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President Bush Blocks NSA Wireless Tapping Probe
scubamage writes "By denying security clearance to federal attorneys from the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) seeking to gather evidence in the NSA illegal surveillance scandal, President Bush has effectively blocked the Justice Department's investigation into the matter of who exactly authorized the illegal actions to take place. The president is apparently able to strictly control who does and does not have security clearance to examine documents regarding the program, citing that giving more people access would endanger national security. His denial is the first of its kind in American history. To quote the article, 'Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels,' chief lawyer H. Marshall Jarrett wrote in a memorandum released Tuesday. 'In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation.'"
> President Bush has effectively blocked the Justice Department's investigation into the matter of
> who exactly authorized the illegal actions to take place
He sure as hell wouldn't have done that had it been an opportunity to point the finger at any of his rivals. Even if he wasn't responsible, he's now responsible for the cover up. If American voters aren't happy with his decision they can always vote him out. I'm sure by the time of the next election there'll be some other bogeyman to deal with - presumably lebenese or syrian terrorists, angry at all the US built/paid for planes and tanks pounding lebenon.
Of course, he is going to block it. Funny thing is, this investigation had no teeth to start off with. It basically said that we are going to do everything in our power to check every little corner if you will allow it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We need to revoke your rights in order to protect them. History will look back upon George W. Bush as the undoing of what it means to be American.
And with it the separation of the powers of legislative, executive, judiciary functions. Americans should say "thanks for the good times, farewell". With a bit of goodwill, you will still see these things in history books for a few years.
Juvenal is the ancient Roman who asked "Who will watch the watchmen?" For George Bush, the answer is evidently "Preferably, nobody."
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
First of all, that headline... While it may be technically true, it's misleading. Then the write-up that convicts the entire program even before an investigation (which is apparently now stalled) has been started by calling it "illegal actions". That might be putting the proverbial cart before the horse.
Let's try re-writing the headline and summary:
Senator Kerry Blocks NSA Wireless Tapping Probe
By failing to win the presidency, Senator Kerry has effectively blocked the Justice Department's investigation into the matter of who exactly authorized the illegal actions to take place.
There you go - this entire thing is really Kerry's doing. And though misleading, it's technically correct.
I'm a big tall mofo.
This was inevitable. The only thing that amazes me is that people genuinely thought this would go somewhere
Lie, Whitewash, Stonewall.
Rinse, Repeat.
These are dark days. And we still have two and a half years to go.
... into the matter of who exactly authorized the illegal actions to take place.
Ahem, sorry to get "technical", but the actions haven't been proven to be illegal yet. They are "allegedly" illegal, since no one has been convicted of a crime (if that will ever happen).
But this is typical spin... the fact is that part of the power of the President, of all Presidents, is to decide on the classification of information within the executive branch of government. When something is classified as "top secret", it requires the President to say, "hey this can now be released to the public" before it is legal to actually do so. This is why we've been having these leak probes (although they haven't gone anywhere). It's called access control... it's there for a reason... and it's not to hinder an investigative probe into misconduct, but to prevent the hindering of investigations into terrorist activities.
Then too he has an odd definition of freedom. He seems to think freedom and democracy are exactly the same thing.
Don't get me wrong... Democracy and voting play substantial roles in assuring freedom. But they're not the only things.
Take for example the cohabitation law struck down in North Carolina recently. A democraticly elected majority said: an unrelated man and woman can't live with each other under the same roof unless they get married. Its fornication and society won't stand for it.
That's not freedom. Freedom says you can run your personal life pretty much any way you want to and its nobody else's business.
I don't think Dubya gets that.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Here's a suitable quote: "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Umm, just exactly _what_ illegal actions occured?
That's the question we'd like answered. It appears the President used his position to order wiretaps without bothering to get judicial authorisation, which is illegal. Or, at least, was at the time. That's the point of the investigation, to learn exactly what was done, when, by whom, and for what purpose.
If the President illegally ordered wiretaps, it's a Very Big Deal.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"By denying [...], President Bush has effectively blocked the [...] investigation into the matter of who exactly authorized the illegal actions to take place."
Technically, yes. Pragmatically, he has made it very, very obvious that it was either he himself or someone very close to him.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's called access control... it's there for a reason... and it's not to hinder an investigative probe into misconduct, but to prevent the hindering of investigations into terrorist activities.
Precisely!
So why is the President using it to block an investigative probe into misconduct? If he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Simple. Let America become a totalitarian state. It won't last, but it will scare enough people for the time that it does last to buy another two hundred years of freedom, after maybe a twenty year civil war.
We have failed to learn history. Now we have to take our medicine and repeat it.
Off topic? This is pretty fucking on-topic. The headline says "President Bush Blocks NSA Wireless Tapping Probe" and there's no such thing. There is a warrentless wiretapping probe, but no wireless tapping probe.
Something that's been bothering me for the last few years about the cry from the administration for utmost secrecy in its actions is the way they never get around to saying exactly whom they're trying to hide information from. When all is said and done, is there any reason to believe that al Qaeda has intelligence gathering capabilities beyond watching satellite television?
We've had secret court cases before, we've had secret sessions of Congress, we have a whole series of safeguards that were apparently deemed necessary and proper when our foe was something as formidable as the KGB, why are we to believe that a non-state has the resources to do better? It would seem all that is needed to maintain secrecy from al Qaeda is to keep the information from being stored on USB drives in Baghdad. Does the administration really believe there are al Qaeda spies that highly placed in the United States government?
And either some "emergency" will be declared right before '08 elections, preventing the polls from opening and a transfer to the next president, and/or Prince Jeb will be next in line and will win courtesy of Diebold.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
How is this action taken by the President not obstruction of justice? Or at the very least interferance with official acts of government?
get the party nomination in the first place.
The Democrats have a history of silencing voices within the party who have the nerve to push for real change or accountability. The party would never allow their presidential nomination to go to anyone who was pushing for an indictment of Bush or his cronies. Radical or even strongly progressive voices within the party are either ignored completely (see Dennis Kucinich), or they seem to end up in mysterious plane crashes like Paul Wellstone.
The Dems and Reps are BOTH beholden to corporate interests and Wall St. bankers. Choosing which of the 2 major parties to vote for is simply choosing WHICH set of corporate swine you want pulling the strings in DC.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Wars end when when somebody is defeated.
And there is the rub. If you declare war, you can declare an end to the state of war. If you don't declare war, you run on "political expediency", and effectively you have a state of "war" without end.
I argue that Congress -did- abdicate their responsibility. It is not just their privelege to declare war, it is their responsibility to recognize the necessity and play their part. Then, yes, they get out of the way and let the CiC run the actual war.
By abdicating their responsibility to declare war, they have set us up for a constitutional crisis.
War declarations are not a prosaic artifact of the Constitution, they are a serious responsibility to be used as necessary.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The Supreme Court (bless them!) ruled that the President only has "extraordinary wartime powers" as a temporary expedient to quickly do things that would take Congress too much time.
I'm not sure I've heard that, though I have heard that such "extraordinary powers" most certainly do not extend to denying constitutional rights, no matter what Hollywood may tell us.
For example, I'm pretty sure that the Supreme Court later determined that Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus was, in fact, unconstitutional. Also, the Supreme Court determined that the suspension in 1942 of civillian rule in favor of military courts in Hawaii was also unconstitutional (and this was a territory, not yet a state, that had just been attacked by a foreign power's military, and even under those incredibly exceptional circumstances the constitution wasn't permitted to be suspended).
Here are some remarks by the former Chief Justice in 2000, and again in 2002, that address the question of civilian versus military judical authority in wartime.
Can anyone provide clear case evidence of the court determining that the President *can* suspend certain civil rights or federal laws in wartime? So far as I've ever been able to ascertain, every single time a President has gone "too far" with the wartime powers argument, he's been rebuffed years later by the Supreme Court, which tells me, at least, that any argument that a president has special lattitude in wartime is a crock, at least from a legal perspective. From a practical perspective, though, since it's always taken the Court years to get around to it, it's certainly been proven true. (though if the Court can decide a presidential election question in a matter of days, you'd think they could handle these other serious issues more quickly, too...)
- Conservatives in a classical sense are concerned with minimal government interfierance in the publics lives, small government, and fiscal responsabilities. In a sense they attempt to preserve the governmental structure with minimal changes - allowing society to grow & evolve around the existing structure.
- Neo Conservatives are concerned with a 'conservative' social agenda - which is neither conservative nor social in nature. They attempt to preserve a non-existant social order through increasingly restrictive government interfierance.
The problem is not with the issues, it's with the people in power, and the people who put them there. The last presidential election only about 60% of the people elligable voted - that's 40% of US citizens were too damn lazy to get out of their chair and flip a lever in a voting booth. If you know there is this huge untapped pool of people - how do you get them to vote? - You create a polarizing issue - one in which the status quo supports the other person and change supports you. Why? because people who are happy - or indifferent with how things are - will stay too lazy to vote - so you gain votes, and the other guy doesn't.Can you create polarization on the real issues of how do we spend tax dollars responsibly? It's accounting for gods sake - even accountants hate it!
But, if I tie spending billions on something wastefull, to spending a couple of million with a polarizing issue - stem cell research - I can polarize the whole issue, get enough votes, and get my billions to waste.
Face it, the only people who are really left without parties nowdays are the centrists like you & me. You can't make a platform based on ballanced fiscal responsibility, social equity, and personal responsibility. Only by creating a coalition of special interest groups can you get into office, and only by apeasing them can you stay there. I know one person who voted for Bush last time - why ? He was pro life --- she hated his spending policy, his military policy, and his general social policies, but he was pro life so she voted for him.
Polarize and win - if you can get enough people to vote for you for 1 issue and ignore all the others, you win. If you try to be ballanced and effective, you loose. It's really become that simple in American Politics.
But I admit I always get a little cautious when it comes to solutions. I distrust any top-down solution, however seemingly well-designed. I think the only way to really get away from the worst abuses of capitalism is for us to stop buying all this crap, and to ethically stop putting the profit motive first. But I'm no ascetic myself, nor do I expect anyone else to be, so I can't be very optimistic about the outcome there. It isn't very insightful to observe that the world would be better if people were better, but I think that's the only improvement we can really hope for. The world is this way because we are this way. I don't think we can come up with any solution to "implement," from the left or the right, that will cure the problems that we ourselves have gone to such great lengths to create.
Corporations exist because we want them to--we want the ability to go into business, make a buck, but not be bothered by actual responsibility for the debts and problems our decisions incur. Well, gasp, that isn't very f-ing healthy. Extrapolate that to the large scale, and you have Enron and Haliburton. So to me, this isn't just a left-vs-right type of thing. The enemy is us, because no one is immune to self-interest and greed. I have no idea how that could be changed.
Perhaps this is an exerpt from a longer bill wherein the Congress declares war? Granting the president war powers != declaring war, although the outcome is largely the same. Nonetheless, the person you're arguing against is correct. This is not a declaration of war. That involves 1.) declaring war, and 2.) declaring who we're at war with.
Bonus question! This authorizes force against those responsible for attacks on the United States. Please explain how this bill justifies a multi-year occupation of Iraq?
With that said I hardly think the >50k dead Iraqis the US has killed would see much of a difference.
If they really wanted to and these shennanigans pissed them off they could defund the NSA, censure or impeach Bush. If the Democrats do well in November, we might see just that sort of thing happen.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Can you please explain to me why Doug Thompson is the only one reporting this story? If so many congressional leaders and presidential aides heard the same thing, why did they rush to Doug Thompson? His reporting career is shady at best, as is his current employer.
If this really happened, wouldn't you think it'd go to a LEGITIMATE media outlet? With all the liberal press out there, are you telling me that no one else was interested in running a story like this?
I call bull on this. Doug Thompson can't even name his source (which he claims to be multiple) and his alleged sources have the first instinct to run to tabloid media. Yeah, uh huh, sure......
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The neo-conservatives need to project an formidable opponent, that's how they got and intend to keep control. It very plainly laid out in the first episode of The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Bah.
:) Even inside Catholocism there are many doctrinal questions that are constantly being debated and changed.
Christianity has (and will continue to be) stretched in many different ways, all stemming from disagreements on the correctness of the bible. Translations are questionable, scripture inclusion and exclusion was a political process of the early church, some people reject the old testament, some people don't care for "Paulism", etc. etc.
I think your argument has a lot more weight if you are talking about Catholicism, as doctrine is defined as flowing downhill. But it is no coincidence that there are a large amount of "sects" which have differing interpretations of Christianity, all while being ostensibly "Christian" themselves. I don't really know of any protestant heretical belief's for example.
On top of all of that, many Christians have no particular desire to codify their beliefs into law (thus forcing those beliefs on others), preferring that such morality is willfully practiced by adherents to the religion.
Christianity is almost as malleable as Buddhism. I would think that the only difference would be that the Christians claim the "truthfullness" of their documents while Buddhists are less concerned with the accuracy of scripture than with the message.
I don't think the grandparent was making any claims of values but rather political claims of what he supports legally (which are two very different things).
Pax -- Ob
Actually it's just choosing which theme to use for the same set of corporate swine.
In other words: different style, same content.
God is not malleable, the bible is not malleable, Christ's teachings are not malleable, they are there to read and to live by.
First of all, God may not be malleable, but your idea of him definitely is. Secondly, the bible is man-made (anyone having studied its history is forced to conclude this), so a valid opinion is that it is not the whole and accurate word of God, but rather a human perversion of God's message. There are many conflicting documents of christ's teachings, and once you start doubting the bible's accuracy and completeness, it's only a small step to doubting what was and wasn't a part of christ's teachings.
So, yeah, depending on where your beliefs lie, you can be a christian (someone who beliefs that christ was the son of God and sent to save us) and have completely different beliefs than what current bible canon dictates they should be.
Okay, so everyone recognizes the problem, i.e. massive corruption by design. Given that everyone recognizes the problem, isn't it now the portion of the plan to fix the problem? Such as, for example, by forcing all political parties to only take campaign funds from the gov't or something?
Really, this has nothing to do with Iraq.
As for the civil liberties intrusions, El Presidente is merely excercising "all necessary and appropriate force"(in thisn case tapping out phones) in order to determine who amongst us "planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks"
If that is an "appropriate" use of force should be the focus of this debate. The whole "we never declared war" argment is a distraction from that.
I don't think history will be too kind on the Bush Administration. I think its time in office will be seen as a point of inflection for the course of the United States. The point at which it's preeminance in the world began to fade. Consider the status of the US in many spheres. It is in decline across the board.
Much of this was inevitable. America was never going to maintain its position as the world's premiere nation for eternity. However, the Bush administration has accellerated, rather than retarded this decline. History will see the administration's time as a watershed period in history for America, when "Americian" ceased to be synonymous with "progressive" and "enlightened".
May the Maths Be with you!
I've been thinking about what dubya means when he talks about "freedom", and I've decoded it to mean "corporate freedom from government oversight". He's not referring to personal freedom at all. Personal freedom doesn't return value to the shareholders and it doesn't really contribute to the bottom line.
Your North Carolina example illustrates this. Protecting "fornication" from prosecution doesn't do anything to boost profits at the factory hog farm. OTOH, Relaxing environmental standards to allow corporate hog farmers to dump more untreated waste into the stream does boost profits at the plant by eliminating "unnecessary" costs.
I am not a crackpot.
Good luck with this stuff. Seriously.
It seems you've already started to vote away your freedoms. If the rest of your country is going to take this lying down, maybe it's time for the rest of you to start taking up the arms that you've so rigoursly been defending the right to own (regardless of the cost in your society) to start taking control of your country back from the religious oligarchy that is currently in charge.
You dragged one President through the mud because he cheated on his wife. Now you've got another one breaking your laws and turning your country into the sort of place that people fifty years ago used to write books about to prove points totalitarianism.
Instead of posting about it on Slashdot, maybe the time has come to start educating your less savvy friends and family that maybe they should stop watching Fox and start engaging their brains to figure out what is best for their country, their family and their friends.
Until you figure out a better way to spend untold billions of dollars and priceless amounts of human life, we, the undersigned, consider ourselves at great personal risk of your policies, attitudes, and actions.
Signed sincerely,
The Rest of the World. (Please consult an atlas for our exact location relative to the United States.)
PS, if you could take money out of politics, you might find - as a completely surprising corollary - you make your country a better place for your citizens.
I agree completely.
Now excuse me while I sell my daughter into slavery, murder all the people at the seafood resturaunt, and anyone I can find eating pork.
PlePlease don't add analysis and opinion in the summary without declaring that it is yours and yours alone.
The word illegal does not appear in the article, nor has anyone shown that the wiretaps did not comply with the law. Democrat Senators that would *love* to pin this on the President came away from the full briefing subdued and dropped the matter. Continued pressure has come primarily from those senators who were NOT at the briefing and thus are talking into their hat.
A careful reading of the law shows that any communications terminating outside the US is subject to surveillance in the interests of national security. It is not a civil or criminal court (nor is it admissible in such courts) and does not fall under the same rules. Even the judges on the supposed panel that would issue such warrants have said it is not in their realm of control. They are there to protect the rights of US citizens and legal residents who are being investigated solely within the confines of the US. There are some notable exceptions to that, any communications to a foreign powers embassy here on US soil is not protected either, because the embassy is technically (and legally) on "foreign" soil.
Any US citizen that thinks communications exiting the US borders are subject to the same protections as domestic communications is a fool, and ignorant fools at that.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I was living on neither side of the fence. I was living ON the fence. Quite pointy there, I tell you. The end of the Cold War was, as you point out, the bankrupcy of the SSSR. Mostly, though, it was also brought along by the fact that the people there didn't want to live in a dictatorship anymore and that even the best propaganda couldn't keep them in anymore. People were fleeing their countries, and that's usually the sign that a country is about to die. Funny enough, the development some of those countries took in the last 2 decades makes a lot of people want their dictators back. So... something went wrong, I'd say.
We actually dealt with our terrorists, and we won. The RAF was a german left-radical terrorist group that was very active in the 70s and 80s. There is no terror today in Germany anymore. I don't question that the US should deal with its terrorists, find their sources and make sure that those dry out, but I wonder where foreign wars come into play there. If I remember correctly, the RAF was funded and supported by some arabian nations, but I don't really remember Germany going to war with Libya and Iran. It was a different time, granted, and terrorism was a matter of capitalist vs. communist politics instead of the war of religions that it is supposedly now, but still, Germany dealt with it on its OWN ground. I.e. where the terrorism happened.
About Iraq, I don't enjoy the existance of dictatorships either. Let's not go into the question whether or not some dictatorships exist not despite but because of US intervention, but I think we can agree that dictatorships are usually not really a source of stability. Yet, they are more stable than anarchies. I wouldn't complain if the US completed what it started in Afghanistan and then went on, but so all that's left is two countries in turmoil with no trace of stability on the horizon.
Finally, to fight the reason for terrorism, you cannot fight the people. Fighting people only creates the will to fight back, but never peace. It might create submission when no other options exist, but as long as the air of defeat and oppression surrounds this submissions, the attraction to terrorism only grows. For a very drastic example, look up WW1 in your history books and how its "peace treaty" made WW2 possible altogether. The peace of Brest-Litowsk was no peace for conciliation. It was aimed at destroying Germany, which did only fuel the fascist ideology and led to one of the worst chapters in history. Peace can only be found when two countries meet as equals and try to accept each other as such. Germany and France were sworn arch enemies for almost a millenium, now they coexist and work together peacefully as the 2 most influential members of the European Union.
It didn't become possible until they both accepted each other's existance. And that is the way out of terrorism. Acceptance of each other's existance. Yes, it might seem idealistic, but when you're from a part of the world where you see, wherever you look in history, that prosperity and peace starts with the acceptance of each other (with Germany and France being only a small example, there are many more, from Finnland down to Turkey), you tend to become kinda peaceful.
War's never done anything good for Europe. We've had enough of it, about 3000 years of recorded history with about 200 years thereof peace. 'tis enough.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is doubtful that a clearance would be limited to just one program so maybe Bush/Cheney are protecting prying eyes from 'seeing' what else is going on. And even if there is a one-to-one clearance system enacted, it would be likely that all the other 'things' going on behind the scenes of the US Laws are tied together via a few or the one "decider".
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
1) Voting for a btter government should never make one feel dirty.
2) voting blindly for a party is bad.
3) Being able to relize that your party is doing bad things and voting against them is good.
4) Democrates aren't as liberal any more.
5) The republicans aren't republicans, there fanatics who care about religeon and making everyone adhere to there belief.
I do not vote for any one party just to be voting for that party. I say these things because bad things are happening in are government and we need more people like you who can think for themselves.
I saw a bumper sticker with a Picture of Geaorge Bush, and it said 'Enough is Enough'
Enough is enough, indeed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on