Bush Caught Lying About Spying on Americans

[Trajan Octavian Titus]

You are right. What matters is the specific text of the resolution. What also matters, for this discussion, is what specific text is left out of that resolution. The text I am referring too, is the same text you are argueing as the justification for the wiretaps on US soil. And that text was not included in the resolution. Thereby making your arguement just what you said, "jack ****".

First off you're taking Dashle's word for it second off what part of: 'any force,' don't you understand it doesn't say: 'any force just as long as you keep out of the U.S.,' it says: 'any force.'

 

[26 X World Champs]

Wow that's funny maybe that's how it works in communist China but here in the United States of America the burden of proof is on the prosecution.

:rofl - Then why does Bush need to subvert the courts and the law to spy on fellow Americans? Isn't the burden of proof on Bush the check required by law to obtain a warrant before or up to 15 days after the fact from a secret court?

 

[26 X World Champs]

To bad that I have already proven to you that the president is well within his legal rights and now all your side is reduced to is rhetoric, speculation, and inuendo, how does it feel when no matter how hard you try you can't make one of your accusations stick?

:yawn: :2rofll: :laughat: :2nobashin

 

[hipsterdufus]

Actually it was the Dems and more specifically Clinton who was in Red China's pocket but whatever I didn't even mention that I have proven that the president is well within his legal rights to protect our country and the proof is in the pudding who stood to gain politically from leaking the information? Give me a break Hip you know damn well who leaked the info so quit trying to play devils advocate.

How the heck do I know who leaked the info?
All I'm saying is that the last classified leak allegedly came from a Republican according to Trent Lott.

 

[argexpat]

Your links say nothing about anyone lying and your thread is spreading disinformation and it must stop.

The idea that I'm going to stop posting because some Republican bootlicker doesn’t agree with me is laughably pompous.

The president ordered survellance on known al-quida operatives and those having repeated communication with al-quida. It's not as if the president is spying on you or I.

And how do you know he’s not spying on you and me (“me” is the correct pronoun BTW)? According to Bush, he has the authority to spy on whomever he wants, whenever he wants, for whatever reason he wants. We’re just supposed to trust him. I don’t trust him. He’s an incompetent jackass who thinks senators represent cities. Luckily I don’t have to trust him, because we have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights with checks and balances. What President Numbnuts is claiming for himself is unchecked power. And what kinds of leaders claim unchecked power? Dictators.

P.S. Be honest, would you be this gung ho for unchecked executive power if it were Clinton (or Gore or Kerry… or Hillary!) we were talking about?

I am glad he did it. It's why I elected him for a secod term - to go after the terrorists. It is treasonous to have leaked this program. The NY Tmes needs to be held accountable for teir unAmerican actions and be eavily fined for aiding and abetting the enemy. This leak is a major blow to the safety of our country.

How is disclosing that the President broke the law a “major blow to our safety”? Bush could have gotten whatever wiretaps he wanted legally, by following the FISA protocol, and there would have been no controversy, but he chose to do it illegally. What was a blow to our safety is re-electing President Bonehead for another term.

 

[oldreliable67]

"but he chose to do it illegally."

Only your opinion, an unproven assertion.

 

[argexpat]

I certainly dispute your contention that it is a "clear violation of the law". I do not dispute that it may turn out eventually to have been illegal, but I totally dispute the certainty which you attach to your assertion.

Fine, then you agree with the premise of my post, that while Bush was assuring us in 2004 that he would be getting court orders for his wiretaps under the Patriot Act, he forgot to mention that he had already been ordering warrantless wiretaps.

He didn't say, "Don't worry, I'll always get court orders for these wiretaps on terrorists...oh, and by the way, I've been ordering wiretaps without a court order for two years now, because I believe I already have the authority to secretly wiretap anyone I want, including American citizens, without a court order. But trust me, I'll get court orders for these wiretaps."

We can debate all day whether this constitutes a lie, but what Bush was saying that day certainly wasn't the whole truth. He omitted facts in order to get the American people to believe he would not do something he had already done.

The Assistant AG has responded to Congressional and media criticisms with a letter, here, to all of the relevant Congressional leaders. The purpose of the letter is to provide a summary of the legal authority supporting the NSA activities described by the President.

We already know the President thought he had the authority to seek warrantless wiretaps. So why didn't he mention that when he was peddling the Patriot Act? It's Bush's version of "I did not have sexual relations what that woman."

So where is the outrage of the "outing" of a classified program that so in evidence over Valerie Plame?

Nevermind that this argument is irrelevant and a non-sequitur. But I’ll indulge it anyway: If Bush had just followed the FISA protocol, there would not have been any "outing."

What is becoming more and more clear, though, is that those people who are inclined to attribute anything and everything possible to a "Bush lie" will continue to do so, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The only lie to be found here so far is that in the eyes of those beholders who see Bush lies in the clouds, in the grass, in the tea leaves, in chicken entrails, etc. Among this group, pragmatism and objectivity are completely alien concepts.

This blunderbuss strawman rant notwithstanding, the fact remains that when Bush said he would always get a court order when seeking wiretaps under the Patriot Act, he didn’t tell us that he had already ordered warrantless wiretaps because he believed he already had the authority to do so, Patriot Act or no Patriot Act, so his assurances were hollow and misleading at best.

Then, when questioned on this discrepancy, he claimed he needed to skirt the FISA protocol because he needed to “act fast,” implying that the FISA protocol was somehow too slow and its guidelines too onerous and would somehow hinder his ability to “protect” us. If so, then why didn't he ask Congress to change it, instead of just ignoring it?

Being that the FISA threshold is notoriously low and warrants can be gotten after the fact, these excuses for skirting FISA are either evidence of Bush's ignorance of the FISA protocol, or he's just bullsh!ting to cover his ass. Bullsh!t by any other name still stinks.

 

[argexpat]

"but he chose to do it illegally."

Only your opinion, an unproven assertion.

OK, how about this: He chose to do it in a way that may be a violation of the law (since you admit that's a possibility), instead of in a way in which no one could argue was illegal, namely by following the FISA protocol. The ends would have been the same: he would have gotten whatever wiretaps he deemed necessary. But the means he chose were very different. He chose the highly controversial, possibly illegal means to achieve an end he could have achieved legally and without controversy. That's evidence of either a stupid president, or one who thinks he's above the law. In this case it's evidence of both.

 

[Squawker]

The Schumer-Kyl Bill. When Daschle and members of Congress pretend to be shocked, they are lying to you. Daschle's name is at the end of this long explanation of how the FISA Law should be amended.

AMENDING THE FISA LAW October 15, 2002


Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I would like to speak in morning business for
as long as I might consume to discuss some legislation Senator Schumer
and I have introduced and to discuss my intention to seek to have that
legislation added to the conference of the intelligence authorization
bill which, hopefully, will come before this body for our deliberation
and acceptance by the end of this week--again, hopefully.
This legislation not only will reauthorize the intelligence community
activities that are funded by the Congress, but also, perhaps, will
include an agreement on an outside commission that will later be
established to look into the events prior to September 11.
So there are some important elements to this bill. One of the items I
would like to add to it also deals with the subject of terrorism, the
Schumer-Kyl bill--that I will describe in just a moment--which is a
very small provision in the so-called FISA law that would be
appropriately added in this conference as an additional way we can help
win the war on terror.
Let me begin by discussing just a little bit what this legislation is
and why it is necessary, and then I will discuss a little bit further
how we would like to have it considered.
The bill number is S. 2568, called the Schumer-Kyl bill. It would add
three words to the FISA legislation under which we are now able to
gather information that is useful in conducting our war on terror.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is a law which
provides a special way of gathering this evidence against terrorists,
and its origins are back in the 1970s. But it deals with a different
situation today in terrorism than it did back then.
Let me just go back in time. The idea was if you were working for a
foreign government, we ought to have a little better ability to
investigate you than through the probable cause requirements of the 4th
amendment that we would ordinarily apply in a title III court
situation. So the FISA law was established to say if you have evidence
someone is working for a foreign government or an international
terrorist organization, then you can involve the FISA Court, the
special court, to ask that court for a warrant to do a wiretap or to
search a home or to search a computer, or whatever the case might be.
Back in the 1970s, when this was first started, it was a fairly
straightforward proposition. If you thought, for example, you might be
dealing with a foreign spy, somebody working for the then-Soviet Union,
you could go to the FISA Court and get a warrant for the information
you were seeking, and it was a little easier to obtain than through a
regular court.
Secondly, the information was all classified, secret; it did not have
to be shared with anyone else, and these judges were cleared to receive
that information. So we were able to keep these kinds of investigations
classified, and obviously that was a key element to be able to
prosecute these counterterrorism types of cases. But back then the
classical FISA target would be either a Soviet agent or perhaps one of
the sort of hierarchical terrorist organizations such as the Bader-
Meinhof gang in West Germany or the Red Army faction or a group of that
sort. Today, as you know, the situation is very different.

We have in the world today amorphous terrorist groups that have
spread throughout the entire world that are very loosely affiliated,
sometimes not affiliated at all. It is not even clear frequently
whether individual people are directly connected to the terrorist group
or actually members of the terrorist group. And when we speak of
"members of," I am not even sure anybody can define a member of a
terrorist organization. You do not pay dues and have a card that
identifies you as a member of al-Qaida or Hamas or Hezbollah or the
Islamic Jihad or any of these other organizations.
Now, it is true within the group there, you would have to be accepted
as someone they could trust, but I do not necessarily think they look
at the people with whom they work as members of the organization.
So we wrote a statute back in the 1970s for a different type of enemy
than the enemy we face today. What we are finding is sometimes it is
very difficult to connect up a particular terrorist either with a
foreign country or with a particular terrorist organization. We know
there are state sponsors of terrorism, and I suppose if we had evidence
somebody here in the United States was planning to commit an act of
terror, and they were employed by the Government of, let's say, Iran,
we could probably get a FISA warrant because we could connect them
pretty easily to a foreign country that has been known to conduct state
terrorism. But it is a lot more difficult when you have somebody such
as Zacarias Moussaoui, for example, the alleged 20th hijacker. His is
an actual case in point used by many to demonstrate the fact that our
law enforcement agencies did not act quickly enough in order to obtain
a FISA warrant against him. The reason they did not is precisely
because of the difficulty of connecting him to a foreign country or a
particular international terrorist organization, which is what the FISA
statute requires.
Now, bear in mind one of the rationales for being able to accelerate
and short circuit the procedures here with a FISA warrant, as opposed
to a regular title III type warrant, is you are dealing with a foreign
country. You are not dealing with an American citizen. You are dealing
with a threat from without or an international terrorist organization.
So that is the theory.
But in the case of someone such as Zacarias Moussaoui, even though he
was a foreign person--not a United States citizen--we could not connect
him with Algeria or France or any of the other countries of the world.
We thought his activities looked very suspicious and that they could be
terrorist-type planning, but not connected to a particular country. Nor
was it possible to connect him to al-Qaida. We did not have information
connecting him to al-Qaida. We had some information that in an around-
about way connected him to terrorists in a particular place but not an
international terrorist organization.
So here you had a situation where he was talking to some terrorists,
he looked to be interested in engaging in activity that could result in
terrorism here in the United States, but the two requirements to get a
warrant--either that he was involved in state-sponsored terror with a
particular country or a particular international terror organization--
could not be proved. And as a result, either legitimately or not
legitimately, the FBI did not authorize a warrant to search his
computer, notwithstanding the fact there were some in our law
enforcement community who wished to do that. And, of course, his
computer was not searched until after September 11.
What the Schumer-Kyl bill does is to correct this one little
deficiency in the statute to bring it up to date, literally from the
time it was created back in the cold war days, to today's environment
in which you have amorphous terrorist groups floating around with
individuals freely associating amongst them, or perhaps even not at all
with them but engaged in terror.
What it does is to correct this problem with the statute by adding
just three words--"or foreign person"--to the targets of the warrant.
So an individual would be the subject of a warrant if you could show
you had probable cause to believe the individual was engaged in or
planning to engage in an act of terrorism and either was doing so on
behalf of another country, an international terrorist organization, or
the person himself is a foreign person.
So you have the connection of two things. You have a potential act of
terror and a foreign person. And that is

[[Page S10426]]

basically the same rationale that exists with respect to the rationale
for the original FISA law and warrants authorized thereunder.
By adding to the definition of "foreign power," a "foreign
person," "a foreign person," you include the kind of case Moussaoui
presented to us where we knew we wanted to look into his affairs. We
could not do so under FISA because we couldn't connect him to a foreign
power or terrorist organization, and yet as the facts definitely
indicated, it was somebody we should have been able to, whose computer
we should have been able to search prior to September 11.
Let me be a little more specific about this case because there are
those who will wonder whether or not maybe we are opening the FISA
statute up to potential abuse of American citizens--the answer to that
is no--by our definition, or that guests of the United States, foreign
persons who were here on, let's say, a nonimmigrant visa, such as
Moussaoui--that maybe their rights would be violated. I want to make it
clear that that would not be the case.

Continued below

 

[Squawker]

We are familiar with the FBI special agent from Minneapolis, Coleen
Rowley, who wrote the famous memo relating to Zacarias Moussaoui. She
testified before the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees that she
believed this kind of additional authority not only was warranted but
was necessary for people like her in the field offices to do their work
and she did not believe that would raise any additional questions; that
it was an essential part of the tools the individuals in her position
would need.
Director Mueller of the FBI, as well, indicated in testimony that he
believed the current limited foreign power definition would have made
it difficult for the FBI to secure a FISA warrant against any of the
September 11 hijackers. And in fact he noted to the committee:


Prior to September 11, of the 19 or 20 hijackers, we had
very little information as to any one of the individuals
being associated with a particular terrorist group.

So what this amendment does is deal with two situations. The first is
where you literally have the lone wolf, a terrorist acting on his or
her own behalf unconnected to an international terrorist organization
or foreign power but who is a foreign person in this country planning
to commit an act of terrorism against Americans. That is exactly what
the FISA warrants are supposed to be getting at or are supposed to
enable us to collect information on. Yet under the current statute that
would not be possible. This solves the lone wolf problem.
It also solves the Moussaoui problem, which is the case of an
individual who you think is associated with terrorists but you cannot
prove that, but you definitely have the probable cause to think there
is an act of terror being planned and, therefore, you seek the warrant.
It would be authorized under the foreign persons provision we are
adding, and you then could connect the individual to an international
terrorist organization or foreign power. That is what eventually
occurred with respect to Moussaoui.
The point is, we are no longer just looking at the FISA warrant to
prosecute someone for a crime that has been committed. The entire
effort of the Congress, the intelligence community, and the
administration after September 11 was to add a mission as a superior
mission to the law enforcement after-the-fact-prosecution-of-crime
mission of the FBI, and that new mission was to try to prevent or
preempt crimes from occurring in the first instance. So the FBI has
been reorganized to go out and seek information on potential terrorists
and be able to prevent the terrorist attack before it occurs. Source

This is very long, but well worth reading.

 

[steen]

Ha I've got that trumped easy:..

Really? How many of them received $5000 from a foreign company and then pushed a law making that foreign company immune from lawsuits by Americans?

Or didn't you read what sleasy deal that Repugnican engaged in? Let me re-link for you:
http://www.debatepolitics.com/showthread.php?t=6787

 

[steen]

well he cited a 5,000 dollar campaign contribution to Republicans and used it to prove they were in a foriegn powers pocket so I turned the table on him.

Really? I must have missed where you showed the money resulting in immunity laws for that foreign entity, resulting in harm to Americans?

No? Ah, so where were the tables turned, exactly?

 

[steen]

"but he chose to do it illegally."

Only your opinion, an unproven assertion.

Actually no. Bush himself showed that it was illegal, when he stated that warrants always were required, then proceeded to not use warrants. Bush himself admitted that it was illegal.

 

[oldreliable67]

Actually no. Bush himself showed that it was illegal, when he stated that warrants always were required, then proceeded to not use warrants. Bush himself admitted that it was illegal.

He did no such thing. Don't be obtuse. Use his statements in the context in which they were made and employ the reference to which they were directed.

 

[Trajan Octavian Titus]

Really? How many of them received $5000 from a foreign company and then pushed a law making that foreign company immune from lawsuits by Americans?

Or didn't you read what sleasy deal that Repugnican engaged in? Let me re-link for you:
http://www.debatepolitics.com/showthread.php?t=6787

lmfao no you didn't and the law won't protect foriegn companies any more than it will protect U.S. owned companies, the fact of the matter it's a product of limiting liability in the production of Pharmaceuticals . . . that's a good thing so that we get the cures for bird flue and anthrax in adequate supply. Besides that fact $5,000 just isn't alot of money partna and you can't prove that one caused the other that's called a fallacy of coincidence.

 

[26 X World Champs]

Actually no. Bush himself showed that it was illegal, when he stated that warrants always were required, then proceeded to not use warrants. Bush himself admitted that it was illegal.

I agree though it is has not been officially determined to be the truth. The hearings in the Senate next February will expose the truth, one way or another.

 

[aps]

Just wanted to post this to remind people about past Supreme Court precedent.

1972 SHATTERING THE POLICY OF WARRANTLESS GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE
Government Misconduct

As a constant feature of its defense of political activists, CCR found itself challenging the use of illegal electronic surveillance in case after case. CCR first challenged the Nixon Administration's policy of national security wiretapping in 1969 during the Chicago 8 case. At that time the government had announced that it did not need a court order to wiretap anyone it considered to be a threat to domestic security. Although the courts were not always responsive, and the government usually denied the existence of wiretaps, CCR continued to press the issue. That perseverance, coupled with the Nixon Administration's flagrant violation of constitutional rights, resulted in one of the Center's most significant and far-reaching legal victories in 1972. In a prosecution for conspiracy to destroy government property (United States v. Plamondun et al), the government finally admitted wiretapping without a warrant, and a courageous judge ordered that the defendants be given the records of the wiretaps. In an attempt to avoid disclosing the records, the government took the issue to the Supreme Court (United States v. United States District Court). In a landmark opinion, the Court unanimously declared that engaging in domestic electronic surveillance without a warrant is unconstitutional. This decision rejected the government's attempt to gain legitimacy for its experiment in using the power of the Executive branch to invade people's privacy and monitor their political activity. The government subsequently dropped a series of political prosecutions, including those against Leslie Bacon, Abbie Hoffman, and many of the May Day defendants, rather than reveal its Illegal surveillance program.

http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/about/history04.asp

A law professor from George Washington University Law School said that what the Bush administration has done is clearly "illegal."

 

[tecoyah]

More and More....I am coming to think this may be the perverbial Straw on Bushs' back. Though the progression is very slow, it is not looking good for the Administration, as far as the lgalities. That and the "Nixon" connection, might force action.