Such seems to be the prevailing attitude of the CIA and Pentagon with respect to their use of “voluntary” letter requests for sensitive financial and credit information from financial institutions; American military and intelligence services have evidently sought and obtained such records by the hundreds in a number of cases of suspected terrorism.
Given a government that can’t be bothered complying with FISA or the Fourth (Sixth… Eighth… First… or any other of those stinking amendments)…
The paradigm was the use of this method to spy on former Gitmo Army Moslem Chaplain Captain James Yee in the hope that his records might yield some decent dirt he could be prosecuted for… Instead, Yee was eventually cleared of every single one of the bogus politically motivated charges that were lodged against him… at the same time…
Bruce the Veep sends us a Dahlia Lithwick piece that finally sums up what TD readers have known for a long time. The reason the Bush Administration wants to assert its right to hold poor schmos like Jose Padilla or the hundreds at Gitmo (and God knows how many thousands in other places) has nothing to do with them representing any kind of actual threat or advancement in the war on terror (because even the Bush Administration knows that precisely the opposite is the case). Worse, the Bush Administration is well aware of the public relations and moral authority blowback from doing this, as well as the waste of critical intelligence resources chasing wild geese in service of the fantasy… that there is a point to any of this…
No… the real reason that Bush Administration continues to this day to assert unlimited executive power… is simply because it can. Its view (think Cheney and Rumsfeld still upset that Nixon gave in so easily) is that in their world, executive power should be unlimited: the excuse of national security justifies dictatorship… as we know, true dictatorship can occur only in a foreign language; since we all speak English, this must still be our Constitutional democracy and republic in all respects… even without habeas corpus, or search warrants, or for that matter, the President (as long as he’s a Republican, of course) not having to comply with any laws at all that he doesn’t want to.
The 2006 election appears to have chastened the Bush Administration… not at all. Speaker Pelosi… Majority Leader Reid… are you going to take that? Are you going to let this jack-jive faux Texan do this IN YOUR HOUSE (and Senate)?
I don’t think so… I think it’s about time we became a government of laws and not of [mediocre, mentally defective] men, starting right now. Who’s with me on that?
tdog
I was a Republican and a HUGE Bush supporter up until the last couple of years has been opening my eyes. While I hate abortion, I hate just as much, the fact that this administration has been systematically neutering the Bill of Rights. I am beyond the level of shock now at the level of civil liberty abuses our president and his men have hoodwinked the population into accepting in the name of this damned (I’m not cussing–I mean it in the literal sense) “War on Terror”. Rather than rid the world of terror, it is creating a greater kind of terror, the creeping secret police kind of terror, which citizens in totalitarian countries have known all too well. We, however, are following the piper like good little mice, and will learn TOO LATE just what a horror we have invited into our lives. Good bye America, unless someone will start saying NO to this eradication of privacy and legal rights for the scapegoats of society. And Tony Blair is following in lock step with his own country!
Talking Dog?