TOM LANTOS, ZIONAZI MOUTHPIECE IN CONGRES IS DEAD!
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himself from being exposed as a criminal in the ongoing campaign to have the
National Security Agency spy at will on Americans.
Claiming -- without a scintilla of evidence to back him up -- that there are
people planning a "much worse attack" than 9-11 on America, Bush says he
must not only have free rein to unleash the NSA spymasters on American
telephone and internet communications, but also a grant of complete immunity
from prosecution for such spying for the telecom industry.
The Senate, of course, with solid backing from Republicans and critical
backing too from a significant number of treacherous Democrats (some of
whom, such as Intelligence Committee head Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) have gotten
significant donations from the telecom industry), has already given the
president the bill he wants. It now is before the House, where some
Democrats and a few Republicans who still remember there's supposed to be a
Bill of Rights, are resisting passage of the cynically named Protect America
bill.
The obvious lie that the president is spreading is made evident by the fact
that there is no heightened alert status -- not at airports, not at the
border, not at city police and fire departments.
But furthermore, if nothing were passed, it would have no impact at all on
the NSA's current spying and monitoring activities. If there really were
evidence of some kind of attack in preparation, the NSA would already be
monitoring it under existing authority, and would be able to continue that
activity without a warrant at least until next September!
And even if the authority to monitor without a warrant were not granted at
that point, the administration has from now until then to obtain a warrant,
which it could do anytime it wants to by going to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court.
So the president's false drama of staying home from his trip to Africa is
just a sham. There is no urgency to this at all.
Then there's the whole insistence on retroactive telecom immunity. The White
House claims that if immunity for past, current, and future warrantless
spying by the telecom industry on behalf of the NSA is not granted, it would
deter the industry from cooperating with the NSA in the future.
That is yet another fraud. If the White House or NSA were to obtain a
warrant for its spying, no telecom executive would or even could refuse to
comply. It's the warrantless spying that one or two phone companies, notably
Quest, had objected to in the past. The answer is easy: the NSA should seek
warrants for its spying. The only explanation for the administration's
refusal to seek warrants from a court that since 1978 has only rejected a
handful of requests out of hundreds of thousands submitted to it, is that it
knows its request would be rejected -- and that should tell us all we need
to know about what Bush is doing.
What is really clear is that the administration has done some things that it
really does not want the public to know about. That is the reason it's
seeking retroactive immunity. What it fears is that class-action lawsuits,
some of which have already been filed against the phone companies, will lead
to discovery that would reveal who it was actually spying on over the last
eight years (and this illegal spying program, we now know, began in early
2001, shortly after Bush and Cheney took office, and well before the 9-11
attacks).
The claim that such discovery could lead to release of information that
could alert terrorists to the fact that they are being monitored is
laughable. No federal judge would allow such a thing to happen. The federal
government would only have to assert such a threat, and any judge in the
federal court system would agree to review the evidence before releasing it
in open court.
So what is it that the White House and the NSA have been up to all these
years that Bush and Cheney are so frightened to have outed?
The answer seems painfully clear, especially given that we know the program
began before Sept. 11, 2001 -- a period when Bush and Cheney were famously
uninterested in investigating terrorism.
They had to have been spying on us -- most likely on the groups that had
protested Bush's election fraud, the Democratic opposition, possible leakers
in his own administration, and then, in the wake of 9-11, the questioners of
the official story of that tragic event, the growing anti-war movement, the
impeachment movement, critical journalists, etc. -- in short, the same kinds
of people that President Nixon, back in the 1970s, unleashed the NSA on, and
which led to passage of the FISA law and the FISA court in the first place.
There is a growing shrillness to the president's lies and to the
administration's efforts to get this protective legislation passed. With a
Democratic blowout possible this November, he has to worry that all this
nefarious activity could come pouring out next year, leaving both him and
Vice President Cheney, by then out of office and without protection from
prosecution, open to attack from both criminal prosecutors and citizen
lawsuits for damages.
The House, which has been a shameless lapdog of the administration for the
past year since the Democrats took control of that body, has a chance here
to show it still has at least one vertebra left in its severely decalcified
spine. It should refuse to pass any extension of NSA warrantless spying
authority, and should refuse immunity for the telecom industry.
Let the president dangle in the wind on this one. Call your representative
(202/225-3121) and let her or him know you want them to really protect
America, by not passing the so-called Protect America bill!
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net.