Cross-posted at
Democracy Cell Project where Karen Bradley will be live-blogging at noon in DC with local protest groups gathering at the Cannon Office Building to send Congress off on the holiday break. They'll be expressing how they feel about the Congressional support of the Bush agenda in general and in particular, their outrage at the audacity of the Bush administration in instructing the NSA to spy on us. Catch the pictures and her posts at the DCP... I'll add the link here when she's live.
I wanted to share this essay that Dick Bell wrote. I think he speaks for many of us. Then think about what street action you can take.
The Constitution in Tatters
The last flimsy fig leaf of respect for the Constitution was ripped away with today's reports that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency in 2002 to eavesdrop on US citizens and foreign nationals in the US.
The story ABOUT this story is equally horrifying. The New York Times knew about this NSA program and at the request of the government sat on the story for more than a year.
The timing suggests that this information could have been made public by the Times before the 2004 election. Such information would have roiled the waters. Through its complicity with the government, the Times may very well have altered the outcome of the election.
Whatever political credibility the Times may have had lies in ruins.
In a just world where people cared about the survival of freedom and liberty, the publisher of the Times should FIRE every single person who had any information about the Times' decision to sit on this story. And if the publisher knew, he should then resign in shame as well.
These reporters and editors are traitors in the deepest sense of the word. They have betrayed the American people and they have betrayed the dignity and integrity of every working journalist on the planet.
Given everything else that the Bush administration has done, it is no surprise to discover yet another area in which the President has led the charge into lawlessness. We have warned over and over again that Bush and his minions were power-mad. And having ceded them such unlimited powers, they have behaved as history tells us that tyrants and dictators always behave when they wield such unchecked powers.
Could you have imagined, ten years ago, that our country was:
*operating an international network of secret prisons
*that our Justice Department was headed by an Attorney General whose craven memos purported to allow US Government officials to engage in torture
*allowing the President on his own whim to arrest and imprison people for the rest of their natural lives without access to an attorney or even a court
I could go on, but the point is clear. We are now living under the gravest threat that our country has ever faced. The men and women who are running the executive branch are sytematically destroying the constitutional foundations of our country. And the men and women in the Congress who are empowered by the Constitution to provide a check on the executive branch have utterly failed to carry out their own constitutional duties.
Every day that passes under the leadership of these people is another knife blow to the ribs of liberty. If freedom is to survive this unprecedented onslaught, the American people are going to have to go to the streets again and again and again until these evildoers are forced from office.
-- Dick Bell