The Imperial Presidency of George W. Bush

THIS CALL MAY BE MONITORED
NY Times Editorial
12/18/05

--snip--Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.

This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.

The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush's order, and that is nonsense. The existing law already recognizes that American citizens' communications may be intercepted by chance. It says that those records may be retained and used if they amount to actual foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material. Otherwise, they must be thrown out.

--snip--Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it.

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Warrantless Surveillance
St Petersburg Times Editorial
12/18/05

President Bush apparently believes that fighting terrorism justifies any action he chooses, no matter how extralegal. But the United States is a nation of laws, and the president is constrained by them, too. That is why Bush's unilateral authorization granting the National Security Agency the power to wiretap American citizens and others in the United States without a warrant is so dangerously ill-conceived and contrary to this nation's guiding principles.

Just as the Senate was considering the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act and debating the safeguards needed to protect Americans from excessive government snooping, it was revealed that the NSA has been spying on potentially thousands of people in this country, without first going to a court for approval.

This is part of an imperial presidency that has emerged under Bush since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. On the authority of the executive branch alone, the administration has imprisoned people for years without charge, captured suspects and put them in secret overseas prisons, and engaged in interrogation techniques that violate domestic law and international treaties. Now the New York Times report on more spying reveals that the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, requiring a showing of probable cause before someone's privacy can be invaded, have been set aside upon the president's sole say-so.

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Big Brother Bush: The President Took A Step Towards A Police State
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
12/18/05

The Bush administration is continuing its assault on Americans' privacy and freedom in the name of the war on terrorism.

First, in 2002, according to extensive reporting in The New York Times on Friday, it secretly authorized the National Security Agency to intercept and keep records of Americans' international phone and e-mail messages without benefit of a previously required court order. Second, it has permitted the Department of Defense to get away with not destroying after three months, as required, records of American Iraq war protesters in the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice, or TALON, database.

Both practices mean that a government agency is maintaining information on Americans, reminiscent of the Johnson and Nixon administrations' approach to Vietnam War protesters. The existence of those records should be seen against a background of the Bush administration's response to criticism of the Iraq war by retired Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. His wife's career at the CIA was ended in revenge for an article he wrote unmasking a dodgy piece of intelligence that President Bush had used in a State of the Union message to seek to support his decision to go to war.

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Spying On Americans
The Washington Post Editoria
12/18/15

IN THE WAKE of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the New York Times reported last week, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of hundreds of U.S. citizens and residents suspected of contact with al Qaeda figures -- without warrants and outside the strictures of the law that governs national security searches and wiretaps. The rules here are not ambiguous. Generally speaking, the NSA has not been permitted to operate domestically. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires that national security wiretaps be authorized by the secretive FISA court. "A person is guilty of an offense," the law reads, "if he intentionally . . . engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute" -- which appears, at least on its face, to be precisely what the president has authorized.

Mr. Bush, in his weekly radio address yesterday, defended his action, chastised the media for revealing it, and suggested both that Congress had justified this step by authorizing force against al Qaeda and that such spying was consistent with the "constitutional authority vested in me as commander in chief." But there is a reason the CIA and the NSA are not supposed to operate domestically: The tools of foreign intelligence are not consistent with a democratic society. Americans interact with their own government through the enforcement of law. And in those limited instances in which Americans become intelligence targets, FISA exists to make sure that the agencies are not targeting people for improper reasons but have sufficient evidence that Americans are actually operating as foreign agents. Warrantless intelligence surveillance by an executive branch unaccountable to any judicial officer -- and apparently on a large scale -- is gravely dangerous.

--snip--Congress must make the administration explain itself. In the aftermath of the revelations, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said hearings on the matter would be a high priority in the coming year. That's good. It should be unthinkable for Congress to acquiesce to such a fundamental change in the law of domestic surveillance, particularly without a substantive account of what the administration is doing and why.

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Surveillance Puts Rights At Risk
Kansas City Star Editorial
12/18/05

The Bush administration’s secret use of the National Security Agency to spy on people within the United States without court-approved warrants raises immediate legal and constitutional concerns.

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution forbids “unreasonable searches” and sets out specific requirements for warrants, including “probable cause.”

Congress needs to step in quickly to find out exactly what has happened. Lawmakers must make it clear to President Bush that, as the Supreme Court noted last year, the struggle with foreign enemies does not simply give him a blank check to do whatever he wants.

The judicial system that the Bush administration keeps trying to bypass may also need to weigh in again at this point. The courts have a responsibility to protect the public’s Fourth Amendment rights.

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Domestic Liberties Require Protection
The Denver Post
12/18/05

At a time when Congress is balking at government encroachment on individual liberties, it was startling to learn that the top-secret National Security Agency has been conducting domestic surveillance without court approval. The agency's charter is to monitor international communication circuits, but it apparently got the go-ahead in an executive order signed sub rosa by President Bush.

The revelation came on the day the U.S. Senate wisely rejected reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, which gave law enforcement broad new powers in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Key provisions of the law will expire Dec. 31 without action from Congress. We again urge the president and his loyalists to adopt revisions of the law passed unanimously by the Senate this summer. The so-called Safe Act contains safeguards meant to ensure protection of civil liberties.

Opposition to a mindless reauthorization of the entire Patriot Act comes from both sides of the ideological spectrum and from members of both political parties. And no wonder. Friday's revelation about NSA spying demonstrates that the administration has lost its sense of balance between essential anti-terrorism tools and encroachment on liberties. What's the cliché here? If we give up our liberties in the name of anti-terrorism, the terrorists have already won.

The NSA spying underscores the need for proper checks and balances. Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies at George Washington University, called the NSA spying - first reported by The New York Times - "as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration." She said, "It is, I believe, the first time a president has authorized government agencies to violate a specific criminal prohibition and eavesdrop on Americans."

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