Rick Hohensee wrote:

In article <6uurt1t6aklol7o5rmok59mv7lm85i5su0@4ax.com>,
Harry Hope <rivrvu@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

We believe that the president's decision violated the law and exceeded
his powers as president.

I believe this is beneath debate and the Republicons that want to debate
this are prima-facie corrupt.

I agree. There is no need to debate an obvious violation of the law.
Impeachment proceedings should begin immediately.

From a Washington Post editorial, 1/29/06:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/29/AR2006012900714.html


Bad Targeting

IT'S STILL NOT known which or how many Americans have been secretly
targeted by the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance
operations in the past several years, or whether abuses occurred.

But we do know that a parallel clandestine operation by the Pentagon
to collect intelligence about domestic threats gathered and stored
information on innocent citizens who never should have been watched.

The story is instructive and alarming.

A database managed by a secretive Pentagon intelligence agency called
Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, was found last month to
contain reports on at least four dozen antiwar meetings or protests,
many of them on college campuses.

Ten peace activists who handed out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
outside Halliburton's headquarters in Houston in June 2004 were
reported as a national security threat.

So were people who assembled at a Quaker meeting house in Lake Worth,
Fla., or protested military recruiters at sites such as New York
University, the State University of New York and campuses of the
University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Cruz.

The protesters were written up under a Pentagon program called Talon,
which is supposed to collect raw data on threats to defense facilities
in the United States.

CIFA, an agency created just under four years ago that now includes
nine directorates and more than 1,000 employees, is charged with
working to prevent terrorist attacks.

Instead, hidden from public and congressional scrutiny, it has
repeated the same abuses once committed against war protesters and
civil rights activists of the 1960s.

In addition to compiling information on Americans who were peaceful
political dissenters rather than terrorists, the agency retained
reports in its database well beyond a 90-day limit -- a standard
adopted in response to the Vietnam-era excesses.

The activity came to light only because of aggressive reporting by,
among others, The Post's Walter Pincus, Newsweek and NBC News, which
obtained a list of more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" included in
the CIFA-managed database.

After the improprieties were made public, Pentagon spokesmen
acknowledged that mistakes had been made, and they promised to clean
up the database and give Defense Department intelligence personnel a
refresher course on the regulations.

Ensuring that the corrective action takes place -- and that further
steps are taken to prevent intelligence-gathering on domestic
political activity -- ought to be the job of the congressional
intelligence and armed-services committees, which have yet to hold a
hearing to review CIFA or its activities.

The larger lesson is that domestic intelligence operations by
security-conscious government agencies, even when necessary and
well-intentioned, can easily get out of hand and violate the
fundamental rights of Americans.

After the abuses of the 1960s and '70s, Congress passed the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act precisely to ensure that there would be
an independent monitor, in the form of a secret court, on the
government's domestic surveillance.

That is the law that President Bush bypassed in authorizing the NSA to
monitor the communications of Americans.

We believe that the president's decision violated the law and exceeded
his powers as president.

_____________________________________________________________

Harry

Rick Hohensee wrote:

In article <6uurt1t6aklol7o5rmok59mv7lm85i5su0@4ax.com>,
Harry Hope <rivrvu@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

We believe that the president's decision violated the law and exceeded
his powers as president.

I believe this is beneath debate and the Republicons that want to debate
this are prima-facie corrupt.

Because, of course, any disagreement with the opinions your
masters gave you is sure sign of pure evil.

--
Walt Smith
Firelock on DALNet