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Skriven 2006-01-29 13:09:56 av BOB SAKOWSKI (1:123/140)
Ärende: Truth to power
======================
A bit of truth to power from the NY Times regarding The Coward who would be
king, aka the Lyin' King.

January 29, 2006
Editorial
Spies, Lies and Wiretaps

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the
legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless
spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we
got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation,
contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to
paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big,
dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at
people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has
violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was
that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had
thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.
•

Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The
nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours
to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They
missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who now
say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one could
possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will
finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged from
hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will not
happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as
though they do not want to defend America. "President Bush believes if Al
Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security
interest to know who they're calling and why," he told Republican
officials. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing
— and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call
from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al
Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in
doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier.

Only bad guys are spied on. Bush officials have said the surveillance is
tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al
Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it
saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper
has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of
e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generate
thousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to
dead ends or to innocent Americans. The biggest fish the administration has
claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn
Bridge with a blowtorch — a case that F.B.I. officials said was not
connected to the spying operation anyway.

The spying is legal. The secret program violates the law as currently
written. It's that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just
this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americans
by reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone
conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created for
this purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the
years and rejected a handful.

As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause,
the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the
surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a
lone-wolf terrorist. The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping
on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good
enough for Mr. Bush, who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from
"probable cause" to "reasonable belief" and then cast aside the bedrock
democratic principle of judicial review.

Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance
between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and
presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is
doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the
good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not
have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a
well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just
changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners
and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his
judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy,
civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers.
The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to
avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

The rules needed to be changed. In 2002, a Republican senator — Mike DeWine
of Ohio — introduced a bill that would have done just that, by lowering the
standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to "reasonable
suspicion" for a "non-United States person." But the Justice Department
opposed it, saying the change raised "both significant legal and practical
issues" and may have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is
a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans
— and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable.

So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already
secretly lowered the standard of proof — and dispensed with judges and
warrants — for Americans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone
to know.

War changes everything. Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to do
anything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is
simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument.

The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against
terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a "wartime
measure." That just doesn't hold up. The Constitution does suggest expanded
presidential powers in a time of war. But the men who wrote it had in mind
wars with a beginning and an end. The war Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney keep
trying to sell to Americans goes on forever and excuses everything.

Other presidents did it. Mr. Gonzales, who had the incredible bad taste to
begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged
to their deaths from the flaming twin towers, claimed historic precedent
for a president to authorize warrantless surveillance. He mentioned George
Washington, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These precedents have
no bearing on the current situation, and Mr. Gonzales's timeline
conveniently ended with F.D.R., rather than including Richard Nixon, whose
surveillance of antiwar groups and other political opponents inspired FISA
in the first place. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war,
and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and
even those that are just anti-Republican.
•

The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to start hearings on the domestic
spying. Congress has failed, tragically, on several occasions in the last
five years to rein in Mr. Bush and restore the checks and balances that are
the genius of American constitutional democracy. It is critical that it not
betray the public once again on this score.
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