The Adventures of Terror Guy
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| It's a man! It's the president! It's Terror Guy! |
Faster than a FISA judge could ever be.
More powerful than a president should ever be.
Able to leap statutes of law with a single rationalization.
Look! Inside your home… your email… your cell phone!
It's a man! It's the president! It's Terror Guy!
Yes, it's Terror Guy – strange sort of Republican from the far
right reaches of secrets and power, believing he's beyond the law. Terror Guy
– who can change
the course of mighty ecosystems, bend laws with the help of his vice president,
attorney general and the Republican Congress, and who, disguised as the president
of the United States, totally incompetent at everything he does, fights the
never ending battle for fear, unchecked powers, and the destruction of the Constitution.
… Sept. 11 could have been prevented.
This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11
plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls
and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The
same officials who now say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that
no one could possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that
Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who
emerged from hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that
will not happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats
look as though they do not want to defend America. “President Bush believes
if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest
to know who they're calling and why,” he told Republican officials. “Some
important Democrats clearly disagree.” Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that
no Democrat has ever said any such thing — and that nothing prevented
American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States,
or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government
to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make
the job much easier. Spies,
Lies and Wiretaps
When will Terror Guy be stopped?
We've learned that the FBI
was sent on wild wiretap chases, which went nowhere.
We've learned that Senator
Mike DeWine offered up legislation to lower the FISA bar, but Bush wouldn't
back it.
We've also learned that if “probable cause” was changed
to “reasonable suspicion” or “reasonable belief,” it might
have been judged unconstitutional, rendering any apprehended terrorist suspect
free from prosecution because of bad evidence.
So, George W. Bush decided to just go around FISA because he could,
after all, he's Terror Guy, in the middle of a generational, never ending war
on terror.
The New York Times broke the NSA story, with blogger
Glenn Greenwald (also posting on C&L)
laying out the DeWine-FISA-standard of lowered proof first , but the Washington
Post has picked it up and run with the whole thing, with must read articles
here,
here,
here.
And we now learn that Senator
Feinstein has written a letter to Senator Roberts about the DeWine issue
and all things regarding “warrantless domestic surveillance,” which
we call around here, illegal domestic spying.
What Democrats now have to do is figure out how to get kryptonite,
aka the truth, into Senator Specter's hearing on illegal warrantless domestic
surveillance and spying.
Will Terror Guy be stopped? Stay tuned, for the sage continues.
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