26 January 2006 (# 52)
Mr. Bush has been doing a Nixon redux these past few weeks with the “Because I’m President, it’s legal” bunk. A minor difference that someone might want to whisper to Bush -- Nixon was actually elected President.
The similarities to the Nixon era extend to having members of their respective administrations lie to Congress.
Mr. Helms lied to Congress regarding the use of the CIA to topple Chilean President Allende. As Mark Halperin reminds us today, at
Think Progress, General Hayden has done the same. Moreover:
The Bush administration has pulled out all the stops in attempting to defend the NSA’s warrantless domestic spying program. After speeches by President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales, Deputy Director of National Intelligence and former NSA Director General Michael Hayden took another crack at the defense in a speech on Monday.
He’s not exactly the ideal choice to restore the administration’s credibility.
As Think Progress documented back in December (2005), Hayden misled Congress. In his 10/17/02 testimony, he told a committee investigating the 9/11 attacks that any surveillance of persons in the United States was done consistent with FISA.
At the time of his statements, Hayden was fully aware of the presidential order to conduct warrantless domestic spying issued the previous year. But Hayden didn’t feel as though he needed to share that with Congress. Apparently, Hayden believed that he had been legally authorized to conduct the surveillance, but told Congress that he had no authority to do exactly what he was doing.
The Fraud and False Statements statute (18 U.S.C. 1001) make Hayden’s misleading statements to Congress illegal.
Link: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/26/hayden-broke-lawGlenn Greenwald has now made Mr. Bush’s fierce attempts to prove he’s not a crook even more reminiscent of Nixon, and the claims made this week by Hayden and Gonzales even more Helms-like:
… the Administration’s excuse from the time the scandal broke and repeated by Gen. Hayden two days ago – that FISA does not provide the necessary "speed and agility" for eavesdropping –
was directly contradicted by its claims in June, 2002 that the Patriot Act’s FISA amendments give it all the speed and agility it needed.
Here is the critical point: if, as the Administration is now claiming, FISA was inadequate for eavesdropping, why was it telling the Congress in June, 2002 that FISA was perfectly adequate to enable all the eavesdropping it wanted, and even praising Congress for amending FISA (via the Patriot Act) and thereby giving the Administration everything it needed?
Link: http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/01/significance-of-administrations-july.htmlIn the same blog post, Mr. Greenwald reminds us just how Nixonian Bush and his neoconster minions are being:
Virtually every significant political law-breaking scandal in our nation’s history is comprised of two components: (a) the law-breaking itself, and (b) the subsequent attempts to cover up and explain away the law-breaking with falsehoods and untrue explanations.
That is what we are seeing now. The Administration scrambled for a full month to explain why they had to eavesdrop outside of the very permissive FISA scheme, to explain why they eavesdropped with no judicial oversight even though the law makes it a criminal offense to do so. We had been fed nothing but incoherent gibberish about the need for "speed and agility" in this "different war."
Now we finally heard an explanation from the Administration as to why they supposedly had to eavesdrop in violation of FISA -- because FISA supposedly was too rigid to allow the eavesdropping they wanted to do –
and that explanation is clearly false, as proven by the Administration's own statements and conduct at the time.
Link: http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/01/significance-of-administrations-july.htmlMr. Bush and members of his administration have violated the 4th Amendment and broken laws – FISA, National Security Act and 18 USC 1001, at a minimum (
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/23279res20051229.html). They must be impeached and prosecuted. We do not need to know why they decided to illegally spy on Americans to proceed with those just actions, now.
However, during the discovery phase of prosecuting them every effort should be made to uncover the details of whom they spied and to whom they shared the illegally gathered information. No “executive privilege” can shield access to such information because it was gathered illegally, and un-Constitutionally. My only concern is that unless someone is willing to tell the truth, it is likely that the physical evidence of the intercepted communications and who was provided access to the information has already been destroyed.
One mistake Nixon made you can be sure these crooks will not make, leave any evidence to be discovered. In other words, had Bush and his neoconsters been around in 1974, this is what they would have been saying -- “tapes, what tapes, you’ve gotta be joking, we’d never tape our conversations” and nobody would have been able to prove they were lying because the tapes would have already been incinerated.
Thank you for your continued leadership,
p.s. As I was printing this letter to you I noticed the following from the DNC:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=59831We’re definitely in sync on this one!
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