I’ve written about this here,
here,
here, and here. The President of the United States should be impeached and convicted and removed from office for authorizing illegal domestic surveillance of American citizens. This is especially true because he insists on continuing to abuse his power, but now with Congressionally granted impunity. To use one of Bush pere’s famous lines: “This aggression cannot stand.”
No one but the grossest simpleton believes that the administration has limited its illegal spying to one little NSA program. We know that the Pentagon has been spying on anti-war groups. We know the FBI is watching journalists that report on intelligence matters. I just assume that Joe Wilson, Pat Lang, and Larry Johnson are being surveilled (which means I have no expectation of email privacy and am not too confident about my phone).
We are being asked to give up our rights. For what?
Only the most inattentive jackass, someone with zero familiarity with our intelligence agencies, would believe for a nanosecond that close to a dozen employees of the National Security Agency would risk their careers, pensions, and freedom to leak information about a top secret program to the New York Times if the program was limited to spying on Al-Qaeda members phoning in to the United States.
The NSA is the most secretive of all our intelligence agencies. It’s nickname is the ‘No-Such Agency’. It’s employees almost never leak. It’s an ingrained part of their culture. It’s amazing that almost a dozen NSA employees were willing to collude and engage in a conspiracy to convince the New York Times of the criminality they were being asked to conduct. The mere fact that it happened at all should tell everyone all they need to know.
So, what is with bullshit like this?
Despite widespread criticism of President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, even vociferous detractors in Congress stop short of calling for an end to the anti-terrorist eavesdropping.
At issue for many Republicans and Democrats isn’t the program itself, but how little the White House told Congress about it and how much it expands presidential power.
Message to the USA Today and all congressional Democrats: I am not a fucking terrorist!
You either hold hearings and find out exactly the extent of illegal domestic surveillance (of all types) that is going on, or get the fuck out of the way. A failure to investigate these matters fully and to treat them as the constitutional crises that they are is akin to telling me that I have no first of fourth amendments rights. Because as things stand now, I have zero confidence, much less any assurances, that my anti-war stance and connections haven’t placed me under the watch of one of Bush’s illegal programs.
Bill Frist is threatening to change the rules of the Senate Intelligence Committee to limit the minority party’s power to participate in oversight. This is an obvious desperation move that is necessitated by the obvious impeachable nature of the NSA program in question (setting aside other Pentagon programs, and programs unknown).
We know they have committed crimes against the Constitution. We cannot let them get away with it. If we let this aggression stand, then the principles our country is based upon will fall.
Millions of Americans would be willing to risk their lives to protect these rights if they were threatened from abroad. But, our rights are not just being threatened, they are being trampled and flushed, right here…on Capitol Hill.
