Big Brother Bush: The President Took a Step toward a Police State
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | Editorial
Sunday 18 December 2005
The Bush administration is continuing its assault on Americans'
privacy and freedom in the name of the war on terrorism.
First, in 2002, according to extensive reporting in The New York
Times on Friday, it secretly authorized the National Security Agency to
intercept and keep records of Americans' international phone and e-mail
messages without benefit of a previously required court order. Second,
it has permitted the Department of Defense to get away with not
destroying after three months, as required, records of American Iraq war
protesters in the Pentagon's Threat and Local Observation Notice, or
TALON, database.
Both practices mean that a government agency is maintaining
information on Americans, reminiscent of the Johnson and Nixon
administrations' approach to Vietnam War protesters. The existence of
those records should be seen against a background of the Bush
administration's response to criticism of the Iraq war by retired
Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. His wife's career at the CIA was ended in
revenge for an article he wrote unmasking a dodgy piece of intelligence
that President Bush had used in a State of the Union message to seek to
support his decision to go to war.
It appears that the phone and e-mail messages of thousands of
Americans and foreigners resident in America have been or are being
monitored and recorded by the NSA. Such action is not supposed to be
taken without an application to and an order approved by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court. Mr. Bush issued an executive order in
2002, months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, removing - secretly -
that legal safeguard of Americans' privacy and civil rights.
The Pentagon's action as part of TALON will be put forward as an
oversight, but the idea of the Department of Defense maintaining files
on American war protesters, perhaps with easy cross-reference to the
NSA's records based on the results of their monitoring of phone calls
and e-mails of potentially those same protesters, makes possible a very
serious violation of Americans' civil rights.
Without a serious leap of imagination, particularly with the list of
those under surveillance not available to anyone outside the NSA and the
Pentagon, it is also possible to project that political critics of the
Bush administration could end up among those being tracked. The Nixon
administration, a previous Republican administration beleaguered by war
critics, maintained "enemies lists."
The White House needs to tell the Pentagon promptly to destroy the
records of protesters as required, within three months. It also needs
promptly to tell the NSA to return to following the rules, to get the
approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before
monitoring Americans' communications. The idea that all of this is being
done to us in the name of national security doesn't wash; that is the
language of a police state. Those are the unacceptable actions of a
police state.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121905L.shtml
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