Alberto Gonzales Sets the Record Straight on Surveillance

Here is a good one. The President still utilized the FISA courts for some intercepts, but not for others. The President needs to explain why.

 

Again, the issue is not whether the NSA should be spying on suspected terrorists. EVERYONE agrees that they should. The issue is whether they should have to get warrants that can be obtained up to 3 days after the fact. The law says they have to. The President's job, as outlined in the Constitution, is to uphold ALL laws of the land, not just the ones that he finds convenient.

The thousands of people who fought and died for our independance can't be wrong. This president is (wrong).

 

Roxran;

That is really low and frankly wrong. If you recall the 9/11 commission report showed that 9/11 could've been caught even with the laws and procedures as they existed then. There's no way of saying that even with warrantless wiretapping 9/11 could've been stopped because its the same bureacracy that's running it and there's no guarentee that the dots would've been connected. Months before 9/11 the info was already out there and known b various branches of law enforcement. It wasn't a matter of collecting more info it was a matter of someone putting it together.

Of course this is the question. Is the President breaking the law? The President or the executive branch aren't going to say they're breaking the law. Nixon never said I'm breaking the law up until he resigned. All you're doing is taking the President's advocate at their word. You're listening to an inherently biased source and assuming that they actually are the one to decide what is legal.
The Executive branch isn't the branch that decides what is legal under existing law or makes law. The Judicial branch decides what is legal under existing law which is why its called Judicial and the Legislative brance makes law which is why its called Legislative.

I'm willing to say though that this may yet prove legal but the USSC should be deciding that not the Executive unilaterally.

The other problem with your argument about allowing the Executive to do pretty much anything to provide securitiy how far should it go?
You bring up the 3000 who died in 9/11 well what if we had a system of installing cameras in every home, business and private car that was tied into the NSA? Then we could keep track of everyone and surely then the terrorists would've been caught since we could've seen them putting together their plans and those 3000 would've been saved!

You don't want a government camera in your house? If you're not a terrorist then why should you care if the government is watching you in your house.

This may sound ridiculous but if the Admin's argument is to be taken at full then they could do that since the AUMF authorizes them to do anything that they, not the courts think is justified as long as they claim it is in the interest of National Security.

 

Your pathos argument is misplaced. Youngstown Sheet says that a President cannot use the guise of war to do what Congress has not said that he specifically can, and certainly cannot do what Congress has explicitly forbidden him to do.

 

funny dick used the same rationale.. but turns out to be another lie..

Cheney Cites Justifications For Domestic Eavesdropping

 

this is maybe the worst post i've seen on this board.

yeah, hit 'em with the ol' "emotional" card. tell them "Remember 9/11!!!" "3000 lives lost, don't ever forget!!!"

PLEASE.

dont you find it ironic that we've had more than 2000 soldiers die protecting our liberties, the same liberties the terrorists they're fighting "hate" so much.... all the while, our president decides upon himself to curtail and illegally circumvent those EXACT LIBERTIES OUR SOLDIERS ARE SUPPOSEDLY FIGHTING TO PROTECT???

so why bother even fighting those terrorists? hell, let's just devolve into a totalitarian state, that way the government can monitor everybody at all times. we'd be mighty safe then! Remember 9/11!!!!

i'm sorry pal, but the fundamental principles and liberties this country was founded on>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the 3000 lives lost on 9/11. period.

so leave your emotional pandering at the door.

 

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3643942.html

Intelligence panel chair calls for eavesdropping inquiry
GOP's Wilson says investigation by whole Congress is necessary


By ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times

WASHINGTON - A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency broke ranks with the White House on Tuesday and called for a full congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.

Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said she had "serious concerns" about the surveillance program. By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why.

Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of the elder George Bush, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full congressional investigation into the program, in which the NSA has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States thought to have links with terrorists.

Wilson's discomfort with the operation appears to reflect deepening fissures among Republicans over the program's legal basis. Many Republicans have strongly backed President Bush's power to fight terrorism, but four of the 10 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voiced concerns about the program at a hearing at which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified Monday.

Several Republicans have called for Congress to consider amending federal wiretap law to address the constitutional issues raised by the NSA operation.

The administration said that it considers further legislation unnecessary, believing that the president has the legal authority to authorize the opera- tion.

Vice President Dick Cheney reasserted that position Tuesday on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.

"We have all the legal authority we need," Cheney said.

 

That is one scary quote.

 

Intelligence panel chair calls for eavesdropping inquiry
GOP's Wilson says investigation by whole Congress is necessary

I guess Rove's threats against Republican Senators was not heeded in this case. Of course, the Republican Senators may not be taking soon-to-be-indicted-in-the-Plame-leak Rove seriously since he maybe a short timer.

 

She's just a lowly house member...

 

dooooooooooh.

 

Needs more cowbell.

 

t

Thanks for the kudos but please don't refer to me as "Sis Chang".

 

Second Republican breaks ranks with the administration. And, like a good American, demands accountability from the administration.

--------------
Senior House Republican wants answers on wiretap program

Filed by John Byrne

The Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has issued 51 questions to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on President Bush's warrantless wiretap program.

The letter, issued to Gonzales today and acquired by RAW STORY, demands answers to myriad legal questions on the program, which involved eavesdropping on Americans' calls overseas. Sensenbrenner has given Gonzales a Mar. 2 deadline to respond.

Combined with a move by the chairman of a House subcommittee on intelligence, and hearings in the Senate, the move is likely to signal that Republicans are not going to swallow the President's justification for the surveillance, and may be a precursor to hearings in the House. Still, Sensenbrenner seems to leave room for accepting the taps, at one point referring to them as "terrorist surveillance," the Administration phrase for the program.

Strikingly, the letter to Gonzales quotes Harvard University professor Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional scholar who testified at unofficial hearings held by ranking Judiciary Democrat John Conyers (D-MI). In a letter to Conyers, Tribe wrote that the taps "far from being authorized by Congress, [fly] in the face of an explicit congressional prohibition and [are] therefore unconstitutional."

Writes Sensenbrenner: "Do you agree that FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) 'expressly prohibits' the specific activities under this program?"

Sensenbrenner also questions the program's authorization under FISA.

"What is the rationale for authorizing a program to conduct surveillance in a manner that does not require prior judicial review by the FISA court?"

"Have past United States Presidents employed signals intelligence of the kind authorized by President Bush after 9/11 to protect the nation during wartime? Please explain."

"What legal precedents, if any, support the Administration's position that the September 14, 2001 AUMF directive to the President to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against al Qaeda included the ability to authorize NSA intercepts of al Qaeda-related communications into and out of the United States?"

Sensenbrenner also asks Bush whether he intends to seek an amendment to FISA that would allow him to conduct warrantless surveillance, and asks about the Justice Department probe which is seeking to root out who leaked the program's existence to the New York Times.

The full PDF of Sensenbrenner's letter is now available here.

http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/DOJNSA.pdf

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Senior_House_Republican_wants_answers_on_0208.html

 

No problem. I apologized in another thread, in case you were offended by the abreviation. I didn't mean it as anything other than short hand, and it wasn't intended as a slight or to be dismissive in any way.

I am sure you know that because it was a post praising your own, but misunderstandings are easy enough over the internet.

 

This is getting too easy...

---------------------

Chief FISA judge warned about misuse of NSA data

The chief FISA judge was advised at least twice by a Department of Justice lawyer that information may have been improperly gleamed from warrantless wiretaps, according to a Washington Post article slated for Thursday's paper, RAW STORY has learned.

Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush’s eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.

The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — who, like her predecessor, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.

The two heads of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were the only judges in the country briefed by the administration on Bush’s program. The president’s secret order, issued sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows the National Security Agency to monitor telephone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and contacts overseas.

James Baker, the counsel for intelligence policy in the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, discovered in 2004 that the government’s failure to share information about its spying program had rendered useless a federal screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information. He alerted Kollar-Kotelly, who complained to Justice, prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program, the sources said.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Chief_FISA_judge_ignored_misuse_of_0208.html

 

wsj also doesn't consider torture torture.

stop with the ultra-conservative drivel. thanks.

 

Gonzales, a tool Bush has used for years, who's perfectly willing to say whatever he's asked to say by Bush, Rove and company, has given sworn testimony twice before the Congress, in the past. It is beyond bizarre that he wasn't sworn in this time. It makes his testimony perfectly useless. He can say whatever he likes without fear of perjuring himself, and is doing exactly that.

It's a farce, and diminishes his office, the Congress, and makes Bush look like the cowardly fool that he is. What a sad pass we have come to, when America's Congress, and the American people, can be lied to by their Attorney General, who sits with a smirk on his face while doing so. Just when you think this Republican government has reached a new low, they dive further into the mud.



Keep D&D Civil.