offense.
Potentially thousands of Americans have claims for three years at $100 per day, or a maximum of about $110,000 each. I do wonder what the discovery rules are for those lawsuits.
12.16.2005 Aaron:
The Whitehouse has posted a new executive order about Freedom of Information Act requests.
Guantanamo ... Social Security ... Wilson/Plame Timeline ... Judicial Nominations
The Project for the New American Century's Statement of Principles, and its pre-2000 writings about Iraq.
The U.S. Constitution
See also
Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau
gentle.reader@att.net ... A proud member of the reality based community.