FISA Expansion
Apparently the Administration is agitating to get the rules for the wiretapping court expanded… again. Greenwald today notes the inaccuracies in a recent op-ed by the Director of National Intelligence when he suggests that FISA hasn’t been upgraded since it was enacted 30 years ago. It has been recently updated, in fact, and Greenwald has the quotes where Bush expressly mentions this.
He (Greenwald not Bush - you can read the Bush quotes for yourself) goes on to say:
And beyond McConnell’s plainly false Op-Ed, the lies told by the Bush administration on the issue of eavesdropping have no equal. In light of the revelations from James Comey, just re-visit the statements from Alberto Gonzales in December 2005 — five days before the New York Times revealed the warrantless eavesdropping program — in which he assured his audience: “All wiretaps must be authorized by a federal judge.” That is the same Alberto Gonzales who barged into John Ashcroft’s hospital room to coerce his consent to their ongoing warrantless eavesdropping activities.
Worse, the President himself — literally one month after the dispute with Comey and Ashcroft over warrantless eavesdropping — one month — ran around the country as part of his re-election campaign insisting that the only eavesdropping done by the government was one done with warrants:
Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.
The same President who ordered warrantless eavesdropping — and who almost had the entire top level of the DOJ resign as a result — told Americans weeks later that the Government only eavesdrops with warrants. To call that “lying” is to understate the case. It really is to our great discredit that we have acquiesced to this level of presidential deceit.
McConnell’s Op-Ed demonstrates that this level of deceit with regard to eavesdropping continues unabated. The notion that the administration would demand, and that Congress would entertain, further expansions of FISA under these circumstances is just staggering. [emphasis in original]
Sigh.
On a good note, nice op-ed from Barack Obama in the Trib today. He talks about the problems with ‘bundling’ - a technique used by lobbyists to get around the donations caps for politicians.
Sphere: Related ContentTo set an example in the 2008 presidential election, I am refusing to accept campaign contributions from registered lobbyists, political-action committees, and I won’t take contributions bundled by lobbyists. I’m also reporting any contributions that are bundled — whether it’s from a small-town doctor or a chief executive officer.
