Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While I would agree that this administration seems bent on creating an all-powerful executive branch and removing the independent judiciary, that really isn't what is going on in this case.
The OPR is part of the DOJ. The DOJ is a huge part of the executive branch. That's why Bush has so much power over the DOJ. The executive telling the executive what to do has nothing to do with separation of powers.
What?
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.
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"
The program does indeed break the law. Only two points remain in-the-air - Who authorized it, and will Congress make similar future programs legal.
But breaking the law breaks the law - If you get convicted of "murder"ing your (literally) braindead spouse the day before congress passes an exception for assisted suicide, you still go to prison for murder.
Bush (or someone VERY high up, which the proposed investigation would determine) broke the law (again). I want to see Bush or Cheney do the perp walk. So do the majority of Americans at this point - It might have taken most of the sheep six years to catch on, but they've finally noticed that every time the wolf appears, some of them vanish.
It already IS a Christian-run state, by the simple fact that Christians are the overwhelming majority in the US. What I think you mean to imply is that he would like the Christian ideals further forced upon all in the US, even non-Christians. For instance, he would like to ban stem cell research, abortion, and gay marriage because they conflict with his notion of Christian values.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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?
For instance, he would like to ban stem cell research, abortion, and gay marriage because they conflict with his notion of Christian values.
/Christian
//supports abortion rights, stem cell research, and gay marriage
Had to be repeated.
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
I would bet that 60 years ago, a majority of Americans would have been against interracial marriage. Does that mean that the government in power should have pushed for an amendment banning it? (Maybe they did, I honestly don't know.) Of course today that would be an absurd proposition to most people, hopefully because they would see that it's discrimination and infringes on people's liberty. I wonder if our society will ever feel that way about gay marriage...
There's a difference between following the minority and protecting the minoritiy's rights.
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...)
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?
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.
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.