The Times Herald-Record is currently hosting a poll that asks " Do you believe President Bush violated the law when he ordered the National Security Agency to listen in on telephone calls originating in America without a court approved warrant?" While it is amazing that this question is even being asked, since the law clearly states that a warrant is required, I think that we need to let people know what the facts of the matter are. Vote at
http://www.th-record.com
To that end, I also sent a letter in a response to a particularly odious column in the Record's Monday edition. Column link and response on the flip.
The column was written by Doug Cunningham, the Record's business editor and resident right-wing hack, and can be read at
http://www.recordonline.com/...
My response, which I sent to all members of the Record's editorial management, was this:
Doug Cunningham is right in his column of January 2, 2006 when he says
"We are, perhaps more so than recently, living in a surreal time."
From that point forward, however, he is dead wrong.
Doug goes on to portray the recently revealed warrantless domestic
wiretapping directed by George Bush as an action on a par with private
businesses documenting individuals' credit histories and the access of
consumers' personal data by businesses and hackers. The appropriate
comparison to online criminals notwithstanding, Cunningham goes on to
break out his Ouija board and get endorsements from the ghosts of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill for Bush's monitoring
schemes. He would have been better served to consult with Richard
Nixon, whose perspective on such actions would have been far more
relevant.
The question that Doug Cunningham will not acknowledge, and pretends
does not exist, is "Why is George Bush ordering these wiretaps to be
made without obtaining warrants from the FISA court?" The court was
expressly set up to handle such requests, pursuant to federal law.
Its records are carefully protected to not allow outside interests to
gain specific knowledge of being targets. It has a history of being
extremely deferential to law enforcement requests for warrants, with
approvals in the tens of thousands and denials in the single digits,
since it was established in the 1970s. And the process does not
impede the ability to swiftly put such monitoring in place: the
request process allows for warrants to be obtained three days AFTER
wiretapping is established for that very purpose. So, what is the
compelling reason for the Bush administration to break the law in
bypassing the judicial branch's oversight of this extremely powerful
capability?
Doug continues justifying the illegal actions of the Bush
administration by painting the Democratic leaders in Congress as
blabbermouths who would have rendered the wiretapping efforts moot by
publicizing them. This argument is both irrelevant in its assertions
and infantile in its assumptions. The existing process to get legal
wiretaps, through warrants from the FISA court, was simple,
straightforward, accommodating to the requesters, and it did not
involve informing Congress at all. No one on Capitol Hill needed to
be involved. Also, this baseless smear asks the reader to believe
that real terrorists would be so naive as to think that their
conversations would not be monitored by intelligence agencies, and
that frank and open discussion of such policies would "tip them off"
to the possibility. If organized crime figures are cognizant of the
existence of electronic eavesdropping technology, it seems safe to
assume that international terrorists are at least as smart. Only Bush
apologists seem to be blissfully ignorant of such capabilities.
And contrary to Mr. Cunningham's assertions, the actions of the Bush
administration are PRECISELY the kind of thing we need to be debating
in public. Not the existence of wiretaps themselves, but the
consistent stance of them to decide which laws apply to them and which
laws they are free to break. Through tortured legal reasonings, White
House lawyers have declared that the President can incarcerate
Americans such as Jose Padilla indefinitely without access to legal
counsel or due process of the law. They have created a legal
netherworld in Cuba where detainees are neither criminals nor
prisoners of war, and have "redefined" torture to add unspeakable
crimes to their "arsenal" against terrorism. And now, they have
declared that they can unilaterally decide to monitor the
conversations of people inside the borders of our country without even
the token oversight of a court that has acted as little more than a
rubber stamp for the entirety of its existence. Some people may not
think that such actions are as dangerous to the stability of our
nation as the denial of an extramarital affair, but the conversation
should take place.
And why should such arrogant and illegal actions be tolerated?
Because we can trust the Bush administration to act fairly,
cautiously, and sagely in its wielding of such dangerous power? As
Mr. Cunningham notes in his list of 2005 failures and missteps, this
White House has long since surrendered any claim to the benefit of the
doubt when it comes to doing what is in the best interest of anyone
but themselves.
On December 20, 2005, Senator John Cornyn declared on the Senate floor
during debate about the Patriot Act that "None of your civil liberties
matter much after you're dead." It is this craven attitude that seems
to permeate the otherwise tough-talking Republican party and their
echo chamber of shills and apologists in the media. I am ashamed that
members of our goverment have happily thrown away the principles upon
which our nation was founded, so eloquently stated by Patrick Henry on
March 23, 1775: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be
purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty
or give me death!"
Allow me to correct my previous statement about where Doug is right
and wrong in his column. I agree with his last statement, as well:
"Either we plan to win, or we don't." However, an America where the
President's word is law is not a victory; it is the replacement of a
democracy with a dictatorship. Mr. Cunningham may choose to surrender
his liberty to Mr. Bush for what may amount to a little temporary
safety, but I do not. I'll continue to follow Patrick Henry's advice.
Hopefully the specious logic of Cunningham's column will be more fully explored by the paper's staff.