Lawrence Tribe Rips Into Bush-Cheney
NSA “Trick”
UPDATE to prior
post…
If there is one thing that has become clear, in my humble opinion,
it's that Vice President Dick Cheney is behind the entire illegal warrantless
searches. This may not come as a news flash to anyone, but it still needs to
be pressed openly. Cheney has been the one behind so much that has gone horribly
wrong in the Bush presidency. His authority is massive, secret and unchecked.
It is dangerous and continuing unabated.
Below are notes from Lawrence Tribe's
appearance on “Charlie Rose.” They're rough, but accurate.
“If as a country we get used to a
regime in which the president can basically treat laws that give him power as
a basis for expanding his own authority beyond what anyone dreamed and treat
laws in which Congress tries to restrict his power in a way that only Lewis
Carrol, Franz Kafka and Alice and Wonderland and the trial could take seriously.
What that means is that essentially the president is saying I'm a monarch. I
can do what I want. I can play with Congress. I don't need their authority.
…” Lawrence Tribe (professor of constitutional law at
Harvard)
Lawrence Tribe responded to Gonzales on “Charlie Rose,” getting around
10 minutes, to Gonzales' forty. However, as usual, he made it count. Tribe was
among several lawyers and constitutional scholars who last month signed an open
letter to Congress challenging the legality of Bush's warrantless NSA wiretapping.
Tribe started off by saying that what President Bush did in his NSA warrantless
search program “defied the whole idea of the rule
of law and checks and balances.” He questioned the notion of taking
the vice president's word, which he has repeated again and again, that no one who
isn't directly connected to Al Qaeda is being caught up in the NSA program.
If this were indeed true, Tribe stated, the substance of the program wouldn't
bother him, as long as it was under “an appropriate legal framework.”
But we don't know the breadth of it. This point was driven home in my earlier
post, when we learned in detail of the FISA judges' reaction to Bush's warrantless
searches.
However, what bothers Tribe is that Bush and Cheney are asking us to take their
word for what they are currently doing. He went into FISA a bit, explaining
that it was meant to be the “exclusive means” by which Americans are
spied upon. The only exception to FISA would have to come from Congress. Tribe
called Bush-Cheney using the Afghanistan war against the Taliban as the excuse
for expanding NSA warrantless spying, an “absurdity.” He repeated
it again: Using the authorization of the “force resolution,” which
came a week after 9/11, as an excuse for the NSA program is “absurd.”
He made the point that terrorists obviously know we are trying to eavesdrop on them.
Tribe said
the ridiculous notion that by signing the “force resolution” Congress
might not have known they were authorizing the warrantless wiretapping, but
that's actually part of what they did, just doesn't fly. Gonzales tried to make
this doozy fly earlier. I almost fell off the couch when I heard it. He calls
Bush's war resolution rationalization a “trick” on Congress: ask for
“x,” get “y,” by tricking Congress to authorize further
authority, then interpreting the legislation to suit your needs. If we accept
this, then checks and balances goes out the window. If Congress believes that
when they're giving the president special authority, that the president will
interpret those new powers as the permission to be able to conduct actions beyond
what Congress authorizes, then Congress will be reluctant to grant special authority.
Senator Lindsay Graham has made just this point. This is dangerous to us all.
Tribe believes Bush-Cheney are treating Congress like “clowns and fools.”
That might be because, since 9/11, that's how they've acted.
Comments are closed.