December 19, 2005
I wrote the following for the forthcoming issue of L.A. Weekly:
When the U.S. Senate last Friday refused to renew the liberticidal
Patriot Act -- with its provisions for spying on Americans’ use of
libraries and the Internet, among other Constitution-shredding
provisions of that iniquitous law -- it was in part because that
morning’s New York Times had revealed how Bush and his White House had committed a major crime.
By ordering the National Security
Agency -- the N.S.A, so secretive that in Washington its initials are
said to stand for "No Such Agency" -- to wiretap and eavesdrop on
thousands of American citizens without a court order, Bush committed
actions specifically forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA). Passed in 1978 after the Senate’s Church Committee documented
in detail the Nixon administration’s widespread use of U.S.
intelligence agencies to spy on the anti-Vietnam war movement and other
political dissidents, FISA "expressly made it a crime for government
officials 'acting under color of law' to engage in electronic
eavesdropping 'other than pursuant to statute.’", as the director of
the Center for National Security Studies, Kate Martin, told the Washington Post
this past weekend. And the FISA statute required authorization of the
secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make such domestic
spying legal. Bush and his NSA sought no such authorization before
invading American citizens’ right to privacy -- a blatant flouting of
the law that made both wavering Democrats and libertarian Republicans
mad enough to vote against extending the hideous Patriot Act, which
thankfully will now expire at the end of the year.
Bush not only acknowledged, and defended, this illegal eavesdropping in a Saturday
radio address, he went further in a Monday morning press conference,
saying he’d "suggested" it. But as Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ
Feingold (right) -- who, together with conservative Idaho Republican Larry Craig, led the filibuster that defeated the Patriot Act’s renewal -- said this weekend,
"This is not how our democratic system of government works--the
president does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to
follow."
But Bush had plenty of bipartisan help from Democratic
co-conspirators in keeping knowledge of this illegal spying from
reaching the American public. It began in November 2001, in the wake of
9/11, and -- from the very first briefing for Congressional leaders by
Dick Cheney until today -- Democrats on the Senate and
House Intelligence Committees were told about it. Those witting and
complicit in hiding the crime included Democratic Senator John D.
Rockefeller IV (left), former chairman and later ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (right),
former ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. They knew it
was a crime -- Rockefeller, for example, warned the administration
against it -- and yet did not make it public. They were frightened by
polls showing security hysteria at its height.
Worse, the New York Times itself was part of the coverup. When it broke its scoop
last Friday, the Times in its article admitted that, "After meeting
with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the
newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional
reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could
be useful to terrorists has been omitted." In other words, the Times sat on its story until after
the 2004 presidential elections, when American voters might have been
able to stop this criminal conduct by voting out the criminal. Not
content with employing Judy Miller as the megaphone for relaying the
Bush administration’s lies about Saddam’s having weapons of mass
destruction, the Times again proved its servility to power by
not telling its readers it knew of criminal spying on them for an
entire year, until the election cycle was long past. Yet this aspect of
the Times’ story has gone unremarked in the mass media.
Bush’s excuses for the illegal eavesdropping are indeed risible. The Times
didn’t mention it, but of 19,000 requests for eavesdropping the Federal
Intelligence Security Court has received from the Executive Branch
since 1979, only five have ever been refused. Bush claimed again on
Monday that this flagrant flouting of the FISA law was necessary
because fighting "terrorists" needed to be done "quickly." Yet, as the Times
reported, the secret court can grant approval for wiretaps "within
hours." And the excuse Bush offered this morning that this illegal
subversion of FISA was necessary to prevent 9/11-style terrorism is
equally laughable. As the ACLU pointed out in a study of FISA two years
ago, "Although the Patriot Act was rushed into law just weeks after 9/11, Congress's later investigation into the attacks did not find that the former limits on FISA powers had contributed to the government's failure to prevent the attacks."
A Zogby poll released November 4
showed that, when asked if they agreed that, "If President Bush did not
tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress
should consider holding him accountable through impeachment," Americans
answered Yes by 53% to 42%. It is therefore not simply an extremist
raving to suggest that impeachment of George Bush should be put on the
table.
Remember that, in the impeachment of Richard Nixon, Article 2 of the three Articles of
Impeachment dealt with illegal wiretapping of Americans. It said that
Nixon committed a crime "by directing or authorizing [intelligence]
agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or
other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the
enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office."
There was no national security justification for Bush’s illegal NSA
wiretaps -- which could easily have been instituted by following the
FISA law’s provisions -- and, instead of being related to "enforcement
of laws," Bush’s eavesdropping was indisputably in contravention of the
law of the land.
And when a president commits a crime in violation of his oath of office swearing to uphold the law, it is the time to impeach.
P.S. LEWIS CALLS FOR IMPEACHMENT: After the above was written, Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat (right) and distinguished civil rights leader, said the House should support impeachment,
saying ""It's a very serious charge, but he violated the law.The
president should abide by the law. He deliberately, systematically
violated the law. He is not King, he is president."