Irresponsibility Care Of The New York Times
The New York Times once again displays not only it's ignorance in matters of law, but it's overall agenda-driven journalism.
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.
Two things. First, they are correct. To date, no Democrat has ever said the above, however as the Times will agree, actions speak far louder than words. The actions and caterwauling of the Democrats is enough for America to understand that they do not like the president is protecting America. Secondly, there is one thing that prevented us from listening in on al Qaeda prior to September 11th. We were not yet at war with them, which meant we would have to go through the FISA court, and end up tipping our hand to our enemy. And, they love to cite the FISA law, and state that it is ordering the government to obey the law, which is exactly what it is doing. They cite the Fourth Amendment (which concerns only CITIZENS, you twits), and the president and the Justice Department are citing Article II, referring to the president's powers.
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.
This is an intercept program. The NSA is using computers to track, sort through, and record conversations that fall within program parameters. If it catches one that later does not fit into it's protocol, the computer drops it. The only human element comes in when the computer starts to spit out relevant data. It is not going to record Maureen Dowd, Molly Ivins, or any other Times writer who thinks that they actually mean something to the world. It is targeting terrorists, and picking them up communicating with their "brothers in death" across the globe.
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.
"The secret program violates the law as currently written." This is an out and out lie. Here is a little legal lesson for the New York Times. The US Constitution is the highest law in the land; no other laws supercede it, nor could they even if enacted. The FISA law is irrelevant to the powers of the president, which are enumerated under Article II, Sections 1 and 2. They stipulate that the powers of the Executive Branch lies within one President of the United States, and that president is the Commander in Chief of our military. In a time of war, nothing trumps the president's decisions. Here nedeth the lesson for the Times inept and wholly uneducated editorial board.
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.
I hate to inform the times of this glaring fact, but Pres. Bush garnered more than 60 million votes in 2004 to win his reelection bid thereby gaining the trust of the American people that was trusted by America as opposed to Sen. Kerry. The Times would be wise to remember that it was Sen. Kerry, not Pres. Bush, that was caught in repeated lie and falsehood during that campaign. And when caught, he simply changed up his story, but even the changes were lies. And as to him making the rules, he does have that authrority under the Constitution, provided through the AUMF from Congress.
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.
Just a second. I would like the Times to cite me--in the Constitution--where a non-citizen is granted ANY protections under it. It is not there. This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts; non-citizens gain no quarter under the Constitution. The Times should be ashamed as to screw up a simple fact of Constitutional Law.
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.
The Times may think that this "excuse" does not hold water, however the courts have ruled that just such instances exist. And there is no discerning measures that the Times cites from the Framers. A "discernible" beginning and end is a bit much to state. No one knew precisely how long World War I or World War II was going to last. If it had lasted ten years, the president's war powers would be unchallenged. This is simply a cop-out argument made by the Times. And in the question of how long a "war" would take, did Pres. Clinton not lie then about the war in Kosovo; promising our troops would be home within a year? They are still there.
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.
My gripe with Mr. Gonzales is the simple fact that the previous four presidents have used such surveillance to keep tabs on our enemies, or potential security risks, within our nation. His only serious mistake was not putting the intercept program into context, relevant to the world today. Citing Washing, Wilson, and FDR are good, but the history is much different for them than the world today. Remember, FDR was still speaking to America via his "Fireside Chats;" there was no Internet, or fiber-optic communications. Nor were thre satellites in space bouncing our communications around the globe. Context, in this aspect, is everything.
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.
I suggest the next time the New York Times decides to write a piece of garbage like this that they consult an actual expert before going off half-cocked. One can understand why they are fighting for this so badly--as this was their story--but there is a point where you have to wave the white flag. They are losing this argument, and it will not be pretty if they continue to act like the KosKiddies throwing a tantrum.
Just because they say something is illegal does not make it so. On the contrary, as they are not the ones who determine our laws, nor whether something is leagal or not, they are completely unprepared for this debate. And it is showing. If I were the Times editor in chief, I would fire the person who came up with this lame-brained editorial, and any op-ed editor that went a long with this. The Times will have plenty to answer for once the leak investigation comes to a close.
The Bunny ;)
The New York Times once again displays not only it's ignorance in matters of law, but it's overall agenda-driven journalism.
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.
Two things. First, they are correct. To date, no Democrat has ever said the above, however as the Times will agree, actions speak far louder than words. The actions and caterwauling of the Democrats is enough for America to understand that they do not like the president is protecting America. Secondly, there is one thing that prevented us from listening in on al Qaeda prior to September 11th. We were not yet at war with them, which meant we would have to go through the FISA court, and end up tipping our hand to our enemy. And, they love to cite the FISA law, and state that it is ordering the government to obey the law, which is exactly what it is doing. They cite the Fourth Amendment (which concerns only CITIZENS, you twits), and the president and the Justice Department are citing Article II, referring to the president's powers.
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.
This is an intercept program. The NSA is using computers to track, sort through, and record conversations that fall within program parameters. If it catches one that later does not fit into it's protocol, the computer drops it. The only human element comes in when the computer starts to spit out relevant data. It is not going to record Maureen Dowd, Molly Ivins, or any other Times writer who thinks that they actually mean something to the world. It is targeting terrorists, and picking them up communicating with their "brothers in death" across the globe.
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.
"The secret program violates the law as currently written." This is an out and out lie. Here is a little legal lesson for the New York Times. The US Constitution is the highest law in the land; no other laws supercede it, nor could they even if enacted. The FISA law is irrelevant to the powers of the president, which are enumerated under Article II, Sections 1 and 2. They stipulate that the powers of the Executive Branch lies within one President of the United States, and that president is the Commander in Chief of our military. In a time of war, nothing trumps the president's decisions. Here nedeth the lesson for the Times inept and wholly uneducated editorial board.
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.
I hate to inform the times of this glaring fact, but Pres. Bush garnered more than 60 million votes in 2004 to win his reelection bid thereby gaining the trust of the American people that was trusted by America as opposed to Sen. Kerry. The Times would be wise to remember that it was Sen. Kerry, not Pres. Bush, that was caught in repeated lie and falsehood during that campaign. And when caught, he simply changed up his story, but even the changes were lies. And as to him making the rules, he does have that authrority under the Constitution, provided through the AUMF from Congress.
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.
Just a second. I would like the Times to cite me--in the Constitution--where a non-citizen is granted ANY protections under it. It is not there. This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts; non-citizens gain no quarter under the Constitution. The Times should be ashamed as to screw up a simple fact of Constitutional Law.
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.
The Times may think that this "excuse" does not hold water, however the courts have ruled that just such instances exist. And there is no discerning measures that the Times cites from the Framers. A "discernible" beginning and end is a bit much to state. No one knew precisely how long World War I or World War II was going to last. If it had lasted ten years, the president's war powers would be unchallenged. This is simply a cop-out argument made by the Times. And in the question of how long a "war" would take, did Pres. Clinton not lie then about the war in Kosovo; promising our troops would be home within a year? They are still there.
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.
My gripe with Mr. Gonzales is the simple fact that the previous four presidents have used such surveillance to keep tabs on our enemies, or potential security risks, within our nation. His only serious mistake was not putting the intercept program into context, relevant to the world today. Citing Washing, Wilson, and FDR are good, but the history is much different for them than the world today. Remember, FDR was still speaking to America via his "Fireside Chats;" there was no Internet, or fiber-optic communications. Nor were thre satellites in space bouncing our communications around the globe. Context, in this aspect, is everything.
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.
I suggest the next time the New York Times decides to write a piece of garbage like this that they consult an actual expert before going off half-cocked. One can understand why they are fighting for this so badly--as this was their story--but there is a point where you have to wave the white flag. They are losing this argument, and it will not be pretty if they continue to act like the KosKiddies throwing a tantrum.
Just because they say something is illegal does not make it so. On the contrary, as they are not the ones who determine our laws, nor whether something is leagal or not, they are completely unprepared for this debate. And it is showing. If I were the Times editor in chief, I would fire the person who came up with this lame-brained editorial, and any op-ed editor that went a long with this. The Times will have plenty to answer for once the leak investigation comes to a close.
The Bunny ;)
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 8:37 PM
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