Gonzales: You can’t stop Bush, you can only hope to contain him

Guy’s, here’s an LTE I’m composing–please give me feedback. I don’t assume that it will change anyone’s thinking, but this legal theory about the commander in chief has clear consequences for our national destiny that needs to be acknowledged…

“The issue of the White House ordering its agents to spy on Americans should concern all of us. Under the Fourth Amendment and other laws, the government may not conduct surveillance on Americans without judicial oversight. Any government agent that does so, by law, is a criminal. The President, by publicly acknowledging that he authorized the wiretaps without obtaining judicial authorization, has confessed to having broken the law.

The White House, however, believes that in a time of war the President alone has the privilege of determining whether he broke the law without interference from anyone, let alone the laws of the land or the limits placed on his authority by the Constitution. Let us understand the implications of this point. A president who need not respect any legal restraint whatsoever is free to use the full power of the federal government to do anything to its people. He may order US citizens held without charge (let alone conviction), tortured, and confined forever. Bush in fact has already done so in at least two instances with Oscar Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi. If the President can ignore inconvenient law whenever he likes, then what if he sees fit to order the roundup and summary execution of Americans because they may be a political threat or for no reason at all? This scenario seems so outrageous, but on the other hand there is literally nothing that would stop such abuse of citizens if Bush recognized no legitimate curb to his power. It would indeed be ironic if we gave Iraq our own system of government and received their former dictatorship in return. Spying is only the most recently uncovered part of a pattern of conduct more consistent with a third-world despot than with an American President.

So the larger issue is not simply a matter of who opposes or favors government spying or torturing, but whether America wants a totalitarian government or not. If readers of the Daily Messenger want a dictatorship model of government, then we should at least cease our posturing about being the “land of the free,” cease giving our president dictatorial powers in secret, and instead openly and with pride acknowledge that 9/11 indeed changed everything and that America is now a police state and the newest rogue nation.”

In case nobody’s guessed, I’m a bit alarmed by all this. The WH’s complicity in violating the law is as open as can be, as is their contempt for law. There is no question anymore. They have thrown down the gauntlet and dared someone to stop them.

You have to hand it to Georgie’s team. They have taken the lesson of “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” to heart. Except for some Friday confusion, they’ve been pretty blatant about what they did and keep insisting that it was not only legal but designed with preserving civil liberties in mind. I listened to Georgie’s press conference today and he kept hammering that point home.

If they’d kept denying the existence of the program, it would have dragged out for much longer as they pulled information and maybe a few more secret memos out of the administration with pliers, crowbar and/or (possibly bipartisan) hearings. Or, worse, the perception would have continued that the administration is actually continuing a secret, illegal domestic wiretap scheme.

I was talking with a friend over the weekend after Russert beat SecState Barbie around the head and shoulders on his program and said that the scary thing is that he’ll pull the justification out of the 2001 Authorization. That seems to be what is cementing right now and, while it may be overreaching, I can see how they got there.

1) In the months following 9/11, several holes are identified in our intelligence gathering. Specifically, there is a gaping hole in the ability to monitor domestic-to-international communications. And the ability to monitor and process those might have added another puzzle piece to the overall picture. (And while Georgie probably should have reacted differently to that infamous PDB, we still might not have gotten that puzzle piece without the ability to monitor those communications.)

2) Knowing that al-Qaeda is flexible, reasonably savvy and probably aware of what capabilities we do have, Georgie’s team wants to start monitoring this gap but try not to let the bad guys know that we’re doing it. Meaning a secret program that breaks new ground and, for whatever reason, can’t go through the FISA court process.

3) Georgie asks, can I do this legally? Ashcroft, Gonzalez and Yoo must have told him a) the FISA process won’t work for this (for whatever reason) and b) we can make a case that the 2001 Authorization gave you the authority to set up new programs.

And it is made so. Certain members of Congress are notified but maybe not all of the ones that should have been, given some of the criticism. And there seems to be little independant oversight but since the monitoring is of alleged al-Qaeda “bad actors” it can all be seen as part of that effort.

And, really, that was the ORIGINAL War on Terror: going after al-Qaeda. The lack of oversight bothers me, however, because if it has been expanded to include random suspects that, say, are non-AQ participants in the Iraqi insurgency, the justification falls apart.

Oscar, Jose…oh, nevermind.

I’m also not even sure what the real beef in this issue is- because of the availability and usage of high tech encryption by the public (much of which is extremely difficult even for the gov’t to crack). Also because of the sheer unbelievable mass of communications taking place every second, it doesn’t make sense that our government, faced with limitations on qualified persons with security clearances and linguistic skills that will almost certainly be a neccessity, will just be trolling the masses- they will be forced to have to be very specific, systemmatic and objective about who they pick to surveil. (And that’s why we have little to fear). Faced with these pragmatic concerns, I’m not sure that the Supreme Court would find the president in violation of the constitution or the Foreign Intelligence Act. Remember, there are distinctions made between conduct of simple law enforcement and conduct specifically granted by the President of the United States in person for the purposes of national security. The court will accord great deference to any President asserting this defense- because the President is the only one with the authority to make the decisions of waging active warfare. Furthermore, the previous laws concerning wire tapping were made long before we were faced with having a mobile populace, with multiple mobile phones- some of which you can buy for cash at a walmart and use with pre-paid calling cards (thus the user is damned near untraceable), and multiple identities used on mobile laptops. If there are any military types out there, they can confirm that a network of civilian persons on encrypted mobile phones and laptops can carry out live action command and control- with live remote video, and the ability to attack other gov’t forces and networks- in a manner remarkably similar to our military. The law is quite simply outdated- and when faced with persons who have demonstrated that they can kill over three thousand civilians in the course of a an hour- you’ve got to cut the president some slack.

There you go again, force majure, being absolutely apologetic for this Lying.Fcuking.Bastard. that pretends to be my President. You say we have nothing to worry about, because there are just too many communications each minute to fear that ONE of us citizens will be an actual target or simply end up as “collateral damage” to this unconstitutional violation of our rights. And the Rethugs that control the Congress won’t do their job — did the stat that Mr. CB noted above sink into your consciousness, force? — so that Bush IS destroying our Constitution. And secret laws? WTF?

George Bush may have been appointed President by the SCOTUS, but he sure as hell was not appointed/coronated as King. And 911 is not to be used to as justification for all manner of illegal and unconstitutional acts, especially since Bush stayed on vacation and didn’t do a damn thing when he was warned in the August 6, 2001, PDB that OBL was determined to strike in the U.S. AND when the U.S. had previously warned Saudi Arabia that OBL was likely to use commerical jetliners to carry out his attacks.

In Vietnam, there were many cynical examples of having to destroy the village to save it from the Communists. How outrageous that in order to “save” America that Bush thinks we should let him destroy our way of life and its democratic principles.

It is fools like you, force majure, that Ben Franklin had in mind when he so famously stated: “Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither.” My biggest RATIONAL fear is that fools like you, having been in charge for five years without restraint has so tilted the world that its ultimate destruction is on an irreversible course. The American Taliban — and Bush as their proxy — has engineered the Rapture and the end times that they seek, and have dragged the rest of us to doom with them.

Damn fools.

My vote is for ‘fool’. The arguments that this was done for the sake of speed or secrecy are completely specious, as speed and secrecy are precisely what the FISA warrants/courts are set up for. And there is a provision to tap first and get the warrant later.

The president must have some other reason to avoid these warrants. Occam’s razor suggests that he has some reason to believe that the court would shoot these requests down. If the White House has some compelling reason otherwise, they should find a way to share that. They are our representatives, not our rulers.

The argument that the Congress granted this authority is also completely ludicrous. The resolution says nothing of the sort.

As we all know after a day of this stuff, FISA can be consulted after the fact. A wiretap can be instantly initiated and then approved within 72 hours. But the process was set aside because it wasn’t nimble enough!? WTF is right. ShrubCo had ulterior motives for sidestepping FISA which we don’t know about yet but I’ll bet those motives didn’t include terrorism or national security. IMHO, it had a lot to do with the perpetuation of Shrubkultur and control of the game.

I do not want a president of this country to have that kind of power and I cannot be sanguine about the reasons why a president would unilaterally choose to exercise that kind of power.

And we still haven’t actually declared war have we? This whole thing is Bushshit.