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FBI Employees Face Criminal Probe Over Patriot Act
DevanJedi writes "According to an article at Wired.com , several FBI agents are under investigation for illegally acquiring information an American citizens. Overzealous agents used 'misleading emergency letters' obtain phone records of thousands of Americans. This marks the first time government officers have been prosecuted for misuse of the Patriot Act. From the article: 'Unit employees, who are not authorized to request records in investigations, sent form letters to telephone companies to acquire detailed billing information on specific phone numbers by falsely promising that subpoenas were already in the works. According to a third source, FBI officials also said at the meeting that some bureau employees have already been granted immunity from prosecution in the investigation. The third source, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, did not recall, however, that FBI officials described the investigation as "criminal."'"
I thought the claim was that scooter kept changing his testimony in order to obstruct the investigation.
i. Russert asked LIBBY if LIBBY knew that Wilson's wife worked for
the CIA, and told LIBBY that all the reporters knew it; and
ii. At the time of this conversation, LIBBY was surprised to hear that
Wilson's wife worked for the CIA; According to Russert: i. Russert did not ask LIBBY if LIBBY knew that Wilson's wife
worked for the CIA, nor did he tell LIBBY that all the reporters knew
it; and
ii. At the time of this conversation, LIBBY was well aware that
Wilson's wife worked at the CIA; in fact, LIBBY had participated in
multiple prior conversations concerning this topic, including on the
following occasions:... Now it seems to me that this indictment assumes that it was Scooter who leaked the name. We now know that it was Armitage, who was never charged.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
"If this is true, I honestly don't know what to say anymore.
I'm moving to Antarctica."
This isn't anything new.
The last time we had anything like this going on was during and after the Nixon administration. In those days it was an FBI program called COINTELPRO- which infiltrated (CIA style) and collected evidence against a semi-terrorist organization called the "Weather Underground". In fact their evidence was so tainted by rights violations, that with the exception of David Gilbert, who got a life rap for murder, they all walked.
Gilbert of course was involved in an armored car robbery in New York, and charged in New York, so even he walked in regard to the COINTELPRO charges.
The others, who used to blow things up (though they warned people about the bombs so that no one would get hurt), were summarily released one after another once the federal courts got hold of the evidence of FBI wrong doing.
In fact, the evidence that freed them, was in fact STOLEN by them out of an FBI office in Mississippi (If memory serves).
This is nothing new. And under this administration not suprising. And the courts did the right thing... evidence that is "fruit of the poisoned vine" should never be allowed.
Let's hope this latest flap is far less agregious.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
I had heard before that the Patriot Act had more to do with inter-agency cooperation than with anything else, but I don't know how to verify that short of reading the law myself.
Speaking of which, can someone please post a link to an example of an American locked up using Patriot Act provisions? I'm not talking about abuses like the one in the OP, but lockups.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Nah, the 7 million who died didn't do it in death camps; you're confusing them with the Nazis. Most of those 7 million deaths were in the Ukraine in the 30's. They were farmers who had a bunch of really bad crop years. The apparatchiks running things from Moscow didn't want to admit a problem to their masters and thought the farmers were holding back food. They had the police and army take all the food, including the seed grain for the next year, to feed the urban populations who might riot if they went hungry too long. So the farmers starved to death on their own lands.
Not that the Gulags were vacation spots. They were forced labour camps that didn't include much concern for worker safety. People often died there from "occupational hazards", for trying to escape, or for not being completely subservient to the overseers. Gulag convicts effectively had no rights. But the Gulags weren't death camps in the same way that German concentration camps like Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were designed to kill the convicts. Solzhenitzin got to write Gulag Archipelago because he lived through it. The Russians preferred to wring out as much cheap, effectively slave, labour out of them as possible instead.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Repeat after me: "corps".
No comment.
Feel free to keep making up stuff, though. Bad example. 40,000 people die in traffic accidents every year, so we have countless laws that restrict our "freedom" when we drive. We can't drive on the wrong side of the road, we have to obey traffic signals and signs, we can't drive too fast, we have to get our cars inspected for safety, we can't drive while intoxicated, car makers have to implement a growing list of required safety features on cars. These laws restrict our freedom and are strictly enforced to help protect us. Why is is suddenly unreasonable for the Government to restrict our freedom and enforce laws to protect us from terrorism? I don't know why "conservatives" are rushing to give away the freedoms our country used to be known for.
There are laws against bad driving practices, just like there are laws against terrorism. However the driving laws are not "strictly enforced" -- most people speed routinely, yourself probably included, and they go unpunished.
However, the government does not try to scare people silly about the risks of driving, and Americans wouldn't stand for the idea of the government secretly monitoring Americans to "protect" us against the dangers of reckless drivers. There are no secret "no-drive" lists where people aren't allowed to drive, but are not allowed to find out why, who put them there, and how to get off. There are no secret monitoring systems for the government to secretly find out every detail of your driving life, who you drive with, and where you go, in order to find "bad drivers".
The government also does not have secret overseas prisons to take people suspected of bad driving and try to torture them into confessing their bad driving activities, because they might kill someone with their bad driving habits.
The Founders of our country wrote the Constitution to protect us against being the victims of a tyrannical government that they had the tremendous misfortune of having to deal with. They knew the temptations of power, and the ways that that power would be abused against the people. The reason the current government is trampling all over the Constitution in abusing the citizens is not to "protect us", but to remove the constraints of the constitution and gain absolute power while people like you sit cowering in fear that the "terrists" are somehow going to come and kill you and everyone else.
The government is not "protecting" you from terrorism any more than the Mafia "protects" shop owners from vandalism and theft.