Abracadabra Bush Makes Privacy Board Vanish

[Ichingcarpenter]

Source: Wired News

The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the Bush administration extraordinary powers to wiretap without warrants inside the United States.
The failure rankles Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), respectively chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee.


"I urge the president to move swiftly to nominate members to the new board to preserve the public’s faith in our promise to protect their privacy and civil liberties as we work to protect the country against terrorism," Lieberman said.

"The White House's failure to move forward with appointing the new board is unacceptable, and I call on the administration to do so as quickly as possible to prevent a gap in this vital mission," Collins said.
In a 2007 measure implementing 9/11 Commission recommendations, Congress reconfigured the oversight committee, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board. The intent was to make the board more independent of the White House, require it to be bipartisan and make it more accountable to the public.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/02/privacy_board

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Lieberman and Colins.........what a joke.

[dweller]

1. with those 2 pitbulls on the case i expect some quick action on it

or not.

now that they're rankled, i suppose it's not long before they are perturbed enough to send a strongly worded letter.
dp

[Supersedeas]

14. Libernick Arnold can also be funny at times

[Solly Mack]

2. lololol

Bush spies on us illegally. Gets away with it. Some bullshit oversight group is formed that's supposed to "preserve the public’s faith in our promise to protect their privacy and civil liberties...", and I'm supposed to feel better if it's actually staffed? Or get angry that it hasn't been?

How about NOT allowing Bush to spy on us and holding him accountable for the spying he has already engaged in? Now that would "preserve the public’s faith in our promise to protect their privacy and civil liberties..."

[unblock]

7. actually, yes

bureaucrats often are in a position of being able to do, for bureaucratic reasons, what politicians cannot do, for political reasons.

congress can't bring itself to directly oppose shrub on civil liberties for fear of seeming weak on terror. but they can create a bureaucracy to take the heat.

[Solly Mack]

9. Nope. Nothing more than a sop to the public

See! We're the super-duper good guys! We're protecting you! We created this added layer of bureaucracy to protect your rights...because we're for damn sure not protecting them by using our powers as Congress to stop Bush from shredding the bill of rights. But here, have an agency that "serves at the pleasure of the President"(so says Bush)


But hey, if it helps people feel better about it all

snicker

"congress can't bring itself to directly oppose shrub on civil liberties for fear of seeming weak on terror. but they can create a bureaucracy to take the heat."

LMAO That's just so admirable... screams integrity.


"Civil-liberties advocates like Lisa Graves, deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, considered the board to be apologists for the government's anti-terrorism policies, rather than independent civil-liberties watchdogs."

"This board failed miserably in its mission of helping to protect Americans' privacy and instead acted mainly to help the White House whitewash programs like warrantless NSA wiretapping that violate Americans' civil liberties," Graves said. "Now that Congress has changed the board's rules to make it a little more independent, the White House appears to have no interest in appointing anyone to it."

But even the newly configured board doesn't have enough power and what is really needed is a totally independent body with the ability to subpoena documents, according to Timothy Sparapani, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.


Like I said, a sop.

[Fridays Child]

3. Good God, Harry! Joe's rankled, again! Tell Nancy to grab the garden hose!

Ieyes:

[ejbr]

4. Wow, Joe is rankled?

Remember how rankled he got because of the unnecessary deaths from Katrina? If deaths of fellow Americans lead him to do jack shit, then I hardly think this is going to get him to act.

[madrchsod]

5. the silence of the lambs in the senate and house will be deafening

our presidential candidates will say nothing to offend

[ozymandius]

6. Not surprised if we see Poindexter, Kissinger and G. Gordon Libby nominated to the board.

[unblock]

8. it's now a bi-partisan board

which of course means that some republicans will simply switch party registration during their tenure on the board....

[u2spirit]

10. I'm sure Joe is beside himself

How's that Katrina investigation you promised in '06 going Joe? Dick!

[DemoTex]

11. "Privacy and Civil-liberties Commission": Am I the only one to whom that rings Orwellian?

Eric Blair is probably LHAO somewhere in the Great Void (Eric Blair wrote as George Orwell).

[librechik]

12. Calling Rummy and Gonzo and Libby! I hear they all need jobs

we don't need any democrats on a board like that.

[Javaman]

13. Alice in wonderland, hobbesian nightmare, soviet article 58, the logic of big brother ..

name it what you want, but when you get right down to it, asshat fucking idiot* acquiesced to this demand fully knowing he* would never staff it. Much like the oversight committee when the repukes ran congress.

repeat after me: "we are not a democracy, we are a constitutional dictatorship". Once you understand that, all the illogical bullshit that moron* serves us daily, becomes clear and easy to understand.

Come on, don't you know that democracy is soooooo 20th century?

Pul-leeeease.

[formercia]

15. Sire, the Parade of Virgins has been cancelled

one is sick and the other refuses to march alone.

[LynnTheDem]

16. The Rise And Fall of the New America Century continues...

Good luck getting your powers back, American citizens.