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George W Bush Made Retroactive NSA 'Fix' After Hospital Room Showdown
circletimessquare writes: New details have emerged about the 2004 conflict between George W. Bush and his Attorney General, John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized when he forcefully disagreed with the president's authorization of the NSA's sweeping new collection powers after 9/11. The New York Times has discovered that the conflict was about a retroactive alteration of the President's wording on the legal theory by which the NSA is allowed to siphon up metadata on all Americans, not just certain targets or classes of targets, such as suspected terrorists. 'Mr. Bush, for the first time, explicitly said that his authorizations were "displacing" specific federal statutes, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and criminal wiretapping laws... the president had "made an interpretation of law concerning his authorities" and that the Justice Department could not act in contradiction of Mr. Bush's determinations.' The president faced a severe backlash from the Justice Department, including a threat of mass resignation.
There's no truth to that. Ashcroft had been hospitalized with acute pancreatitis. He had surgery the day before Bush and other White House staff members visited him. Bush didn't cause it, but it certainly says something about the legitimacy of the program when Ashcroft's authorization was sought while he was extremely ill and likely quite medicated.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
I don't think this is nonsense, and it's actually been reported before. See this Bill Moyers transcript for another, much older, source. Here are a couple more sources from 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051500864.html and http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/16/AR2007081601358.html. Basically, the White House was so desperate to have DoJ authorization for the program, they visited a man in the hospital who was very ill, almost certainly very medicated, and in no condition to make decisions about the legality of domestic surveillance. It seems like they were trying to take advantage of Ashcroft's state and trick him into signing the papers. Notably, Alberto Gonzales, an attorney general later in the Bush administration, was among those visiting from the White House. Also, Ashcroft wasn't even the Attorney General at the time; because of his illness, he had transferred the power to Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey. Bush went around Comey to try to take advantage of a very ill man to try to get the surveillance authorized.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
When someone we don't like does an evil, it's because they are evil. When someone we do like does an evil, it's okay, because they have goodness in their hearts.
We tend to overlook the evil things done by people we like.
It doesn't mean every controversial thing done by someone we like is actually evil.
To the extent that Obama has "retroactively and unilaterally revising law passed by Congress" with the ACA he's done it to work around things that most here would recognize as bugs, ie words in the law that make the law do things we didn't actually want it to do.
The issue we're talking about with Bush wasn't a bug fix, he added new features to make the law things it was never intended to do.
I stole this Sig
i'm the submitter
i wrote
i meant
i didn't mean
apologies, there was no bad intent, i just wrote the summary without being aware that my wording made it possible of someone finding a novel secondary meaning
fuck the english language
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it