Letters to the Editor
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"countdown to zero hour"
did he forget that we did intercept messages on september 10?
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what about the FISA courts?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that Bush has *always* had the FISA courts at his disposal and his illegal wiretapping was an end run around those courts. If we know that somebody in al-Qaeda is talking with somebody in America - what's so hard about getting clearance for the wiretap through FISA? FISA doesn't even require that they have the warrant in advance! They can get it (IIRC) 3 days after the fact!
So, the fact that the Administration's wiretapping was declared illegal does *nothing* to hinder conversation intercepts like Rove suggests.
My fear is that he's protecting a much larger and more invasive program that we don't have all the details on. My fear is bolstered by reports that AT&T has rooms in at least 5 cities that intercept all Internet traffic for the government. So our web surfing habits are known but our phones, unless we're friends with al-Qaeda, are safe? I'm not buying it.
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God that's funny.
Imagine the furor from the left if he had wire tapped and stopped a plot where terrorists were going to take over planes with box cutters and crash them into the WTC, Pentagon, Capitol and the White House?
Tim would have had a field day talking about the threat was mostly imagined by a power hungry administration and then wondered how long it would take for impeachment hearings to start.
You people are pathetic.
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Oh how I wish
I wish that someone in the newly emboldened Press Corps. would ask the very simple and direct question of someone in the BushCo administration: "Did President [sic] Bush have the inherent power to order wiretapping prior to 9/11?"
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Wait a minute . . . the Bullshit Index is spiking
According to Richard Clarke, on January 24th, 2001, he wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.
However, according to documents filed in the lawsuit against AT&T and other telecom enablers of warrantless wiretaps, the U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
In addition to any protection that might have been provided by warrantless wiretapping, there were adequate provisons under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for the Bush Administration to use warranted wiretaps to protect America, if, of course, they were the slightest bit interested.
When you receive a memo saying Bin Laden Determined To Strike Inside US and your response is to take another 3 weeks of brushcutting vacation in Crawford Armpit of the Universe Texas, I believe your commitment to security is suspect.
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The Bush administration was aggressively uninterested in al Qaida ...
...before 9/11. Bush could have had unlimited power to wiretap out the wazoo, with no authorization necessary at any time before, during, or afterward, and al Qaida still wouldn't have been on his radar screen. In fact, Richard Clarke said he had to explain to Condi Rice what al Qaida was. And Bush's only interest in the Taliban was to set up a pipeline deal with them.
The Bushies were in fact openly contemptuous of Clinton holdovers who were "obsessed" with bin Laden. (Perhaps the Clintonites should have referred to al Qaida as "the Commies" -- maybe that would have goten Bush and Condi's attention.)
The Bushies were so ignorant, in fact, that their only attempt to secure bin Laden consisted of a "plan" (and I use that word extremely loosely) to ask the Taliban to hand him over in exchange for some business perk or other--the Taliban being the same group that was not only entusiastically sheltering bin Laden, but to whom he was connected by marriage, as one of his kids had married one of Mullah Omar's kids. They were freaking in-laws, for God's sake.
Under FISA, all Bush would have had to do was ask the court, which has pretty much been a rubber stamp for every administration, for a warrant AFTER initiating a wiretap. Bush had all the power he needed, and was surrounded by people, to use Richard Clarke's term, "running around with their hair on fire" warning of imminent danger. But there was all that pesky brush to cut in Crawford...
The problem, of course, is that most people don't understand this issue, so when Bush says "the Democrat party wants to tie our hands on wiretapping," they believe him. The Democrats need a very simple statement on this, that they can keep repeating over and over. Something like, "any President can wiretap anyone whenever he feels like it. He just has to alert the court afterward. Bush was never interested in wiretapping al Qaida before 9/11." Just keep saying it, over and over, every time these clowns insist that the Democrats are a bunch of civil-liberties sissies. Otherwise, I fear they'll get away with this canard again.
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Re: God that's funny
It's easy to conjecture about what the "left" may or may not have done if wiretapping had stopped the 9/11 attacks, but think about this - if Bush *had* used wiretapping to stop the 9/11 attacks, he would have saved the lives of nearly 3,000 people. Isn't that worth a little partisan politicking?
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Is Rove really talking about something else?
Once again we find Bush's people offering justifications for activities bigger than what they're purportedly defending. Just as in the torture debate, when they'd preface what sounded like a justification for torture with a claim that they don't torture, we see Rove offering what could be a justification for intercepting ALL calls, when he's puportedly defending only wiretaps targeting al-Qaida. This is the true, unspoken reason why FISA was circumvented. They don't want to be limited to wiretapping known suspects whom a judge would agree should be wiretapped. They want to listen to EVERYTHING, in order to find new suspects.
It's hard to believe wiretapping has any operational value anymore, anyway. Terrorists should have long ago figured out that they shouldn't use the phone, not because the media revealed any programs but because terrorists who used the phone (or email, or banks) were getting captured. At this point secrecy is mostly to hide the true breadth of surveillance from privacy-conscious American voters, not from terrorists living off the grid that it's never going to catch.
Bush's supporters constantly bring up the fact that part of the surveillance program has been exposed by the media because it gives them another "we understand this war and they don't" wedge and puts a chill on the press. If the program was still operationally useful, every mention of it would remind a terrorist to stay off the phone, and it would be harmful to mention it, wouldn't it?