President Obama Continuing Controversial Warrantless Eavesdropping Program
Bill Lindner
January 26, 2009
You have to give President Obama credit for making good on some of his campaign promises. After being inaugurated, President Obama was busy correcting some horrendous wrongs perpetrated by the former presidential administration, nullifying the most controversial, draconian tools implemented 'to keep us safe' after 9/11.
The rationale of the Bush administration's legal team and Justice department for violating the Constitution and authorizing war crimes was the same rationale used by Hitler's lawyers at Nuremberg. It didn't work then either.
The damage inflicted on the American people --- not to mention the rest of the world --- by Bush's administration has had a pestilent affect on Democracy and ruined our standing with the rest of the world. The 'War on Terror' was nothing more than an excuse to use delusional rationale for trying to justify all of the grossly negligent, illegal acts committed and authorized by our former President. The 'War on Terror' has prevented us from confronting real challenges we face from those who wish to use terrorism against us and has done nothing to keep us safer.
Bush's 'War on Terror' succeeded in at least two things: It created and fueled the emergence of a culture of fear. Vagueness and carefully calculated, loosely defined illicit 'legislation' that ended up being nothing more than excuses to terrorize the American public while trying to rewrite the rule of law to make illegal acts legal and it made National Security an oxymoron.
One very important facet of the horrendous wrongs perpetrated by the former presidential administration not currently being corrected by President Obama was Bush's initiation of illegal warrantless wiretapping. In fact, Obama reportedly sided with Bush in urging a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case that weighs in on whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
U.S. District Jude Vaughn Walker has been presiding over one controversial case. President Obama filed a request asking Judge Walker to stay enforcement of an important ruling on the constitutionality of the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program, approved by former President Bush --- allegedly in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The request for staying enforcement concerns Judge Walker's decision to admit as evidence a classified document showing that two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration in 2004.
When the U.S. Treasury Department accidently released the Top Secret memo to the lawyers --- Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoo --- they sued the Bush administration. At one point, the courts ordered the document, which has never been made public, returned and removed from the case.
Constitutionality Of Warrantless Eavesdropping Program Challenged
Admitting the document to the case is crucial for the two lawyers to acquire legal standing so the constitutionality of the warrantless eavesdropping program can be challenged.
As noted by Wired.com, testimony by incoming Attorney General Eric Holder implies that the Obama administration is siding with the former administration's legal defense of the illicit 'legislation' passed by Congress last July immunizing Telecommunication's companies who were complicit in participating in Bush's eavesdropping program.
Obama flip-flopped on his support of the illicit immunity legislation when he was a U.S. Senator from Illinois. The legislation included a broader spy package that granted the government wide-ranging warrantless eavesdropping powers on Americans' electronic communications.
The decision on the constitutionality of the illicit immunity legislation pending before Judge Walker is a result of a separate case filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). More on the ongoing legal snafu can be found from Wired.com.
During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eric Holder, President Obama's choice for Attorney General, reportedly made the statement that the Obama administration will vigorously defend Congressional legislation immunizing U.S. telecommunication companies from lawsuits regarding their participation in the Bush administration's domestic spy program when asked whether the Obama administration would continue the legal fight to uphold the legislation.
Holder told Senator Orin Hatch that "the duty of the Justice Department is to defend statutes that have been passed by Congress" and "unless there are compelling reasons, I don't think we would reverse course." Apparently the fact that there are two clauses in the U.S. Constitution prohibiting passing laws ex post facto meaning the 'legislation' is illegal and unconstitutional isn't compelling.
Warrantless Wiretapping Began Before The Attacks of 9/11
Ryan Singel from Wired.com wrote a report in October 2007 revealing that the National Security Agency (NSA) began building a massive call records database seven months before 9/11. Jason Leopold from TruthOut wrote about the domestic spying that began long before 9/11 in January 2006. Not only was the Bush administration illegally spying domestically long before the attacks of 9/11, the illegal spying taking place failed to prevent 9/11, offering more evidence of Bush administration complicity in the attacks of 9/11. An excellent breakdown of Bush's wiretap crimes and the FISA farce can be found in this June 2006 article from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
There is more than ample evidence proving that the illegal warrantless wiretapping began long before the attacks of 9/11.
At a San Francisco hearing in the EFF's case last month, Judge Walker wondered aloud if the incoming Obama administration would continue to defend the 'legislation' passed last July. Then Senator Obama allegedly opposed immunity but voted in favor of it because it was included in new 'legislation' giving the Bush administration broader warrantless surveillance power.
The EFF challenged the immunity legislation on the grounds that Congress legalized what the EFF termed as unconstitutional activity by the telecommunications companies.
NSA Targeted Journalists, All U.S. Communications
If none of the previous information is compelling enough to reverse course and charge the former administration with crimes worse than those committed by former President Nixon, below is some more.
Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst appeared with Countdown host Keith Olbermann two days in a row this past week. Tice revealed that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program targeted U.S. journalists, and vacuumed up all domestic communications of Americans, including faxes, phone calls and internet traffic.
After the New York Times broke the story in 2005 on the government's warrantless wiretapping program --- with Tice's help --- then President Bush said the only people in the U.S. being targeted for surveillance were those who were talking with terrorists overseas. As usual, Bush lied.
Tice confirmed what critics of the illicit wiretapping program have long assumed: the spying involved a monitored dragnet of all communications.
According to Tice, the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communications would be collected. For example, if the agency determined that terrorists communicated in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its system to record all such calls, resulting in invading the privacy of everyone talking on the phone for two minutes.
Tice was told to monitor certain groups in order to eliminate them as suspects. Those groups were U.S. journalists and news agencies, along with 'tens of thousands of other Americans.' But rather than excluding the organizations from monitoring, he found out that the NSA was collecting the organizations' communications 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, meaning there was never any intent of eliminating anyone from the surveillance. Tice has not identified the reporters or the organizations that were allegedly targeted.
Wiretaps Combined With Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens
Information garnered from the data-mining was combined with credit card records of U.S. citizens. During Tice's second appearance on Countdown, Tice expanded on his revelations from the night before. Tice said the NSA also combined information from phone wiretaps with data that was mined from credit card and other financial records as well as travel records. Information on tens of thousands of U.S. citizens is currently stored in digital databases warehoused at the NSA.
New York Times reporter James Risen, the co-author of the paper's 2005 story on the warrantless wiretapping suspects he was one of those monitored since Bush administration officials obtained copies of his phone records. Risen does not know if the records were obtained legitimately by the FBI or if his information was included in the NSA data-mining program.
Risen figures the NSA program of monitoring journalists was intended to be used to ferret out and intimidate possible sources "to have a chilling effect on potential whistleblowers in the government to make them realize that there's a Big Brother out there that will get them if they step out of line."
Being a lawyer and Constitutional professor before entering politics, Obama is more than well aware that the legislation passed by Congress regarding the Telecom immunity is both illegal and unconstitutional, yet for some reason he's supporting the continued use of it. After the past eight years, it's time for the prosecutions and accountability to begin, it's time for the deliberate illegal destruction of Democracy, rights and freedoms in the name of "National Security" to end and it's time for the truth to come out.
The rationale of the Bush administration's legal team and Justice department for violating the Constitution and authorizing war crimes was the same rationale used by Hitler's lawyers at Nuremberg. It didn't work then either.
The damage inflicted on the American people --- not to mention the rest of the world --- by Bush's administration has had a pestilent affect on Democracy and ruined our standing with the rest of the world. The 'War on Terror' was nothing more than an excuse to use delusional rationale for trying to justify all of the grossly negligent, illegal acts committed and authorized by our former President. The 'War on Terror' has prevented us from confronting real challenges we face from those who wish to use terrorism against us and has done nothing to keep us safer.
Bush's 'War on Terror' succeeded in at least two things: It created and fueled the emergence of a culture of fear. Vagueness and carefully calculated, loosely defined illicit 'legislation' that ended up being nothing more than excuses to terrorize the American public while trying to rewrite the rule of law to make illegal acts legal and it made National Security an oxymoron.
One very important facet of the horrendous wrongs perpetrated by the former presidential administration not currently being corrected by President Obama was Bush's initiation of illegal warrantless wiretapping. In fact, Obama reportedly sided with Bush in urging a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case that weighs in on whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
U.S. District Jude Vaughn Walker has been presiding over one controversial case. President Obama filed a request asking Judge Walker to stay enforcement of an important ruling on the constitutionality of the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program, approved by former President Bush --- allegedly in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The request for staying enforcement concerns Judge Walker's decision to admit as evidence a classified document showing that two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration in 2004.
When the U.S. Treasury Department accidently released the Top Secret memo to the lawyers --- Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoo --- they sued the Bush administration. At one point, the courts ordered the document, which has never been made public, returned and removed from the case.
Constitutionality Of Warrantless Eavesdropping Program Challenged
Admitting the document to the case is crucial for the two lawyers to acquire legal standing so the constitutionality of the warrantless eavesdropping program can be challenged.
As noted by Wired.com, testimony by incoming Attorney General Eric Holder implies that the Obama administration is siding with the former administration's legal defense of the illicit 'legislation' passed by Congress last July immunizing Telecommunication's companies who were complicit in participating in Bush's eavesdropping program.
Obama flip-flopped on his support of the illicit immunity legislation when he was a U.S. Senator from Illinois. The legislation included a broader spy package that granted the government wide-ranging warrantless eavesdropping powers on Americans' electronic communications.
The decision on the constitutionality of the illicit immunity legislation pending before Judge Walker is a result of a separate case filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). More on the ongoing legal snafu can be found from Wired.com.
During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eric Holder, President Obama's choice for Attorney General, reportedly made the statement that the Obama administration will vigorously defend Congressional legislation immunizing U.S. telecommunication companies from lawsuits regarding their participation in the Bush administration's domestic spy program when asked whether the Obama administration would continue the legal fight to uphold the legislation.
Holder told Senator Orin Hatch that "the duty of the Justice Department is to defend statutes that have been passed by Congress" and "unless there are compelling reasons, I don't think we would reverse course." Apparently the fact that there are two clauses in the U.S. Constitution prohibiting passing laws ex post facto meaning the 'legislation' is illegal and unconstitutional isn't compelling.
Warrantless Wiretapping Began Before The Attacks of 9/11
Ryan Singel from Wired.com wrote a report in October 2007 revealing that the National Security Agency (NSA) began building a massive call records database seven months before 9/11. Jason Leopold from TruthOut wrote about the domestic spying that began long before 9/11 in January 2006. Not only was the Bush administration illegally spying domestically long before the attacks of 9/11, the illegal spying taking place failed to prevent 9/11, offering more evidence of Bush administration complicity in the attacks of 9/11. An excellent breakdown of Bush's wiretap crimes and the FISA farce can be found in this June 2006 article from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
There is more than ample evidence proving that the illegal warrantless wiretapping began long before the attacks of 9/11.
At a San Francisco hearing in the EFF's case last month, Judge Walker wondered aloud if the incoming Obama administration would continue to defend the 'legislation' passed last July. Then Senator Obama allegedly opposed immunity but voted in favor of it because it was included in new 'legislation' giving the Bush administration broader warrantless surveillance power.
The EFF challenged the immunity legislation on the grounds that Congress legalized what the EFF termed as unconstitutional activity by the telecommunications companies.
NSA Targeted Journalists, All U.S. Communications
If none of the previous information is compelling enough to reverse course and charge the former administration with crimes worse than those committed by former President Nixon, below is some more.
Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst appeared with Countdown host Keith Olbermann two days in a row this past week. Tice revealed that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program targeted U.S. journalists, and vacuumed up all domestic communications of Americans, including faxes, phone calls and internet traffic.
After the New York Times broke the story in 2005 on the government's warrantless wiretapping program --- with Tice's help --- then President Bush said the only people in the U.S. being targeted for surveillance were those who were talking with terrorists overseas. As usual, Bush lied.
Tice confirmed what critics of the illicit wiretapping program have long assumed: the spying involved a monitored dragnet of all communications.
According to Tice, the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communications would be collected. For example, if the agency determined that terrorists communicated in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its system to record all such calls, resulting in invading the privacy of everyone talking on the phone for two minutes.
Tice was told to monitor certain groups in order to eliminate them as suspects. Those groups were U.S. journalists and news agencies, along with 'tens of thousands of other Americans.' But rather than excluding the organizations from monitoring, he found out that the NSA was collecting the organizations' communications 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, meaning there was never any intent of eliminating anyone from the surveillance. Tice has not identified the reporters or the organizations that were allegedly targeted.
Wiretaps Combined With Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens
Information garnered from the data-mining was combined with credit card records of U.S. citizens. During Tice's second appearance on Countdown, Tice expanded on his revelations from the night before. Tice said the NSA also combined information from phone wiretaps with data that was mined from credit card and other financial records as well as travel records. Information on tens of thousands of U.S. citizens is currently stored in digital databases warehoused at the NSA.
New York Times reporter James Risen, the co-author of the paper's 2005 story on the warrantless wiretapping suspects he was one of those monitored since Bush administration officials obtained copies of his phone records. Risen does not know if the records were obtained legitimately by the FBI or if his information was included in the NSA data-mining program.
Risen figures the NSA program of monitoring journalists was intended to be used to ferret out and intimidate possible sources "to have a chilling effect on potential whistleblowers in the government to make them realize that there's a Big Brother out there that will get them if they step out of line."
Being a lawyer and Constitutional professor before entering politics, Obama is more than well aware that the legislation passed by Congress regarding the Telecom immunity is both illegal and unconstitutional, yet for some reason he's supporting the continued use of it. After the past eight years, it's time for the prosecutions and accountability to begin, it's time for the deliberate illegal destruction of Democracy, rights and freedoms in the name of "National Security" to end and it's time for the truth to come out.
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