alternative reader no. 131
Time to Call Bush on
Lawbreaking
By Jesse Jackson
The Chicago Sun-Times
Posted by Bulatlat
The
National Security Agency has created "the largest database ever" with the
phone records of millions of Americans provided to the NSA by AT&T,
Verizon and Bell South for a price. The NSA says it used the records to
trace patterns - data mining - in the hunt for terrorists. The agency got
neither warrants nor permission from the secret Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court. As Republican Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen
Specter admitted, the FISA law "has been violated." But that's not all
that is violated.
The
Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects the privacy and liberty of
Americans. It says the government can't search or seize you without a
warrant issued on probable cause to believe you are involved in a crime.
This right is the line between a democracy and a police state, where the
state can search or seize at will. That is the line that the NSA program
erased.
President Bush authorized the program and defends it. "We are not trolling
through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," he said
last week. How do we know? The court set up to provide warrants has been
ignored. The law set up to regulate the system has been trampled. How do
we know the president is telling the truth? Trust us, he says.
Trust
the president who led us into Iraq on the basis of disinformation and
misinformation? Trust the president who just weeks ago told us the NSA
program involved only international calls with al-Qaida? The same
president who said he'd fire anyone in the White House who helped leak the
identity of Valerie Plame, the undercover CIA employee whose husband
helped expose Bush's lies about
Iraq's
nuclear capacity? Now, with Karl Rove in the center of the effort to
discredit Wilson and out Plame, the president says he has no comment on a
continuing criminal investigation.
This
isn't a routine Washington dustup. This concerns the trampling of the
Fourth Amendment by the government and the sale of our privacy by the
phone companies. And it isn't an isolated case. Bush, along with Vice
President Dick Cheney, who is the major force behind this thing, believes
the president acts above the law in the war on terror. He claims the right
to make war without a congressional declaration; to surveil Americans
without warrant; to arrest us without probable cause; to hold us without a
hearing; to deny us the right to counsel or even to hear the charges
against us if the government decides, on the basis of evidence they need
not produce, to tag us as accomplices in the war on terror.
Now most
Americans would gladly sacrifice some of our liberties if it would
increase our security against another Sept. 11. Bush counts on that
feeling when he acts above the law. But the entire fabric of our freedom
is woven into a system of checks and balances.
Here,
all the checks and balances have been tossed aside. Qwest, the only
honorable phone company, refused to cooperate with the NSA in this program
without a warrant or permission from the FISA Court. NSA refused to
produce either; the FISA court was ignored. The NSA and the administration
have simply refused to supply information to Congress, and the lame
Republican Congress has refused to hold them accountable. When the Justice
Department's independent Office of Professional Responsibility opened an
investigation on the lawyers who signed off the program, the White House
refused to provide the secrecy clearances needed to have the investigation
go forward. "Trust us," the president says, and then he ensures that we
have no choice but to trust him, since every legal check and balance is
locked out.
It is
time for accountability. Two public-interest lawyers have sued Verizon for
$5 billion for violating the law, which should force the administration to
defend the program before an independent court. Don't hold your breath for
this Congress to hold hearings. But Democrats should stand up and promise
an in-depth series of investigations of this administration and its
lawlessness - from Halliburton's making off with billions in sole-source
contracts to the cesspool of hidden prisons to the trampling of liberties
at home.
We wage
the war on al-Qaida terrorists in defense of our freedoms. We'd better
make certain this administration isn't shredding those freedoms along the
way.
16 May
2006
Posted by
Bulatlat
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