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Subpoenas Issued Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping
Spamicles writes "The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to subpoena documents from the Bush Administration related to the government's admitted eavesdropping on Americans' overseas emails and phone calls without getting court approval. In a 13-3 vote, the Committee decided to authorize its chairman to issue subpoenas for documents related to the NSA warrantless surveillance program. Nearly any request is going to be met with tough resistance from the White House, and the confrontation over the documents 'could set the stage for a constitutional showdown over the separation of powers.'"
If it's a Republican president, he can purposely ignore all threats and cancel current anti-terror operations beforehand, and when the attack starts, he can ignore that it's happening in order to continue a PR event, and people will still consider him a great heroic leader as long as he ... well, does nothing, really.
Okay
Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the USA.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You know, Russia said the exact same thing about their soldiers who died in Afghanistan. That war broke the USSR's back. The government lost all credibility, their military became exhausted, and the USSR lost any international credibility it had before (ok, it wasn't much before). Anyone else see any parallels?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
I also have a copy of the 9-11 Commission Report right here. I even read it.
Just wanted to remind everybody of how the Bush administration actually hindered the commission and publishing of this report. Who really believes was an honest and complete accounting?
If they don't comply, the full Senate can have a vote finding the subpoenaed officials in contempt of Congress. This forces the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate and possibly bring charges. Contempt generally doesn't require a jury ruling to be found guilty (for contempt of court, not sure about Congress), so the judge in the case could issue a bench warrant for the subpoenaed officials to appear before the Congress. If they refused to appear, they could be arrested and physically forced to appear.
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The problem with the pre-9/11 era was that law enforcement should have been able to do the job, but suffered from severe systemic and organizational failures.
No, the real problem was our incompetent President. It was all laid out to him a silver platter in the form of two daily briefs: that Bin Laddin was going to attack the U.S., and that he might use planes to do it. He could have directed the FBI to watch passenger lists. He could have told the FAA to watch out for suspicious activity. He could have told NORAD to come up with a plan to deal with kamikaze 747's. On the day of the attack, he could have ordered fighter jets in the air when he was notified (since he told the FAA to be vigilant) that four planes had disappeared. He could have done all of this in about five minutes.
Instead, he told the person giving the brief "All right. You've covered your ass, now" and sat on his butt reading My Pet Goat while planes were hitting buildings.
Flash forward a few years to Bush's "post 911 mindset". There have been enormous increases in intelligence gathering and law enforcement powers, and yet Bush and his team are too fucking stupid to realize that an Arab country is going to take control over the largest ports in the U.S. until the deal is almost finished.
You know, I'm not an American, but it's idiotic claims like this--which seem to pop up surprisingly often--that really make me fear for the future of the USA. Where did this idea come from? What the hell is it that you think makes republics necessarily undemocratic?
"Republic" is a way of describing a country that refers to a the structure of its government, while "democracy" is a way of describing a country that indicates (in a very general way) how office holders are selected.
There is no problem with referring to a republic as a democracy so long as office holders are democratically elected, and there is no problem with referring to a democracy as a republic, provided it really has a republican form of government. A country can be one, the other, both, or neither.