More Egregious Affront to the US Constituions

Nyquil already addressed this pretty well but to follow up on his point. You may feel that abortion is an affront to the Constitution but it since it is legal settled law, as you note, to the Constitution it isn't an affront. This is isn't a matter of what is right or wrong only that its matter of what is settled law. For instance slavery up unitl the 13th Ammendment wasn't an affront to the Constitution because it was legal and was even referenced in the Consititution. What is settled law though can be changed and the Constitution allows for both ammendment and interpretation. Until then though the Constitution establishes a legal basis for upholding the laws of this country.

Again you're confusing principles with the Constitution itself. I agree that principles are important but at the same time the Constitution as the basis of empowering the government to make and enforce laws will always stand for what is legal and against what is illegal.

 

Sishir summed it up already. The court doesn't notify anyone. The court provides a check in order to protect the citizens. It is there to keep the govt. from spying on people without reason.

The govt. can start spying without a warrant, and then later present their reasons and recieve a retro-active warrant in cases such as investigating terrorists to protect our national security.

The only reason the govt. would be rejected is if they didn't have any evidence. If they didn't have any evidence they shouldn't be wiretapping in the first place.

The FISA court is the only protection citizens have from the govt. There is no second layer, or ability to appeal. There is the FISA court and nothing else in cases such as that. If the executive branch bypasses that one protection then the citizens are left unprotected.

 

No, but you showed that you don't seem to understand the relevant issues with respect to FISA and how it works.

This is not surprising, as the farcical arguments propounded by the Bush administration as to the necessity of the illegal taps assumes an audience that doesn't comprehend FISA and how it works.

 

I understand the confusion. I meant the courts notifying the nsa or whoever is wiretapping that the warrant was granted. I didn't phrase that very clearly.

 

The Executive branch should have only restraints which tie a definition of a potential threat for terrorism for the record. this should be established, I'm sure for jucial review made available for reasoning, and if the record is legitimate then the reasoning is sound...

Perhaps I just want to save money and live in a safer world

 

You are correct, but I'm sure attention would legitimately be focused on real potential threats and monitored. I want this.

 

I haven't had a squirrel in 2 months!...

 

The terrorists will really be at risk. I'm sure Uncle Sam has a lot of interest in Joe B. Squirrel....

 

You may doubt the govt. would use wiretapping for anything other than terrorists, but history would seem to disagree with you.

Why was the Bush administration spying on religious Quaker meetings in their religious houses of worship? Why were they spying on PETA? Please explain how a pacificst quaker group is a threat to the U.S.?

to blindly trust the govt. to only spy on the bad guys seems far different than the concerns our founding fathers put in the constitution, and unwise, to put it as kindly as possible.

 

Yesterday...

NBC changes official transcript of Andrea Mitchell interview, deletes reference to Bush possibly wiretapping CNN's Christane Amanpour
by John in DC - 1/04/2006 04:29:00 PM

Well this is getting interesting. NBC just delete two paragraphs from its Andrea Mitchell interview, the paragraphs that talked about whether Bush was wiretapping ace CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour


Here's what the NBC "official" transcript used to say...


Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

Here's what it says now:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You are very, very tough on the CIA and the administration in general in both the war on terror and the run up to the war and the war itself Â? the post-war operation. Let's talk about the war on terror. Why do you think they missed so many signals and what do you think caused the CIA to have this sort of break down as you describe it?

Risen: I think that, you know, to me, the greater break down was really on Iraq. It's very difficult to have known ahead of time about these 19 hijackers. They were, you know, probably lucky that they got through and they did something that no one really assumed anybody would ever do. And I think that made 9/11 a lot like Pearl Harbor. That even when you see all the clues in front of you that it's very difficult to put it together.

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/nbc-changes-official-transcript-of.html

 

so why not apply for the court order/warrant retroactively..

its still won't slow down the govt right?

 

What you're describing is essentially a warrant as a judicial review of the reasoning is what is required to issue a warrant and that warrant is then available for later judicial review if there is a problem. This whole issue is whether the Executive Branch needs a warrant. Their argument is no so they can surviel without evening putting forward reasoning to any other branch of government

Saving money isn't a bad thing but doesn't take precedence over the seperation of powers or liberties. Many dictatorships run much more efficiently than our system. Safer world is highly debatable. Many would say a President that can act without the restraints of the separation of powers is a danger in itself.

 

Roxran, I admire that you have enough faith in the govt. to only spy on threats such as terrorists.

Sadly that faith has been misplaced.

 

I'm not describing a warrant, because I don't see the virtue of a branch of Government without expertise analyzing basis of reasoning and making a sound conclusion. The Judicial branch has the expertise on law, therefore a record of reasoning should be made to defer to in case of post-problematic situations. The Judicial branch can even be referred to in a general capacity to safe keep rights. However, the Executive branch is best equipped to make quantitative analysis on identification. The Executive branch has the best tools for taking action towards counterterroristic collaboration and planning methods. This is a good thing. You have the Homeland Security department networked with the dept. of Justice, the Secret Service, Immigration, among several/many others. Why lose valuable time and resources not acting on a strong potential security breach, and instigating Congressional/Judicial approval when the expertise of grasping the connection of the data or content of the threat is minimal or downright nonexistant? This would be the equivalance of having a businessman or lawyer explain the differance of a .223 round from a 5.56 x 45mm round and how this may matter from the same barrel...Separation of powers is there and always will be there. From the report it is demonstrated to a very compelling degree that the President has followed Constitutional precedent. If anything, I would find it incompetent for a United States President to not not find significant Constitutional precedent, especially when engaging the clear, and present danger threat we are in with terrorism.

 

Only a database among many groups I'm sure. No evidence thus far of surveilance. Where is the "spying"?

 

It is relevant to the spy case, because you claimed that the govt. wouldn't waste their time spying on average people, or insinuated that they would only go after terrorists and threats to our national security.

The point is that they had this quaker group and 79 year old grandmother listed as a potential terrorist threat. That kind of selectivity, or rather, lack of selectivity when deciding who is a threat or isn't, seems to be ample reasoning to make sure there is a check on what the govt. is doing under the name of defending against terrorists.

It is not so along ago that the govt. was using national security to spy on all sorts of people who weren't a threat to our national security.

This is from the same article.

To ignore a history of abuse of power, and blindly trust the govt. is to go down to authoritarianism without so much as a fight. All the guns in the world won't matter if people just give it away.

 

Even with the court approval the executive branch could still make the decisions on who or how many people to spy on. That wouldn't change. The only difference is that the court would make sure they had a legitimate reason for spying on those individuals.

No time would be lost. The govt. can wiretap immediately, and get the court order afterward. It is clear they are wasting their time in regards to national security when they are monitoring pacifist quaker groups, and peaceful protestors.

Why ignore the history of a govt. that illegally spied on MLK jr., The socialist workers party, were opening mail, collecting private information about the political activies of private citizens, etc.?

There is a history of abuse of power, and I can't believe that anyone would not want to make sure that abuse didn't happen again in the land of the free.

The only protection we have to make sure that doesn't happen again is the FISA court.

We know that the administration has already lied regarding this operation. They claimed they were doing so with the knowledge and consent of members of congress. The congressmen involved then later said it wasn't true, and produced letters written long ago objecting to these practices.

Yet despite that kind of dishonesty we should just trust that they can do what's best for us, without any official entity there to check and protect the citizens?

With all due respect, I find that quite naive.

 

I will still say there is no spying. Why mislead or imply in this instance? The Executive branch of the government (Even your Clinton's administration) has ALWAYS had databases on groups, and history has shown religious tied groups to be an issue. For instance, I'm sure Janet Reno's dept. of Justice under the Clinton administration had some sort of database on the WACO incident. I read there were people of grandparenting age in the compund, and it was founded through surveilance that these folks were enough of a threat to act on...

I'd rather leave the approval/ selection process with those in expertise.

 

NSA Destroyed Evidence of Domestic Spying

By Jason Leopold
Thursday 05 January 2006

The National Security Agency, the top-secret spy shop that has been secretly eavesdropping on Americans under a plan authorized by President Bush four years ago, destroyed the names of thousands of Americans and US companies it collected on its own volition following 9/11, because the agency feared it would be taken to task by lawmakers for conducting unlawful surveillance on United States citizens without authorization from a court, according to a little known report published in October 2001 and intelligence officials familiar with the NSA's operations.

NSA lawyers advised the agency to immediately destroy the names of thousands of American citizens and businesses it collected shortly after 9/11 in its quest to target terrorists in this country. NSA lawyers told the agency that the surveillance was illegal and that it could not share the data it collected with the CIA or other intelligence agencies.

The lawyers said the surveillance could result in numerous lawsuits from people identified in the surveillance reports, two former US officials told the Houston Chronicle in an October 27, 2001, report, and was illegal despite any terrorist threat that existed in the days following 9/11.

By law, the NSA cannot spy on a US citizen, an immigrant lawfully admitted to this country for permanent residence, or a US corporation. But, with the permission of a special court, it can target foreigners inside the United States, including diplomats.

The revelation raises new questions about the legality of the NSA's domestic spying initiative, authorized by President Bush in 2002, which has come under intense scrutiny by Republicans and Democrats and will likely lead to Congressional hearings.

The fact that the NSA has purged the names of thousands of Americans and businesses it collected after 9/11 suggests that at the time there were questions about the constitutionality of the agency's efforts to combat terrorism by secretly spying on Americans.

Still, the intelligence destruction angered CIA and FBI officials as well as staff members of the House and Senate intelligence committees who feared that leads on potential terrorists would be permanently lost.

"In heated discussions with the CIA and congressional staff, NSA lawyers have turned down requests to preserve the intelligence because the agency's regulations prohibit the collection of any information on US citizens," the Chronicle reported.

The NSA, based in Fort Meade, Maryland, operates under the Department of Defense. It distributes analysis summaries of its intelligence-gathering to a certain number of senior US officials, but it doesn't share its raw data - transcripts from wiretaps - with anyone. The raw data is prized by intelligence analysts because it provides additional context and more leads than the watered-down summaries.

However, those guidelines changed after 9/11 also.

The NSA ended up giving its raw data to then Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton on at least 10 different occasions since 9/11. Bolton, nominated by Bush to be US ambassador to the United Nations, let slip during his confirmation hearings in April that he asked the NSA to unmask the identities of the Americans blacked out in the agency's raw reports, to better understand the context of the intelligence.

However, evidence suggests that Bolton used the information for personal reasons, in direct violation of rules governing the dissemination of classified intelligence. During one routine wiretap, the NSA obtained the name of a state department official whose name had been blacked out when the agency submitted its report to various federal agencies.

Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA official, revealed during the confirmation hearings that Bolton had requested that the NSA unmask the unidentified official. Fleitz said that when Bolton found out his identity, he congratulated the official, and by doing so he had violated the NSA's rules by discussing classified information contained in the wiretap.

It turned out that Bolton was just one of many government officials who learned the identities of Americans caught in the NSA intercepts. The State Department has asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American citizens 500 times since May 2001.

At the time of the NSA purge in October 2001, US Rep. Charles F. Bass, R-NH, who served for four years on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested that the NSA routinely skirted the law by eavesdropping on Americans.

"I think it could be the biggest information problem that we face," Bass told the Chronicle. "If somebody is abroad and they even mention the name of an American citizen, bang, off goes the tap, and no more information is collected."

But what seemed to be a blatant violation of the law shortly after 9/11 was beginning to get a second look a year later, when Bush first authorized the NSA to spy on Americans, and lawmakers suggested that domestic spying was all but guaranteed to avoid terrorist attacks.

Porter Goss, the former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said as much in a wide ranging interview with the Miami Herald on June 11, 2002.

"The most critical question of all - how much spying on Americans do we want," said Goss, now the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. "What this comes down to is domestic surveillance [on individuals and groups], and I don't know how you do that without spying on Americans. I can't emphasize enough that that's the hardest part."


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010506I.shtml