Letters to the Editor
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Re: Ramesees & Greenwald's Capitalizations
By capitalizing a word like "Serious," Glenn shows us how the word "serious" is a transparent, shrill, craven Beltway Talking Point. Turn on cable news a bit, and one soon finds this use of "Serious."
And by capitalizing a word like "Terrorist," Glenn shows the word has become an empty signifier: i.e. there is no terrorist -- there's only a Terrorist, which is a rhetorical construction created for the bludgeoning of one's political opponents. And the sad thing is that there are terrorists out there, but the people wielding the word Terrorist have little interest in them. Note the post on the 24-style GOP FISA advertisement.
Glenn's moderate usage of the capitalization trope highlights transparent Talking Point Language (TPL), which does everyone a great service.
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For whatever reason
The National Association of Manufacturers has been following this story closely and have been putting up misleading posts on their blog on an almost daily basis. Their lates entry on the subject included the following sentence so I felt compelled to respond:
The activists want to undermine the legitimate surveillance of foreign communications through litigation[...]
http://blog.nam.org/archives/2008/02/fisa_money_as_m.php
You not only have no basis for that statement, but it borders on slanderous. All the "activists" that I am familiar with are motivated by the desire that the traditional rule of law extend to the executive branch and that any needed modifications to the FISA law are provided for by the normal political process that the Constitution requires.
The Bush administration's brazen desregard for not only the FISA law but also the Presidential Records Act and his declared intention to ignore any other portion of any statute which purports to regulate his own behavior or freedom to act, is more than adequate motivation for anyone who cares to see that the Constitutional balance of power is maintained.
The accusation that the EFF is motivated by either financial reward or the desire to inhibit intelligence collection is not only dishonest, but it undermines any legitimate arguments you would care to advance in defense of the current NSA program or the President's conduct.
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Privacy Is Only Presidential
With his continual claims of "executive privelege" and insistance on warrantless wiretapping, Bush has made his stand:
Privacy is only for the president!
I'm tired of hearing the wingnut claim that the program is only listening to foreign terrorists. Without oversight we KNOW that any such power WILL be abused. That's why we have FISA in the first place.
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IT'S TIME TO TAKE BACK OUR GOVERNMENT AND OUR MEDIA FROM THE RWNM
The Right Wing Noise Machine continues its stranglehold on the MSM, including Tim Russert, etc, etc. I watched Bush's press conference yesterday, and sent the e-mail that follows to Nancy Pelosi. I suggest that everyone reading this blog copy and paste the e-mail, or draft your own, and send it not only to Pelosi, but to your own Senators and Congressperson, and to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:
Representative Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House, U.S. House of Representatives
450 Golden Gate Avenue, 14th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
Re: NO RETROACTIVE IMMUNITY!
Dear Speaker Pelosi:
I once again write you concerning the FISA legislation.
I watched President Bush’s press conference this morning: he’s really putting the “full court press” on the House of Representatives to lay over, play dead, and pass the awful Senate version of the FISA bill, which includes retroactive immunity for the telecom industry, and contains few of the safeguards that are in the House version of the bill, and the Senate’s Judiciary Committee version. Let me review again for you my thinking on this subject, which, as you probably can tell by now, is extremely important to me and others who are concerned about the rule of law, and Bush’s utter disregard and contempt for it.
FISA has been the law since 1978, and four previous Presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have utilized its provisions to obtain wiretaps of foreign sources communicating with U.S. citizens and residents. There have been over 20,000 warrants issued under FISA, and less than a handful have been denied.
After September 11, 2001, George Bush decided, based on the legal opinions of John Yoo, David Addington, and others within the Administration, to ignore FISA, and to simply wiretap based on his plenary power as President. Most, but not all, of the telecom companies went along with his requests for warrantless wiretaps, despite the fact that the wiretaps were blatantly illegal under FISA.
Asked about wiretapping terrorists during the 2004 campaign, Bush stated, “Anytime you hear “wiretap,” “wiretaps require a warrant,” and that a Court of Law reviewed each wiretap request. What the questioner did not know was, at that time, Bush had been secretly wiretapping without FISA warrants for nearly three years.
When the New York Times revealed Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program at the end of 2005, instead of reacting as a criminal who had been caught red-handed, Bush went on the offensive, claiming that “FISA was written in 1978, and this is 2006" as if FISA hadn’t been amended once. In fact, FISA had at least 4 major re-writes, including after the 2001 attacks, which have expanded its provisions and kept up with technological updates such as e-mail, cellphones and other improvements to the telecommunications delivery system.
You and I both know that Bush is relying on the dubious authorities of John Yoo, David Addington, and other extreme-right-wing-nuts within the Administration when he claims that he has the power, as President, to wiretap without warrants.
The Republicans in the Senate are still voting, en bloc, with the President, and did not allow ANY amendments to the Senate bill put forward by the Senate Intelligence Committee, despite the fact that a number of those amendments had majority support, if not 60 votes. For the President to claim that the Senate bill had “bi-partisan” support is dubious, at best, given the fact that the even those Democrats that voted in favor of the Senate bill knew that the House version was very different, and that the more odious provisions of the Senate bill had a good chance of being stripped from the final bill to be presented to the President for his signature.
It is time for the Democrats to go on the offensive on the FISA bill, and not to sit back and let Bush do all of the talking. The most critical issue is retroactive immunity. I repeat for the umpteenth time: retroactive immunity has NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR NATIONAL SECURITY.
Bush’s argument for retroactive immunity is that the telecom industry won’t cooperate with future warrant requests unless they are given retroactive immunity. That is absolute hogwash, since a telecom company CANNOT lawfully refuse a request for wiretapping, within FISA, by a government agency. It’s illegal, and Bush knows it. The only reason that he wants retroactive immunity is to permanently cover up his unlawful wiretapping, and avoid sitting in jail someday.
I urge the House not to cave into Bush’s demand for retroactive immunity. The lawsuits are the only way that we will ever find out if Bush used warrantless wiretapping not only for legitimate requests, but for fishing expeditions that compromised our constitutional right of privacy.
Thank you for your time.