| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
03 Jan 2006 02:23:25 PM |
| Object: |
National Catholic Reporter: The latest Bush threat to democracy |
From The National Catholic Reporter, 1/6/05 issue:
http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2006a/010606/010606r.htm
The latest Bush threat to democracy
Enough.
Little else is left to say to an administration that:
-----Led a country into war on false premises;
-----Continues to link the war against terrorism with the war in Iraq
when the two had no relationship at the outset;
-----Dismisses the Geneva Conventions and holds prisoners incognito
for years, without charges or access to legal representation;
-----Places detainees on planes bound for foreign countries known for
torture and abuse of prisoners;
-----Maintains secret CIA prisons on foreign soil;
-----Subverts laws guarding the civil liberties of U.S. citizens,
including searches of personal records and infiltration of religious
and peace groups by the FBI;
-----Defers to a vice president who argues for legal exceptions so
that U.S. personnel can engage in torture;
-----And has, at various times, created mechanisms to plant false news
reports domestically and overseas and most recently paid to have
stories planted in the Iraqi press.
Where are we headed?
To this deeply disturbing list of human rights abuses and violations
of civil liberties add the most recent revelations that President
Bush, under the influence of and with the encouragement of Vice
President Cheney, personally approved widespread electronic
eavesdropping on Americans.
We may not have reached, yet, the "Newspeak" or "telescreens" of 1984,
but the level of deception is certainly approaching Orwellian
dimensions when a president who casts himself as a champion of global
democracy could orchestrate so much that is fundamentally destructive
of democracy.
Cheney, it is said, has long had as a personal ambition the
restoration of presidential power, which he thinks was unreasonably
diminished in the wake of executive branch lying and deception during
the Vietnam and Watergate eras.
The need for restraining presidential power, however, is made clear by
President Bush’s now extensively documented inclination to view his
prerogatives regarding the ordering of search, seizure, imprisonment
and interrogation with no regard for the limits of federal and
international law accepted by predecessors.
Law already exists granting the president great latitude in using the
super-secret National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens.
All the government must do is present probable cause that someone is
linked to terrorist or other activities to the Federal Intelligence
Surveillance Court and obtain a warrant to do the snooping.
According to intelligence expert James Bamford, writing in the Dec. 25
issue of The New York Times, "The court rarely turns the government
down. Since it was established in 1978, the court has granted about
19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five."
Moreover, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who believes the war
on terror justifies domestic eavesdropping, still believes it would
not place an undue burden on the government to seek warrants.
Bush thinks otherwise.
He believes that the ill-defined and limitless war on terror gives him
the authority to order eavesdropping without resort to the courts.
He asks us to trust him; he is simply trying to protect us.
What the president apparently refuses to acknowledge is that his
undermining of due process and civil liberties, the deep invasion of
privacy that he wants unchecked power to authorize, is as least as
dangerous to democracy as any terrorist threat.
As Bamford noted, the National Security Agency was established at a
time when eavesdropping meant listening in on telephone calls or
intercepting telegrams.
"But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail
messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the
Internet, and chatting constantly on cell phones, the agency virtually
has the ability to get inside a person’s mind."
The president justifies his activity in part by noting that he
consulted with congressional leaders who agreed with his assertion
that he had the authority to do domestic spying.
Some congressional leaders dispute the president’s version of those
meetings.
All of it is complicated, of course, by the fact that top-secret
matters were under discussion.
We agree with Republican Sen. Arlen Specter’s initial reaction to the
revelation of the government’s eavesdropping on Americans:
Something is wrong and needs to be investigated.
The investigation should include testimony from anyone -- Democrat or
Republican -- who was in on the decision, who acquiesced to it or who
carried it out.
Thirty years ago, Bamford writes, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho)
investigated the National Security Agency "and came away stunned."
He quotes Church saying:
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American
people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the
capability to monitor everything: Telephone conversations, telegrams,
it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide."
Bush tells us that he is protecting us from terrorists.
But without even the minimal protection of the secret Federal
Intelligence Surveillance Court, how do we know what criteria are used
to determine national security threats?
Who’s there to protect against the temptation to use the technology
for political ends?
Exactly what, in these days of secret detentions and rendition
flights, makes for an enemy of the state?
At what point do we begin to call what’s happening a dangerous abuse
of power and demand accountability?
It is time.
_____________________________________________________
Harry
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