reality-based educator

This LA Times editorial criticizing the preznit's approval of domestic spying hits all the right notes for me:

Bigger brother

PRESIDENT BUSH WAS CAVALIER on Friday night when he told Jim Lehrer on PBS that a report about the National Security Agency eavesdropping on U.S. citizens was "not the main story of the day." He is entitled to his own news judgment, but it reveals a lot about his willingness to disregard constitutional safeguards and civil liberties while pursuing the war on terrorism. To the rest of us, the revelation in the New York Times that the National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on people within the United States without judicial warrants was stunning. In one of the more egregious cases of governmental overreach in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush secretly authorized the monitoring, without any judicial oversight, of international phone calls and e-mail messages from the United States.

The news came on the same day that Congress voted not to extend controversial aspects of the soon-to-expire Patriot Act, and on the heels of disturbing reports that the Pentagon's shadowy Counterintelligence Field Activity office has been keeping tabs on domestic antiwar groups, including monitoring Quaker meetings, under the guise of protecting military installations. The program is reminiscent of official efforts to spy on antiwar groups in the 1960s.

The scandalous abuse of Americans' civil liberties in that period led in the 1970s to a new set of laws aimed at curtailing domestic espionage by intelligence agencies. To balance national security needs with our constitutional liberties, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act created secret "FISA" courts in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal agencies can covertly obtain warrants to eavesdrop on suspected spies (now terrorists too) in the United States. These courts are generally efficient and deferential to the government. Yet the Bush administration still opted to cut them out of the process in some cases; warrants are still sought to intercept all communications that took place entirely within the United States.

Some critics say the FISA courts are too slow to issue decisions in an environment in which every minute counts, and that Cold War laws are ill-suited for a war on amorphous terrorist cells. If that's the case, the administration and Congress should have worked together to alter the courts' procedures or to amend the law. Instead, the White House unilaterally opted to exempt much of its antiterrorism efforts from any kind of judicial oversight — just as it tried doing with its policies regarding detainees.

The Supreme Court has already reined in the executive branch on that score, and the NSA's eavesdropping, arguably a violation of both the law and the Constitution, may lead to even greater legal woes for the president. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called reports of the NSA practices clearly unacceptable and said he would hold hearings early next year. There will be plenty to ask about.

One early defense of the program is a claim by the administration that it had to be implemented quietly — the president authorized it in a classified order — because otherwise terrorists would be alerted to its existence and work to evade it. But those same suspected terrorists would have already known that they might be wiretapped with the aid of a secret warrant. What is the difference?

Last week may come to be seen as a tipping point in the public's attitude, one that will cause the administration to reverse its encroachment on rights in the name of security. The report of the NSA's unsupervised eavesdropping program helped defeat an extension of certain controversial provisions of the Patriot Act in the Senate on Friday.

Now even sympathetic lawmakers can be expected to view the Patriot Act more skeptically. The revelations about the NSA raise two fundamental questions about the administration's rationale for increased powers: If it's already spying on its own citizens, then why does it need the Patriot Act? Alternatively, if it's already spying on its own citizens, how can it be trusted with the Patriot Act? This administration has yet to fully acknowledge that with greater powers must come greater accountability.

As for the Defense Department's counterterrorism database, the Pentagon was forced on Thursday to acknowledge that it hadn't followed its own guidelines requiring the deletion of information on American citizens who clearly don't pose a security risk. Imagine that: a domestic military intelligence program that failed to abide by its own safeguards.

Given this administration's history, none of these developments is especially surprising. But the latest revelations may serve as a timely reminder of why the American constitutional system requires the judiciary — the third branch of government — to review the actions of the executive branch when necessary to protect the people's liberty.

This preznit believes he is above the law. For the first five years of George Bush's administration, this Congress has abdicated its oversight duties of the executive branch, consistently putting "elephant" above "flag" on matters of both domestic and international concern.

Now we can see the price the nation is paying for one party GOP rule.

A war of choice in Iraq that was ill-conceived, badly planned, and poorly executed that has left the United States more vulnerable in Bush's "War on Terror," not less vulnerable.

An anti-terrorism policy that includes "rendering" terror suspects to countries abroad to be interrogated (i.e., tortured), holding "terror suspects" in perpetuity without charges being filed against them, and using "enhanced interrogation techniques" against terror suspects, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, inducing claustrophobia, and using electric shock on genitals.

A federal government that couldn't respond to the first national crisis in the post 9/11 world when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and killed hundreds of people.

This administration does whatever it wants and rarely if ever pays a political price for its misteps, mistakes, or even crimes. They simply spin their way out of whatever controversy they're in and the send their GOP apologists and party hacks out to hit the TV circuit to spread talking points which a compliant news media is happy to disseminate and a willing public is even happier to lap up.

Meanwhile the opposition party sits by offering mild protest or, more often than not, attempts to co-opt "centrist" positions that stand for nothing and appeal to no one in the electorate except for a few Democratic Leadership Council appartachiks.

And the result has been a Bush administration that has run rampant over the Constitution and the Separation of Powers doctrine.

Dana Milbank reports in today's Washington Post that Democrats and even some Republicans believe the GOP-controlled Congress has done a piss-poor job of carrying out its oversight responsibilities over the administration:

In an interview last week, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said "it's a fair comment" that the GOP-controlled Congress has done insufficient oversight and "ought to be" doing more.

"Republican Congresses tend to overinvestigate Democratic administrations and underinvestigate their own," said Davis, who added that he has tried to pick up some of the slack with his committee. "I get concerned we lose our separation of powers when one party controls both branches."

Democrats on the committee said the panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002, at a cost of more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration, two to the Energy Department over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and one last week to the Defense Department over Katrina documents.

Some experts on Congress say that the legislative branch has shed much of its oversight authority because of a combination of aggressive actions by the Bush administration, acquiescence by congressional leaders, and political demands that keep lawmakers out of Washington more than before.

"I do not think you can argue today that Congress is a coequal branch of government; it is not," said Lee H. Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, told reporters this month: "It has basically lost the war-making power. The real debates on budget occur not in Congress but in the Office of Management and Budget. . . . When you come into session Tuesday afternoon and leave Thursday afternoon, you simply do not have time for oversight or deliberation."

...

"The House has absolutely zero oversight. They just don't engage in that," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said in an interview last week.

Specifically, Democrats list 14 areas where the GOP majority has "failed to investigate" the administration, including the role of senior officials in the abuse of detainees; leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame; the role of Vice President Cheney's office in awarding contracts to Cheney's former employer, Halliburton; the White House's withholding from Congress the cost of a Medicare prescription drug plan; the administration's relationship with Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi; and the influence of corporate interests on energy policy, environmental regulation and tobacco policy.

Meanwhile, the House ethics committee has not opened a new case or launched an investigation in the past 12 months, despite outside investigations involving, among others, Cunningham and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

...

Democrats, who have tried to get Davis to subpoena the White House for Katrina documents, are not impressed. "Republicans have made a mockery of oversight," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the committee's ranking Democrat. "There was nothing too small to be investigated in the Clinton administration and there's nothing so big that it can't be ignored in the Bush administration."

Simply put, the Republican Party, led by Karl Rove, Tom Delay and Denny Hastert, has always put "elephant" over "flag" and forced Congress to abdicate its oversight responsibilities over the administration, the media abdicated its own oversight responsibilties in the horrific aftermath of 9/11, consistently giving the administration the benefit of the doubt on every issue that arose, especially in the run-up to the Iraq war, and the public allowed itself to be swayed by this administration's skillful use of PR and propaganda.

The result is an imperial president who clearly thinks he can break the law.

Just like Nixon. Remember his famous quote: "If the president does it, it's not illegal"?

George W. Bush seems to hold to the same philosophy.

Now its time for this GOP Congress to act like the patriots they claim to be and hold King George to the rule of law.

It's also time for the media to call the administration on its bullshit and the president on his les.

And most of all, its time for the American people to realize that just because this preznit says something is true doesn't make it so.

To the contrary, given his track record, if this preznit says something's true, you know he's lying.