Yup The SECRET GUVMINT hard at work. We need to come up with an ACTION PLAN
and
Get On With getting our Republic Back !
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3505348655137118430&q=bill%2Bmoyers%2Bsecret%2Bgovernment
He's a dose of what is really going on !
Vigilius Haufniensis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03192007.html
March 19, 2007
Our Highest Law Enforcement Officials are Criminals Crime Blotter: 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
While serving as President Bush's White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzales
advised Bush that the president's war time powers permitted Bush to ignore the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and to use the National Security
Agency (NSA) to spy on US citizens without obtaining warrants from the FISA
court as required by law. Under an order signed by Bush in 2002, NSA illegally
spied on Americans without warrants.
By spying on Americans without obtaining warrants, Bush committed felonies
under FISA. Moreover, there is strong, indeed overwhelming, evidence that
justice was obstructed when Bush and Gonzales blocked a 2006 Justice Department
investigation into whether Gonzales acted properly as Attorney General in
approving and overseeing the Bush administration's program of spying on US
citizens. Also at issue is whether Gonzales acted properly in advising Bush to
kill an investigation of Gonzales' professional actions with regard to the NSA
spy program.
We are faced with the almost certain fact that the two highest law
enforcement officials of the United States are criminals.
The evidence that Bush and Gonzales have obstructed justice comes from
internal Justice Department memos and exchanges of letters between the Justice
Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), an investigative
office, and members of Congress. The documents were leaked to the National
Journal, and the story was reported in the March 15, 2007, issue by Murray
Waas, who also relied on interviews with both current and former high ranking
DOJ officials. Ten months previously on May 25, 2006, Waas broke the story in
the National Journal about the derailing of the OPR investigation.
From Waas's report it is obvious that many current and former Justice
Department officials have serious concerns about the high-handed behavior of
the Bush administration. The incriminating documents were leaked to the
National Journal, the only remaining national publication that has any
credibility. The New York Times and Washington Post have proven to be supine
tools of the Bush administration and are no longer trusted.
When the Bush administration's violation of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act was leaked to the New York Times, the paper's editors obliged
Bush by spiking the story for one year, while Bush illegally collected
information that he could use to blackmail his critics into silence. As I wrote
at the time, the only possible reason for violating FISA is to collect
information that can be used to silence critics. The administration's claim
that bypassing FISA was essential to the "war on terror" is totally false and
is a justification and practice that the Bush administration, no longer able to
defend, abandoned in January of this year.
The known facts: After keeping the information from Congress and the public
for one year, on Dec. 16, 2005, the New York Times reported that Bush was
spying on Americans without complying with the FISA statute. In response to a
request from members of Congress, the Justice Department's Office of
Professional Responsibility launched an investigation into the Bush
administration's decision to ignore FISA and to conduct domestic spying on
American citizens without obtaining the warrants required by law. On January
20, 2006, Marshall Jarrett, the Justice Department official in charge of OPR,
informed senior Justice Department officials of his investigation and its scope.
Gonzales informed President Bush about the OPR investigation, and Bush shut
down the investigation by refusing security clearances to the Justice
Department officials in OPR. In a response to Senate Judiciary Committee
chairman Arlen Specter on July 18, 2006, Gonzales disclosed that President Bush
had halted the OPR investigation.
This is the first and only time in history that DOJ officials have been
denied security clearances necessary to conduct an investigation. The Bush
administration claimed that the secret spying was too crucial to our national
security to permit even Justice Department officials to learn about it.
However, even as Bush was denying clearances to OPR, he granted identical
clearances to: (1) the FBI agents ordered to find who leaked the
administration's secret spying to the New York Times, (2) DOJ officials in the
Civil Division who had to respond to legal challenges to the illegal spy
program, and (3) five private sector individuals who sit on the Privacy and
Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
Obviously, the unprecedented denial of security clearances to OPR was done in
order to prevent the investigation.
On March 21, 2006, Marshall Jarrett wrote to Deputy Attorney General Paul
McNulty that OPR was being "precluded from performing its duties."
In May, 2006, Jarrett informed Congress: "On May 9, 2006, we were informed
that our requests had been denied. Without these clearances, we cannot
investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation." The
National Journal reports: "[Rep. Maurice] Hinchey and other Democratic House
members asked Jarrett why he was unable to obtain the necessary clearances;
Jarrett's superiors, according to government records and to interviews,
instructed him not to inform Congress that President Bush had made the
decision."
When the illegal domestic spying program was launched in 2002, Gonzales was
still White House Counsel. Documents and interviews show that most high ranking
Justice Department officials opposed the illegal program. Attorney General
Ashcroft, Deputy Attorney General James Comey, Assistant Attorney General Jack
Goldsmith in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, and James A. Baker, counsel
for the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review all raised objections to the
illegality and propriety of Bush's National Security Agency eavesdropping
program. Baker went so far as to warn the presiding judge of the FISA court
that authorities were improperly obtaining information and bypassing the court.
On learning that the administration was violating FISA, one of the federal
judges on the FISA court resigned in protest.
Goldsmith was troubled by Bush's claim that the "war on terror" gave the
president virtually unlimited powers. Goldsmith's objections to the
Bush-Cheney-Gonzales view that the president is above the law during time of
war brought him under fierce attack from Vice President Dick Cheney and
Cheney's two principal henchmen, Scooter Libby, now a convicted felon, and
David Addington.
Goldsmith found an ally in Deputy Attorney General Comey. Comey defied the
White House in March 2004 when he refused to reauthorize Bush's spying on
American citizens unless the program was brought within the law. Comey incurred
additional Bush-Cheney enmity when he appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald to
investigate the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, an investigation that
resulted in the arrest and conviction of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.
In his lengthy and detailed report in the National Journal, Waas quotes a
former White House Official: "Comey showed us that he was a guy who wouldn't be
kept on a leash in an administration that likes to keep everybody on a short
leash."
A criminal political administration has no choice but to keep everyone on a
short leash in order to keep its illegal acts under wraps. Americans have never
experienced an administration so replete with crimes as the Bush Regime.
This criminal regime must now be brought to an end. Impeachments of Bush,
Cheney, and Gonzales, followed by felony indictments and trials are imperative
if the rule of law in the United States is to be preserved.
Paul Craig Roberts held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University and
was Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He
served as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be
reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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