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.'"

Comments

The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[Anonymous Coward]

One by one they are taking away the tools that President Bush needs to fight terrorisim at home and abroad. When we are attacked again, we will know who to blame.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[poopdeville]

Yes. The terrorists.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[ScrewMaster]

Maybe so (although some of us prefer to think of it as "restoring civil liberties stripped from us in the name of fighting terrorism") but they sure had a lot of tools at their disposal last time around, and that didn't stop 9/11. Didn't even come close to stopping 9/11. You can have all the tools you want: hell, you can have a bloody totalitarian state if it makes you happy. The thing is, that won't matter in the end, no matter how much you spend, if you don't use your capabilities efficiently and well. 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. By all accounts, they still are. So, it wasn't because they were lacking sufficient authority: they just didn't know what the hell they were doing. The terrorists, on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing.

Time will tell just how well our government officials use the expanded powers they've arrogated to themselves since the original attack. My feeling is that they'll be just about as successful in preventing future acts of terrorism as they have been at stemming the tide of illicit drugs entering this country. In other words ... don't hold your breath. Something else is going to blow up sooner or later, no matter how many telephone calls the NSA monitors. In the meantime, a lot of honest Americans are going to get shafted, one way or another, and a bunch of innocent foreigners are going to get ground up as well. We must accept that we are paying a price for Bush's "War on Terror". The only question is whether or not you believe that it has been worth the cost, that it will continue to be worth it.

Fears of terrorism aside, I don't much like the direction this country has taken. Mind you, I'm not just talking about the Bush Administration: we've been off the beam for decades.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[folstaff]

Not that I normally want to defend anonymous cowards, but when the next terrorist attack occurs the American public will blame the administration for not doing enough. We will blame the terrorist first, but we will also ask for 2 reactions from our government: do something to keep this from happening again and tell us why the government didn't stop it in the first place.

Moderator: You may completely disagree with Anonymous Coward's point, but labeling his comment as funny is an insult to real debate. He wasn't trying to be funny and what was said should not be taken lightly.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[The Rizz]

Not that I normally want to defend anonymous cowards, but when the next terrorist attack occurs the American public will blame the administration for not doing enough. Only if it's a democrat in the White House.

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.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Okay

Bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the USA.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[kestasjk]

It's so simple: How do you stop disgruntled morons from hating your country? Invade their country of course! The logic is flawless.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[lawpoop]

Al Franken is not a credible source for content. You wouldn't accept a quote from Rush Limbaugh. The 911 Commission's Report is a better source and it was critical of both administrations. Al Franken's book was researched by a team of students at Harvard. He cites his sources. You can trust him inasmuch as you can check his sources. Not so sure about Limbaugh.

Oh wait! I look at what wikipedia has to say about the factual innacuracies in _Lies..._:

Franken wrote that former U.S. Senator Max Cleland (D-GA), while serving in the U.S. Army, "...left three of his limbs in Vietnam. A VC grenade blew them off."

In fact, it was not a Viet Cong grenade; instead the grenade had fallen from a fellow American soldier's flak jacket during a non-combat mission and accidentally detonated. Woah, that really blow his credibility!</scarcasm>

The inaccuracy was corrected in the book's paperback edition. Oh, nevermind.

You may disagree with a lot that Bush has done in office, but to say he has done nothing is wrong. He did nothing, *absolutely* nothing, about Middle East terrorists, Jihadists, or Islamic fundamentalists before 9/11. What was the Bush administration doing during their first several months in office? Trying to build a missile defense shield and back out the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia. Clinton pursued and convicted Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the first WTC bombing. Yousef is now in a maximum security prison. ( Where is Bin Laden now? Probably hiding out in Pakistan, our military dictatorship friends in the middle east). Clinton launched cruise missile attacks against terrorist training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan while the Republican congress was investigating things like his Christmas card mailing list and his travel agent's activities. CNN said at the time that

U.S. officials say the six sites attacked in Afghanistan were part of a network of terrorist compounds near the Pakistani border that housed supporters of Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden.

American officials say they have "convincing evidence" that bin Laden, who has been given shelter by Afghanistan's Islamic rulers, was involved in the bombings of the east African embassies. So he was attacking Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida.

At the time I wondered if this was wag the dog, to distract the American people from his troubles with the congress. Now I understand that the Republicans are more interested in using our terrorist enemies as a political tool, to win elections and gain power, rather than actually protecting us against them.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[The Rizz]

Al Franken is not a credible source for content. He is generally quite credible - you can easily find the documentation behind most/all of his claims. If you claimed he were a biased source you would be right, but that alone is not enough to discard his claims off-hand. The only way you could claim he is not credible is if you mistake his jokes for claimed facts.

You wouldn't accept a quote from Rush Limbaugh. Nor would I accept quotes from O'Rielly, Coulter, or Hannity, unless they were backed up with good documentation. They have been shown repeatedly to lie, alter facts, like, make shit up, and lie. Bring me a credible right wing pundit (they do exist - they just aren't the big names) and I'll be much more likely to accept what they have to say.

The 911 Commission's Report is a better source and it was critical of both administrations. ...and I have a copy of the book sitting just a few feet away from me. However, a rather boring 567 page book isn't as interesting to link to as a excerpt from a professional comedian/political commentator.
As for being critical of both administrations: Good. But we're not talking about Clinton's failings here, we're talking about GWB's.

[Side note: To further address your obvious claims to my bias, consider the following: I hated Clinton. I think he was one of the worst presidents we've had. In fact, in the last 25 years, only George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were worse.]

as long as he ... well, does nothing, really. You may disagree with a lot that Bush has done in office, but to say he has done nothing is wrong. Why? The only actions he did right were the ones anyone with an IQ high enough to tie their shoes would have done in his place - i.e. go after the ones who did this horrible thing, tell the country to stay strong, and reassure the populous that everything will be all right... oh, wait, scratch that last one.
No real decision he has made has been the right one - his entire presidency has been one of either doing the obvious, or fucking up. That is worse than nothing in my opinion.

Besides, I was talking about what he did to be considered heroic. People were saying he was being a great, heroic president standing in the face of opposition just days after 9/11. What had he done so far? Press conferences and photo ops. That is what I was talking about - he was being called a hero simply because he was President when a tragedy occurred.

but the war in Afghanistan was fairly well done and the right decision. Yeah, too bad Bush decided to pull most of the troops out before the clean-up was done, and more-or-less abandoned the survivors to the whims of rival warlords. Good job!

The reality is that radical Islam has been at war with the US at least since the first Trade Center bombing. And radical Christians have been "at war" with the US for much longer than that (since about 1492, if memory serves me right). Hell, radical Zoroastrians have probably been at war with the US as well. Radical {insert religious group here} has always hated the idea of not controlling every government in the world.

The US government is finally dealing with it. No, the US government is using it as a scapegoat -- unless by "dealing with it" you mean "making it 100× worse than before".

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[smilindog2000]

Hey, that was a good post. I see you're currently modded 3 for 'informative'. That seems fair to me (informative links deserve high mods). There's an odd trend I've noticed that I can't explain, so I'll just state it. I predict that your post will be modded up for a while, and then over a couple of days, it will get modded all the way down to 0. For some reason, after a few days, moderators keep modding down any posts that seem at all anti-Bush, but they don't do it right away. The delay is what bothers me. Why doesn't it happen right away when we're all reading the article and responses? I also predict that this post will be modded down, in similar fashion, but only after a couple of days.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[PopeRatzo]

I don't think you can accurately say that George W. Bush did absolutely nothing about terrorism. In fact, I think George W. Bush has done more to benefit and encourage terrorism than any other world leader. Osama bin Laden only wishes he could inspire the kind of passion that has been produced by the actions and policies of George Bush.

Of course, there haven't been any significant terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, and George Bush deserves the same credit for that as he deserves for their having been no major cataclysmic meteor strikes or earthquakes. Of course, he can't take credit for preventing hurricanes, but he sure did his part in making the one big hurricane we did have cause maximum damage to human life.

The real shame of it all is that there may well be a terrorist threat in the world today, but the administration of George Bush has dealt with it so poorly that I find myself questioning the very existence of the threat. To so badly damage the confidence of the American people is a very difficult thing to do, considering how much Americans want to believe in their leaders. We're passing the two year mark during which George Bush has had the confidence and support of less than a third of Americans. Even Richard Nixon wasn't so universally discounted. Even though Nixon did manage to hit a low in the polls of 23 percent (only 3 points lower than Bush's most recent showing in Newsweek), and that was only for about 60 days, 7 months before he resigned in disgrace. Fortunately for Bush, his Vice President is so much less trusted that the Democratic majority dare not impeach him.

Today, the headlines included a story of how Vice President Cheney actually tried to shut down the government agency that is responsible for overseeing his use of classified information. According to the story in that notorious liberal rag the Wall Street Journal, Cheney obeyed the law regarding classified info for the first two years of his first term, but has ignored it ever since. His office went so far as to argue that the Vice President wasn't really part of the Executive Branch of government.

The number of presidential signing statements, which are the executive equivalent of making a promise with your fingers crossed behind your back, is not closing in on one thousand. During the eight years of the Clinton Administration AND the Reagan administration together, the number was about fifty.

As hard as George Bush and company have tried to get the American people to fear terrorism, the people of the USA are learning to fear the President and Vice President (along with a cast of characters worthy of a Columbian dictator, like Abu Gonzales) even more. This is the saddest result of all, because as I said, Americans WANT to believe in their President. I know I do.

NSA wiretapping? Since nobody but the Justice Department is going to know the full story, thanks to a level of secrecy not even known during the darkest days of World War II, we'll never know how far it's gone.

The good news, is that within one term of a President who is a decent human being, Americans will regain their confidence in the basic goodness of their leaders. I'm not sure Barack Obama can win, though.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[omeomi]

Afghanistan was fairly well done and the right decision.

The right decision, yes. But fairly well done? Instead of going in full-force with as many military personnel as we could conjure up, we diddled around with the "Northern Alliance" for awhile, and then got sidetracked by a war in Iraq. Bin Laden still hasn't been captured, and Afghanistan's chief export is now opium. In what way has that war been handled well?

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[The Rizz]

Afghanistan was fairly well done and the right decision. The right decision, yes. But fairly well done? Well, I don't know what the GP poster meant, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt an assumed that by "war" he meant the invasion of the country, and removal of it's government from power (i.e. the first few days). That action was very well planned and executed - of course, that was actually Clinton's plan, created with input from competent generals, and executed by competent generals.

The real problem came afterwards, when Bush and the administration set their sites on Iraq. Bin Laden had not been caught, and every story about Afghanistan reminded the American public of that fact, so of course Bush did everything he could to get it out of the news -- which for him effectively meant ignoring it completely and hoping it would go away. Mix that with Bush's insane hard-on for Sadam, and we suddenly have a media frenzy pointed elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the unfortunate US troops, and unfortunate Afghani population, had to make do as best they could in one of the most war-torn countries in the world with no real support. The fact that the entire country hasn't turned into pile of smoking rubble tells me that the people there really wanted this to work; if we had sent in the necessary troops to keep peace (a fraction of what we've sent to Iraq), and used the US's considerable power to build the country back up, we would probably have a working democracy there now, and it could be a near-first-world country.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[Scudsucker]

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.

Re:The defeatocrats are the terrorists best ally

[Scudsucker]

In that case, the original WTC attack should have been preventable as well.

Of course it was preventable.

Clinton launched cruise missile attacks against terrorist training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan

A lot of good that did.

It would have done a lot more good if the Republicans hadn't been screaming that Clinton was "wagging the dog" while they were trying to invent a reason to impeach him. It also would have helped if Bush had negotiated with the Taliban when they offered to hand over Bin Laddin.

Yes, but the sleeper cells came to the US under his watch

Sleeper cells! Oh, the drama!

Or you can be honest, and admit that a government that respects people's privacy is not going to be able to prevent every possible attack. Clinton knew this, and Bush may know this although he doesn't act like it, although he's probably just giving in (or taking advantage of) the impossible task that the public is demanding.

Problem: all the successes we've had fighting terrorism have come from the boring, "pre 911 mindset", Constitution-abiding law enforcement. On the other hand, the Administration has it's Patriot Act, waterboarding, NSA wiretapping, kidnappings, endless detention w/o trial, and yet is too fucking incompetent to know when an Arab company is about to take over administration of the largest ports in the U.S.

No surprise here

[WrongSizeGlass]

I bet the NSA knew these subpoenas were going to show up since they're probably already tapping the Senate Judiciary Committee's phones too. ;-)

At the end of the day...

[FunWithKnives]

It doesn't mean anything that these documents have been subpoenaed. When the White House refuses to release them, which they will most definitely do, will this Congress have the intestinal fortitude to fight back? Or will they pass more "non-binding" resolutions and whine about it while doing nothing? Judging from the past, I'm going to fully expect them to continue to let the constitution crumble and civil liberties die. I think that the big picture here is that we, as the common people of this country, no longer have anyone fighting for us, whether democrat, republican, third party, or otherwise.

Re:At the end of the day...

[garcia]

When the White House refuses to release them, which they will most definitely do, will this Congress have the intestinal fortitude to fight back? Or will they pass more "non-binding" resolutions and whine about it while doing nothing?

Even if the resolution has teeth it won't matter. The Bush Administration will abuse their power to ensure that the information released will be useless. Hell, if they are using third party e-mail accounts to subvert regulations for other shit and Cheney's office refusing to allow the Information Security Oversight Office in, what the fuck do you think that they are doing for this?

Re:At the end of the day...

[Evilest Doer]

Why would it probably be ruled in the President's favor? If there are no checks on the President, and he can break the law willfully and nobody can enforce it on him, then he is a king.

Why do you think he put people like Alito and Roberts on the Supreme Court? It's not about the rule of law or what the Constitution is supposed to say. It is about raw, naked power.

It's this simple...

[suitepotato]

despite the idea often held by some cultures that corruption proceeds from the top down, it is rather the other way around. The people themselves are inherently corrupt and weak. They don't want to take responsibility for themselves, they don't want to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in their lives, don't want to acknowledge their fallibility. Yet deep down, they would have to be positively not human to not know and accept all of the above, but it terrifies them. So they bide their time keeping busy until something comes along to absolve them of all that and make them feel better.

While in past times these were some other ethnic group, some other nation, the devil, etc. we have today the modern political system. Someone else has wronged you, someone else got what should have been yours, you and yours have been held back by they and theirs. All these things are open to interpretation convenient to the subject audience to which the political/avaricious/power-hungry/self-deluded are preaching. They dress up with fun-house mirror magnifications of real issues mixed with non-sequitr reasoning and provide them to the people with the dual benefits to the seller of giving the audience the needed scapegoat du jour to avoid dealing with their fallibility and culpability, as well as providing an ultimately open-ended and thus never reachable hopeful land of opportunity to permanently right all of these probably non-existent wrongs against them.

We the people let this kind of thing happen because we the people buy into this kind of thing. They aren't selling us anything we didn't buy from them. If we didn't buy it, they'd have sold us something else, probably equally odious in the end whether or not it was as obvious as this or not.

While our collective modern intellectual and psychological exhaustion with trying to make sense of our truly warped world and the people who made it and the horrors of what that says about us may not always work well and probably will not, we can at least thankfully point to that and say it is thanks to this we have the modern sense of cynicism that gives us a chance to grab the reigns solidly, and pull back from disaster. Our collective history shows we won't, but perhaps a self-derived deceptive and deluded false hope is better than one sold to us by someone else. At least when it all falls apart, we can blame it on a conspiracy of one, headed by the person staring back at us in the mirror.

We have met the enemy, and probably wondered if we needed a shave when we looked at them.

Re:Write committee, wrong body.

[grcumb]

I cannot support impeachment. The phrase "President Cheney" scares me too much.

So start with Cheney. Move on to Gonzales. Repeat as necessary.

Heck, leave Bush alone for all I care. He's not driving this bus, he's just the guy with the hat.

Impeachment: It's not just for presidents.

Re:Write committee, wrong body.

[Kandenshi]

I'm not American, nor familiar with your laws, but I keep seeing this point(President Cheney) brought up as a reason to not impeach Bush. Sort of a "Hey, he's the lesser of several evils" arguement I suppose.

Is there honestly no method to simultaneously impeach them? Knock off both at once, and then the next guy in the line of succession takes their place. Or are you just worried that one will suceed and the other fail? Is the THIRD guy in line for the presidency ALSO an ass even bigger than Bush? It seems hard to believe that many despicable people would get elected :P Surely you'd hit a worthy guy eventually.

Priorities

[king-manic]

So in America, A president ordering others to repeatedly violate your constitution and violate the rights of the people you are not punished but if you get a blow job from an ugly fat girl you get impeachment hearings. My god you guys have issues with sex.

Re:Priorities

[Evilest Doer]

Actually, most of the right-wing nutbags were saying that he should be impeached simply because he got a blowjob from Lewinsky. Their argument was that he was abusing his position, much like a corporate CEO would be abusing his position if he got blown by a secretary. And they also often said that he should be impeached for lying to the American people about it on national television. So, the point still holds. Lie about sex - get you character eviscerated on television. Lie us into a war that has killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians - get praised as a hero.

NSA warrantless surveillance program

[buss_error]

Well, we know how this will be answered. I mean, after all, the VP isn't an execuitive branch office, you know.

NSA: What NSA. There is no such office or department.
If there were, it's actions would be of the highest national security secret. Highly sensitive. Even admitting there were such a department would subject New York or Washington to a dirty bomb attack. So there is no such agency. Even if there were such an agency, I mean, after all, it's only charged with tracking terrorist. No true citizen worthy of the protections of the constitution is involved. After all, only CITIZENS are afforded the rights granted by the state. And only those we designate are citizens. We can't have just any old Tom, Dick, Harry, Iven, Shamus, Pedro, or Jamal covered by the same rights as some one that "belongs" here is granted. If you aren't white, Anglo-saxson, prodistant, you aren't shit, right? Why the hell do you expect to enjoy "one justice for all"?

You know what? I think America is strong enough to grant the same rights to evey person that is under our control the same rights of a citizen, except the right to vote and hold office. The prisoners at Gitmo and other sites not known should be affored the same rights and protections as someone whose grandparents were born here.

We are all illegal immigrants, unless we have native american blood. Just ask Chief Ten Bears. Oh, wait, we killed him.

Re:A request you can't ignore...

[HUADPE]

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.