Slashdot Mirror
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.
"The DOJ promises to thoroughly investigate its boss and find no wrongdoing."
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.
One evil doesn't excuse another. But overlooking an evil because it is your kind of evil is the worst kind of evil.
Further, Obama has had six years to fix this "evil" and hasn't. And yet, nobody is blaming him for not doing anything about it ... because he is "your kind of evil" so you overlook it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Congratulations! It only took a few minutes before someone already brought the ACA into this.
Fuck Ajit Pai
There is no 10th Amendment. "Commerce" clause overrules everything.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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!
Pretty much, yeah. John "No boobs on the statue of Lady Justice" Ashcroft, and even James "No secure crypto for anybody" Comey, for all their faults, still believe(d) in the rule of law.
When it comes to eliminating the rule of law by neutralizing both the legislative and judicial branches in favor of the executive, the same names always come up - Yoo and Addington - as the real powers behind the throne. Were they working for President Cheney, or did it go one level deeper than that -- they were merely Cheney's keepers (in the B5:Shadows sense of the word) whose job it was to whisper the right words into the ears of the powerful, and working constantly to find ways to legalize what was previously illegal? I'm not one for conspiracy theories, and there's insufficient data to speculate about who the real power behind the throne is/was/will be. We don't know and we'll probably never know.
The most interesting revelation is that it made the NSA/Snowden testimony, in which Clapper and Hayden tried to argue that getting all the metadata but not looking at it somehow qualified as not having the metadata in the first place... now makes a lot more sense, from a legalistic point of view. Their bosses really did manage to make, in a twist of Orwellian blackwhite/doublethink, that "obtaining and retaining" was not the same thing as "acquiring." I kinda feel sorry for those goons during the Snowden hearings. They weren't technically lying, and they really couldn't explain that distinction without committing crimes themselves.
Now, for better or worse, we know the legalistic reasoning behind the distinction. Thank you, Edward Snowden.
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!
From TFS:
'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"...
That's the heart of the issue right there. President Bush wrongly believed the threat of terrorism gave him authority to break constitutional law. It actually doesn't, but no one has thus far found a way to correct this mistake. It's absolutely stunning to me after 14 years. The Orwellian-named Patriot Act was supposed to be a temporary measure and yet it's still in place.
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
Because behinds the scenes, it's the same people running the show.
Do you seriously think a Black Lawyer who had a small time civil rights practice can become president without being bought?
It cost 100's of millions in Americas corrupt political system to become president.
46137
Not me. Regions have different cultures, different geography, different levels of wealth. That means they like to do things differently. A national approach means one-size-fits-all, which is never going to be as efficient.
The 55 mph federal speed limit is a perfect example. It may seem reasonable to people who live in hilly places that get bad weather, but if you live in Nevada, say, or Nebraska it's just a dumb idea.