Ya’ think?
The (non-partisan) Congressional Research Service has concluded (surprise, surprise) that the Bush Administration’s snooping on all snoopable communications violates existing American law, according to this WaPo piece. Republican apostate Senator Spector has vowed to hold hearings on the issue of the Bush Administration’s “possible” violation of law (notably the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act… and the Fourth Amendment… and the rest of the freaking Constitution…) in its ongoing imperial activities, notably in this instance ordering the National Security Agency to open up the spigot on spying on tens of thousands of Americans (if not more… many more…) simply because it has the technology to do so… oh, and “there’s a war on, and I’m a WAR PRESIDENT… YEAH!” (This is why we should never ask questions like “could Bush find a worse attorney general than Ashcroft?” We know the answer to questions like that…we now have good old Alberto “Abu” Gonzales, the human rubber stamp…)
All just part of the ongoing executive power grab; another discussion of same on a different angle of tyranny (the arbitrary detention of citizens) is here with my interview with one of the lawyers for Jose Padilla, the erstwhile (and ersatz) “unlawful combatant”. When the President decides to make up the rules… bad things happen.
Will Americans wake the f*** up and start to care about the fact that we are now in a police state (you don’t start these things on that a massive scale… although the surveillance seems pretty damned massive…), or will we be more concerned with the events on Wysteria Lane than those on Pennsylvania Avenue? Will we continue to be content with rationalizations about the President “protecting us” from a grossly overstated threat as an appropriate basis for scrapping our Constitutional protections?
At the moment, I won’t get my hopes up…
January 7th, 2006 at 10:23 am
i think that the “Patriot” Act should have clued everybody in…WHEN has Congress ever created something so monumental in so short a period of time??? Having read the Global 2000 report commisioned by Jimmy Carter, i also realize that THIS stuff we’re now seeing is a truly bi-partisan effort.
A lot of people forget that yesterday’s Dixiecrats are now the backbone of the GOP…and the ‘68 Democratic convention showed that there was still a lot of intolerance in what Malcolm X likes to refer to as “Up South.” Hell, i’ve heard so much final solutionizing on WABC, NYC’s premier talk radio station, that i’m surprised there ain’t a jackbooting parade down Fifth Avenue on Hitler’s birthday!!!
GW once let it slip that there’s a shadow government…NOW we gotta run from the shadows