Snoopgate Legality Loses Ground
.. The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot
claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order
the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001.
Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance
when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said.The report also concluded that Bush's assertion that
Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does
not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved
after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing
the president to use military force. …
“Unilateral executive decision making” by the executive
branch without input from Congress isn't how this is all supposed to work. The
“war on terror” may be with us for the rest of our lives and if Republicans
like Bush have anything to do with it, the executive branch will be the puppet
masters over the privacy of the puppets, which just so happens to be the people
who are supposed to run this democracy. Bush has got this all backwards and
Congress needs to set him straight, starting with Judge Alito on Monday. We
need to know his beliefs on executive power, which to me is a lot more important
than some argument over the settled law of abortion.
The report includes 1970s-era quotations
from congressional committees that were then uncovering years of domestic
spying abuses by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI against those suspected of communist
sympathies, American Indians, Black Panthers and other activists. Lawmakers
were very disturbed at how routinely FBI agents had listened in on U.S. citizens'
phone calls without following any formal procedures. As they drafted FISA
and created its court, the lawmakers warned then that only strong legislation,
debated in public, could stop future administrations from eavesdropping.“This evidence alone should demonstrate the inappropriateness
of relying solely on executive branch discretion to safeguard civil liberties,”
they wrote. The lawmakers noted that Congress's intelligence committees could
provide some checks and balances to protect privacy rights but that their
power was limited in the face of an administration arguing that intelligence
decisions must remain top secret.
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