Bush Justice- It's all a provokation (Glenn Greenwald) About the DCF's wiretapping....

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Subject: Bush Justice- It's all a provokation (Glenn Greenwald)

Date: Feb 20, 2008 1:27 AM

This illegal wiretapping is exactly what duh DCF does. In this way,
they can find
out who your witnesses are, and then call those witnesses, tell them
horrible lies
about you, so that those witnesses will come and perjure themselves on
the behalf
of the State.

It's actually worse than the PATRIOT Act and the Bushie Military
trials.
This is certain because AAG Jessica Gauvin repeated VERBATIM what I
said on the
phone the night before to my kids, in the "courtroom," manipulating
it,
of course, to have it mean something else.
She clearly also lied to the Berlin police in order to avoid going to
jail herself:
http://www.actionlyme.org/GAUVIN_DEATH_PENALTY.htm

Everyone should know what are the possible outcomes of being
wiretapped. You could
be falsely accused of something or you could know about some serious
crime, and
be bagged as a whistleblower:
http://www.actionlyme.org/LYNNAE_LAKE_CASE.htm
There;s no better way to make a problem go away than to deploy duh DCF
morons, since
no dumber class of people ever existed.

MAKE SURE YOU TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW, that DCF bugs phones, follows
you around in
their cars, stakes out your house, goes through your garbage, and
calls everyone
you know to invent horrible lies about you so that you have no allies.


Kathleen M. Dickson


http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/02/19/lawlessness/index.html
Tuesday February 19, 2008 11:17 EST
The courts and Congress affirmatively conceal and protect lawbreaking

In August, 2006, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor became the first federal
judge ever to
rule on the legality of the Bush administration's NSA warrantless
spying program,
and she ruled that the NSA program violated both statutory law as well
as multiple
rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The case was brought by
the ACLU on
behalf of numerous Muslim lawyers, journalists and others, who argued
that the existence
of the warrantless eavesdropping program rendered them unable to
perform their jobs.

The Bush administration appealed that decision to a three-judge panel
of the Sixth
Circuit. In July of last year, two of the three appellate judges voted
to reverse
Judge Diggs Taylor's ruling, not because they disagreed with her
conclusions
about the program's legality. Instead, they found that the plaintiffs
lacked
"standing" to challenge the legality of the program -- and courts were
therefore barred from ruling on their claims -- because the plaintiffs
were unable
to prove that they were actually subjected to the warrantless
eavesdropping (due
to the absolute secrecy under which the program operates).

The third member of the appellate panel, Judge Gilman, dissented from
that finding,
holding that plaintiffs were permitted to proceed with the lawsuit,
and then proceeded
to find that the NSA program was illegal. Thus, even to date, the only
two judges
ever to rule on the legality of Bush's NSA program -- District Judge
Diggs Taylor
and the Sixth Circuit's Judge Gilman -- have both ruled that it was
illegal.

The ACLU appealed the Sixth Circuit's procedural ruling to the U.S.
Supreme
Court, asking the Court to hear the appeal. Today, the Court announced
that it would
not hear the appeal, thus bringing an end to the ACLU's legal
challenge to the
NSA program (even though no judge has ever ruled the program legal):

The justices' decision, issued without comment, is the latest
setback to
legal efforts to force disclosure of details of the warrantless
wiretapping that
began after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Supreme Court accepts only a tiny percentage of cases for appeal,
and under
its long-standing rules, a refusal to hear a case does not constitute
agreement
with the lower court's decision. It simply means that the Court, for
whatever
reasons, will not decide the appeal.

This decision does mean, however, that EFF's pending lawsuits in San
Francisco
against AT&T, Verizon and the other telecoms are now the sole
remaining vehicle
for finding out what the Bush administration actually did when spying
on Americans
for years without warrants, and as importantly, is the last hope for
obtaining a
judicial ruling as to whether the President broke the law and violated
the Constitution
when doing so. If Jay Rockefeller and Dick Cheney have their way and
retroactive
amnesty is granted to these telecoms, those lawsuits will be forever
dismissed and
Americans will remain indefinitely in the dark about how our own
Government spied
on us, and will forever lose the opportunity to have a court rule
whether the Government
broke the law and violated our Constitutional rights.

In March, 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted (along party
lines) against
holding hearings and conducting an investigation into the warrantless
NSA program.
Thus, Congress has never fulfilled its duty of meaningfully
investigating the spying
scandal. Identically, the courts have accepted the Bush
administration's procedural
arguments as to why they are barred from ruling on the legality of the
program.
Thus, despite agreement among legal experts across much of the
political spectrum
that George Bush and company committed serious felonies in spying on
Americans without
warrants, the two other branches of government have been completely
closed off (willingly)
in investigating what happened or even in determining whether the law
was broken.

Think about the information that has been completely concealed -- all
the things
which we, as Americans, remain in the dark about with regard to our
Government's
illegal spying on us. We do not know which Americans were spied upon
without warrants,
how they were chosen for surveillance, whether they had any connection
to terrorists,
and/or what was done with the information obtained. Despite the fact
that we enacted
laws 30 years ago making warrantless spying a felony, we have no idea
what was done
with the warrantless spying powers the President arrogated unto
himself and then
used for years.

More significantly, recall that in May of last year, former Deputy
Attorney General
James Comey testified that through 2004, the Bush administration was
doing something
with domestic surveillance that was so patently illegal, so extreme
and unconscionable,
that the entire top level of the DOJ -- including John Ashcroft, FBI
Director Robert
Mueller, and Comey -- threatened to resign if it continued. These are
the same officials
who would go on to endorse the NSA warrantless spying program. That's
how extreme
they are. Yet whatever it was that the Bush administration was doing
back then was
so illegal that even these right-wing extremists would have resigned
in protest.

What was the Bush administration doing that provoked such an extreme
reaction? What
laws where they breaking? Even though (according to Comey) those
activities ceased
in 2004 -- and there is thus no arguable ground for continuing to
conceal those
activities -- we still have no idea what they did. We're completely in
the dark
about all of it. And every avenue for our finding out -- Congressional
oversight
and judicial accountability -- has been blocked, except for the
lawsuits against
the telecoms. And Congress is on the verge of blocking that final path
to discovery
and accountability as well.

Don't these facts just speak volumes for themselves? Imagine if, say,
Vladimir
Putin was accused by his own top officials of systematically spying on
Russian citizens
for years in ways that were patently illegal, but he then manipulated
the courts
to ensure he was never accountable, and had his political allies in
parliament block
any investigations, so that the activities remained concealed forever
and he was
never made to answer for what he did. Think about the grave
denunciations that Fred
Hiatt, Charles Krauthammer and the State Department would be issuing
over such authoritarian
and lawless maneuvering.

That's exactly how our country operates now. When high political
officials here
are accused of breaking the law, they need not defend themselves.
Congress acts
to protect and immunize them. The courts refuse even to hear the
lawsuits. And executive
branch officials are completely shielded from the most basic mechanics
of the rule
of law.

No hyperbole is necessary to sustain the Putin comparison. It's
demonstrated
by the facts themselves, by how our system of government works now.
None of the
"great controversies" of the Bush years, involving multiple
accusations
of lawbreaking, war crimes and other forms of serious corruption, has
resulted in
any legal process or investigations or ajudications because our
government officials
have been vested with omnipotent instruments to shield themselves from
accountability,
or even investigation, of any kind.

In a minimally functioning Republic, when our political leaders are
accused of concealing
wrongdoing, Congress investigates, uncovers what happens, and informs
the American
people. When political leaders are accused of breaking the law, courts
decide whether
that occurred. None of the branches of government do that any longer.
They do the
opposite: they not only fail to perform those functions, but they
affirmatively
act to block investigations, help the conduct remain concealed, and
ensure that
there is no adjudication. When it comes to ensuring that the NSA
spying scandal
specifically remains forever uninvestigated, secret, and unexamined,
telecom amnesty
will be the final nail in this coffin, but it is merely illustrative
of how our
political culture now functions.

-- Glenn Greenwald