Subscribe".. The application of vague and elastic standards for wiretapping and bugging has resulted in electronic surveillances which, by any objective measure, were improper and seriously infringed the Fourth Amendment rights of both the targets and those with whom the targets communicated. The inherently intrusive nature of electronic surveillance, moreover, has enabled the Government to generate vast amounts of information - unrelated to any legitimate government interest - about the personal and political lives of American citizens. The collection of this type of information has in its turn raised the danger of its use for partisan political and other improper political ends by senior administration officials."
BIDEN: Thank you very much.
General, how has this revelation damaged the program?
I'm almost confused by it but, I mean, it seems to presuppose that these very sophisticated Al Qaida folks didn't think we were intercepting their phone calls.
I mean, I'm a little confused. How did it damage this?
GONZALES: Well, Senator, I would first refer to the experts in the Intel Committee who are making that statement, first of all. I'm just the lawyer.
And so, when the director of the CIA says this should really damage our intel capabilities, I would defer to that statement. I think, based on my experience, it is true -- you would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some kind of surveillance.
But if they're not reminded about it all the time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget.
Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM), “whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency broke ranks with the White House and has called for a full Congressional inquiry into the Bush administration’s domestic eavesdropping 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.”
why didn't Congress declare war ?
"The central thrust of the administration's argument for ignoring FISA is that the FISA application process is too slow. Yet, as anyone who read the text of the statute realizes, FISA allows for a search-first-apply-later option....
Gonzales paints the emergency FISA process to be so grueling, so bureaucratic as to render the entire process almost useless in this post-9/11 word where we need to act swiftly. Well, if emergency FISA searches are so darn hard to execute, why then has the Bush administration's use of emergency FISA risen exponentially since 9/11? Take for example the one year period following the 9/11 attacks. From 2001 to 2002 , the Bush administration had exercised the emergency FISA option 113 times. To total number of emergency FISA wiretaps in the court's 23-year history before Bush took office?
Forty-six.
Forty-six emergency FISA wiretaps in 23 years, and here we have 113 such warrantless wiretaps in a single year. By April 1, 2003, that number was 170. That's more than three times the total number of emergency wiretaps before Bush took office. In case you're wondering about the math, that's about 9 warrantless, emergency FISA wiretaps per month since September 11th. About 2 per week.
FISA works, and the administration's frequent, successful employment of FISA's emergency provision proves that. Again, the central issue: since the administration's own records prove FISA is flexible enough to address immediate terrorist threats, why did the President ignore the law and wiretap Americans without a warrant? Why did he keep his program secret for over four years? And what does he have to hide?
"After four and a half years, our intelligence and national-security apparatus still hasn't learned how to track terrorists, and the Bush administration has put forward little more than cosmetic reforms.
The legal controversy over the NSA surveillance program has obscured an intelligence issue that is at least as important to the nation's future: sheer competence. Do we have any idea what we're doing? One reason the NSA is listening in on so many domestic conversations fruitlessly - few of the thousands of tips panned out, according to The Washington Post- is that the agency barely has a clue as to who, or what, it is supposed to be monitoring....
Vice President Dick Cheney asserted recently that the NSA’s domestic surveillance program has 'saved thousands of lives.' The only domestic success that administration has publicly linked to the surveillance program is the exposure of a rather comical plan by truck driver Iyman Faris to blowtorch the Brooklyn Bridge (even that claim is questionable)." [Newsweek | February 8, 2006]
" [On] April 24, 2004, ...[Bush]...told a Buffalo audience: 'Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.' This statement was false, and Bush knew it when he said it. The president lied in Buffalo." [Newsweek | February 6, 2006]
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posted by JWright at 11:09 PM on February 8, 2006