Of course, my title’s a paraphrase of what the NSA really told Justice Department lawyers recently:
WASHINGTON – The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
(continued below the fold)
Well who wants another messy investigation of an illegal spying program anyway? Just some stupid Democratic Congresspersons, and we know how much their opinions matter, now don’t we?
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program.
“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
That’s okay, however, because everything’s cool, everything’s jake. The NSA would never do anything wrong because it is already subject to just oodles and oodles of oversight by Congress and the President. Really. Don’t just take my word for it, though.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program “has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception.”
Roehrkasse noted the OPR’s mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.
So stop you’re whining Representative Hinchey. It’s so unbecoming of a man in your position:
“This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they’ve created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It’s up to us to stand up to them,” said Hinchey.
Just for the record (not that I think anyone at the NSA might be paying attention to what I might write or say, oh no, not at all) I just want to say that I think the NSA has been doing a bang-up job, and I see no reason why the Justice Department (or anyone else) should investigate what they are doing. I support the President! I’m a loyal American! Anything my President does in the name of national security and the War on Terror is okie-dokie A-Ok with yours truly.
You betcha.
Cross-posted at that Orange place.
I have the feeling that, depending on how Democrats in congess react, this could be the breaking point for America.
Oh, Gonzales? That’s hunky dory with me by the way.
As I mentioned in the last thread, the author of the USA Today piece was on CNN this morning and said the program “may” have been planned before 9/11, which suggests she has evidence that isn’t fully corroborated yet.
It sounds like there is a pretty good chance they intended to do this from the moment they took office, “War on Terror” or not. If that’s true, it is completely understandable why they’re terrified people might find out.
When it comes to screwing Americans out of their civil liberties, I’m sure it was something they have been planning for decades (in Cheney’s case, since the Fall of Nixon).
It would be nice if the NSA or the administration would just get it over with and send us scripts. Remember when Sinclair broadcasting forced all of its on air personalities, even the weather people, to end their segments with something along the lines of “I support President Bush and his efforts to protect us” or some similarly disturbing. That would work. I read yesterday that that sort of language is being inserted into speeches made by mid level officials at the Department of Agriculture. That’s great, but what about the little guy? If we’re going to devolve into a bad science fiction rip off of 1984, we should at least be provided with a half decent script to work off of, as well as at least one skin tight unitard.
I’ll shut down this blog tomorrow if I like my unitard enough.
Talking about scripts, who is writing the script for the MSM about American children being in great danger from sexual predators and tee shirt logos. If you watch much MSM and network TV lately, you would think that the true threat to American was promiscuity caused by all those latent desires that are not being purged by a strong enough religious participation and censorship.
Yup, its not Iraq or constitutional rights going down the tube that threatens America, but all the perverts (probably all liberal dems) that are going to eat our children before they grow up. We must censor, censor, censor, and of course the Jerry Falwell’s of the world will be the censors because they know what is best.
Where is this crap coming from, or is there really a big epidemic that is new?? If there is/was such a new epidemic, then just what would be the true cause and social preventative?
Where have I heard that phrase before!
What else can we learn from that book?
now is the total politicization of national security. It’s a game of chicken. They declare the illegel to be legal and dare Congress to challenge their ability to “do everything possible to protect the American people in a time of war.”
It’s a sad time for America.
by throwing them all in prison. After all, warrantless surveillance is only conducted on suspected terrorists, right?
Draw your own conclusion.
Apparently Qwest was the only major telco not to go through with this. Makes me glad to be a customer; maybe I’ll have to switch to give them more of my money.
Then maybe I can say in public that I checked out short courses in Farsi and Mandarin from my local library. Just to see whether I could play them on my MP3 player. Honest!
Oops, maybe I’d better erase that. Where’s the backspace key . . .
What often goes unstated is how pointless most of this is. I live in the middle of nowhere in Alabama. We have plenty of (alleged) sheriff-controlled drug traffic around here, but absolutely no one within 50 miles is even remotely sympathetic to terrorists.
Every second they spend analyzing my neighbors’ telephone calls, every dollar they spend “protecting” my neighborhood, is time and money that could be used on something that actually does protect the country from a threat which is obvious to all of us.
Multiply that waste by a few thousand and you have Bush’s national security policy. When will democrats make this misallocation of resources an issue?