Mark said to dmb:
... In your opinion, who is more authoritarian, Obama or Bush Jr.? Just
wondering. Who is more competitive and destructive? Obama has only had two
years to far. .. I do not agree that the right wing is more likely to suspend
the bill of rights.
dmb says:
What color is the sky in your world? Do they have newspapers on your planet?
Seriously, it is common knowledge that the Bush administration made a sustained
effort to expand executive authority. I'd be surprised if you could even find a
right-winger who would deny that. It was in all the papers, you know? It was
Cheney's dream since the early 1970's. You can find this out at the Cato
Institute or USA Today. Nobody failed to report on this expansion of power and
the weakening of rights that goes with it. The story has been told a million
times. Literally. For those who've been living in a cave for the last ten
years, here's how a leftist paper reported the story almost five years ago:
Bush administration report defends spying, unconstrained executive powersBy Joe
Kay23 January 2006The Bush administration is responding to revelations of
illegal government spying by mounting a campaign to defend its actions,
employing the same arguments that have been used to justify a massive expansion
of executive powers on a number of different fronts. Far from retreating in the
face of media reports of the secret National Security Agency (NSA) program to
spy on US citizens, the administration has declared that it cannot be
constrained in carrying out these actions.The existence of the NSA program was
first revealed last month in an article in the New York Times. It was reported
at the time that the Bush administration had authorized the NSA to spy on some
communications entering or leaving the United States. It has since become clear
that the spying agency has gained access to vast databases of telephone calls
and e-mails, most of which have nothing to do with Al Qaeda, but include
communications made by ordinary Americans. During the past several months,
there have also been numerous revelations of spying on American citizens
because of their antiwar activity.The pseudo-legal arguments used to defend the
NSA program were outlined in a 42-page document issued by the Justice
Department on January 19. The memo claims that the spying falls within the
framework of the president’s wartime powers as commander in chief of the
military, which the Bush administration contends were activated by the
Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress in the
wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001.Because the country is at war, the
Justice Department memo argues, the president has the authority to “conduct
warrantless surveillance of enemy forces.” The NSA activities “are primarily an
exercise of the President’s authority as Commander in Chief during an armed
conflict that Congress expressly has authorized the President to pursue,” it
argues. “The NSA activities, moreover, have been undertaken specifically to
prevent a renewed attack at the hands of an enemy that has already inflicted
the single deadliest foreign attack in the Nation’s history.”Governments
seeking to appropriate dictatorial powers have often warned that these powers
are necessary to protect the nation against some external threat. The Bush
administration’s arguments are entirely within this mold. The Justice
Department memo states, “The AUMF places the President at the zenith of his
powers in authorizing the NSA activities.”The memo attempts to justify this
previously unknown term—“zenith of his powers”—by referencing a concurring
opinion written by US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in the 1952 Steel
Seizure Case. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that President Harry Truman
could not claim wartime powers in seizing control of steel mills that had
stopped production during a strike. In his opinion, Jackson outlined three
scenarios that might govern a presidential action: (1) A president acts
“pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress,” in which case
his powers were at their maximum; (2) There is no legislation bearing on the
matter, in which case the president is in a “zone of twilight” regarding what
he may or may not do; and (3) The president acts in a way that is expressly
forbidden by Congress, in which case his power is at its “lowest ebb.”According
to this rubric, the NSA spying program would clearly fall within category 3,
since the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act forbids spying on
communications originating from or entering the United States without a
court-approved warrant. The Bush administration, however, argues that the AUMF
authorizes the president to use all of his traditional wartime powers,
including intelligence gathering on all alleged enemies in this war. Therefore,
the Justice Department memo claims, its actions fall under category 1 of
Jackson’s framework.The idea that the AUMF authorizes a vast expansion of
domestic spying powers is absurd. The legislation states, in part, “The
President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against
those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized,
committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
It says nothing about spying on US citizens. However, in interpreting the act
as conferring expansive new powers, the administration has pointed to precedent
in the 2004 Supreme Court decision in the case of Yaser Hamdi.At the time, the
Hamdi case was championed by the Democrats as a major setback for the Bush
administration because it granted so-called “enemy combatants,” including
Hamdi, a US citizen, certain habeas corpus rights (which have since been
sharply curtailed by a congressional act passed late last year). As the WSWS
noted at the time, however, the controlling decision, written by Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor, accepted the validity of the “war on terror” and the argument
that the AUMF gives the president the power to seize anyone, including US
citizens, and hold them indefinitely as enemy combatants. (See The meaning of
the US Supreme Court rulings on ‘enemy combatants’)The administration is now
arguing on the same grounds that the AUMF gives it the authority to carry out
domestic spying. A similar argument has been advanced in administration memos
to claim that the president has the right to order military tribunals and the
torture of prisoners.In putting forward this argument, the administration is
adopting the position that the entire world, including the United States, is a
battlefield in the war on terror. Since the American government is at war, and
since the battlefield includes the United States, spying on US residents is
necessary in order to spy on the enemy.In essence, the Bush administration has
declared that the US population as a whole consists of actual or potential
combatants in the war on terrorism. The repeated statements to the effect that
the spying only involves members of Al Qaeda—or those associated with it—are
entirely bogus, since the databases the government is accessing are not limited
to communications between Al Qaeda members.A report issued January 5 by the
Congressional Research Service examining the administration’s justifications
for the NSA program noted: “The Administration’s position would seem to rely on
at least two assumptions. First, it appears to require that the power to
conduct electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes is an essential
aspect of the use of military force in the same way that the capture of enemy
combatants on the battlefield is a necessary incident to the conduct of
military operations. Second, it appears to consider the ‘battlefield’ in the
war on terrorism to extend beyond the area of traditional military operations
to include US territory.”According to this view, the report noted, “the United
States is under actual and continuing enemy attack, and the President has the
authority to conduct electronic surveillance in the same way the armed forces
gather intelligence about the military operations of enemy forces, even if no
actual combat is taking place.”The administration still has to deal with the
inconvenient fact that FISA explicitly prohibits the very type of actions that
have been authorized for the NSA. In particular, it mandates that any
surveillance of communications entering or leaving the United States must be
approved by a FISA court. The FISA Act was set up in 1978 after revelations
that US intelligence agencies were carrying out extensive monitoring of antiwar
protestors and other opponents of US government policies.Besides its general
commitment to the principle of unconstrained executive power, the
administration wants to bypass FISA for two reasons. First, it is filtering
through large databases that include thousands or even millions of separate
communications. Second, the ultimate aim is to spy on all political opponents,
and not simply those that can somehow be tied to Al Qaeda.In dismissing FISA,
the Justice Department argues that if FISA or other legislation is “interpreted
to impede the President’s ability to use the traditional tool of electronic
surveillance” then “the constitutionality of FISA, as applied to that
situation, would be called into very serious doubt.” Since the constitutional
powers of the president as commander in chief are essentially unlimited, any
constraints on these powers may be unconstitutional. The memo then makes the
argument that the NSA program does not in fact violate FISA, based again on the
claim that the AUMF authorizes the spying.Finally, the Justice Department
maintains that the spying program is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment
protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The searches “are
reasonable because the Government’s interest, defending the Nation from another
foreign attack in time of armed conflict, outweighs the individual privacy
interests at stake, and because they seek to intercept only international
communications where one party is linked to al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist
organization.”Behind the pages of obfuscation laid out by the Justice
Department report is the basic argument that the undefined “war on terrorism”
confers upon the president unprecedented powers that have no limit in space or
time. Underlying this argument is the “Big Lie,” accepted by the entire
political establishment and the media, that all the actions of the US
government since 2001 have been in response to the threat of terrorism. In
fact, the attacks of September 11 have been used as a pretext to carry out
polices long sought by the American ruling elite, including the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq and the unprecedented attack on democratic rights in the
US.The extraordinary attack on democratic rights represented by the NSA program
and the other actions of the Bush administration has only been possible due to
the complicity of the Democratic Party. On the Sunday morning television talk
shows, leading Democrats declared their support for the spying in general, only
voicing the hope that the administration would do it in a way that was less
overtly illegal.On ABC’s program “This Week,” former presidential candidate and
current senator John Kerry declared that while he was critical of the way the
administration had pursued the program in secret, he considered a move by
Congress to cut off funding for it to be “premature.” He said the president
should go to Congress if he wants to get authorization to continue the
program.Senator Joseph Lieberman, the former vice presidential candidate,
declared on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “I want my president to be reading e-mails
of people talking to Al Qaeda.” He added, “Congress needs to get together on a
bipartisan basis and give the president the authority to do what he has done.”
And Congresswoman Jane Harman, the ranking member of the House Intelligence
Committee, also on “This Week,” said that “if FISA is being violated, we should
either change FISA or change the program.” She indicated her preference by
declaring that we “need a strong program.” As a member of the so-called
congressional “Group of Eight,” Harman has received briefings on the spy
program since it began four years ago.See Also:Bush administration domestic
spying provokes lawsuits, calls for impeachment[18 January 2006]More
revelations of illegal spying by US government[7 January 2006]Bush employs “Big
Lie” technique to defend illegal spying on Americans[24 December 2005]
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
