NSA Wiretapping

This should be the question that puts Republican's in a pretty pickle:

Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

So how much money are we spending on these wiretaps? Also if they are so important to the security of this country they why does the phone companies cut off so easily, or the FBI not pay? This really has a smell of corporate welfare from the party of *cough bullshit* "ffiscal responsibility" to me.

It is time for a full criminal hearing into the Bush White House. Here is the latest revelation on the NSA wiretapping:

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the documents, but Nacchio's lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans' phone records.

In the court filings disclosed this week, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's refusal to take part in that program led the government to cancel a separate, lucrative contract with the NSA in retribution. He is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper.

(emphasis added)

Think Progress reminds us of this argument for the spying:

After September the 11th, I vowed to the American people that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack. As part of this effort, I authorized the National Security Agency to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.

But that statement has now passed into the vault of constant lies told by this President.

Putting this into the perspective of time, Bush took office on January 20, 2001. Six months before 9/11 would be 3/11. That means less than two months after taking office, this White House was working on violating the rights of Americans. Also - this tapping did nothing to stop the 9/11 attacks.

Is Nancy Pelosi still thinking about giving Bush everything he wants on FISA? If so then she is as guilty as Bush when it comes to shredding the Constitution. Bush wants this new FISA? Fine - time for full blown Congressional inquiries into the program. No executive privilege. We need full Watergate style hearings now.

Now things are starting to move in the right direction:

Two attorneys representing claimants in a lawsuit over wiretapping by the National Security Agency will subpoena the White House today, RAW STORY has learned.

Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, who represent hundreds of plaintiffs in lawsuits against Verizon, AT&T, and the US Government, will announnce today that they are serving both the Bush administration and Verizon with subpoenas.

The announcement is due to arrive at 4:30 PM, outside of Verizon headquarters in New York, RAW STORY has confirmed.

The subpoenas come on the heels of two federal court decisions that were seen as blows to the Bush Administration warrantless spying program.

This will really get the apologists out there screaming and crying. It will be even more interesting if the courts uphold the subpoenas. You can bet the right will be calling for more ways to due away with the "judicial activists".

Sincerely, the Judicial branch:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

"Plaintiffs have prevailed, and the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution," Taylor wrote in her 43-page opinion.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers who say the program has made it difficult for them to do their jobs. They believe many of their overseas contacts are likely targets of the program, which involves secretly listening to conversations between people in the U.S. and people in other countries.

The government argued that the program is well within the president's authority, but said proving that would require revealing state secrets.

The ACLU said the state-secrets argument was irrelevant because the Bush administration already had publicly revealed enough information about the program for Taylor to rule.

I give it about another 20 minutes before the wingnuts are hitting the airwaves saying this is the reason people try to murder judges or that this is a violation of Bush's constitutional rights. These are the people who also support living in a dictatorship, since they have no respect for a balance of powers.

The Bush Administration is still working hard to get rid of leakers. The latest is their subpoena of Russell Tice, a former NSA employee who has testified to Congress about the NSA wiretapping.

NSA WHISTLEBLOWER IS SUBPOENAED TO TESTIFY BEFORE FEDERAL GRAND JURY

Government Begins its Witch Hunt Targeting Whistleblowers

On Wednesday, July 26, Russell Tice, former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst and a member of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), was approached outside his home by two FBI agents who served him with a subpoena to testify in front of a federal grand jury. NSWBC has obtained a copy of the subpoena issued for Mr. Tice’s testimony and is releasing it to the public for the first time. The subpoena directs Mr. Tice to appear before the jury on August 2, 2006 at 1:00 p.m. in the Eastern District of Virginia. Mr. Tice “will be asked to testify and answer questions concerning possible violations of federal criminal law." [To view the subpoena click here].

This brings into light a new and interesting development in the NSA wiretapping scandal:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that President Bush personally blocked Justice Department lawyers from pursuing an internal probe of the warrantless eavesdropping program that monitors Americans' international calls and e-mails when terrorism is suspected.

The department's Office of Professional Responsibility announced earlier this year it could not pursue an investigation into the role of Justice lawyers in crafting the program, under which the National Security Agency intercepts some telephone calls and e-mail without court approval.

At the time, the office said it could not obtain security clearance to examine the classified program.

Under sharp questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, Gonzales said that Bush would not grant the access needed to allow the probe to move forward.

"It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" asked Specter, R-Pa.

"The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales told the committee hearing, during which he was strongly criticized on a range of national security issues by Specter and Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy , the panel's senior Democrat.

This is proof positive that Bush believes he is exempt from following the laws of this country. It also gives Senate a perfect reason to call him in and make him testify about what happened. Question number one should be - "What is your reasoning to circumvent the necessities of our democracy in checks and balances".

Considering the fact a federal judge recently ruled that the FBI had every right to enter the office of a Congressman in a legal search, the same must be held applicable to the President of the United States. We have three equal branches of government that are suppose to be balanced. Why is it that Bush can offset the balance in his favor? The Constitution does not give him that power nor any other ruling in the history of this country. It is time for him to be held accountable for his actions.

This just in from Raw Story:

BREAKING: The House Judiciary Committee unexpectedly passed a Democratic resolution calling on the Justice Department to turn over all documents relating to information collected under the NSA wiretap program and any and all agreements with telephone service providers.

The measure was passed by a voice vote Wednesday morning with support of Republican Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

Sensenbrenner told the Committee he would bring the measure to the full House floor for a vote if the Justice Department did not comply with his earlier requests for information about the program.

Looks like Republicans in the House are starting to worry about elections and figure they better start doing their jobs.

Sounds like that pussy Specter is bowing down to the big old bully called Dick Cheney now:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has proposed legislation that would give President Bush the option of seeking a warrant from a special court for an electronic surveillance program such as the one being conducted by the National Security Agency.

Sen. Arlen Specter's approach modifies his earlier position that the NSA eavesdropping program, which targets international telephone calls and e-mails in which one party is suspected of links to terrorists, must be subject to supervision by the secret court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The new proposal specifies that it cannot "be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to gather foreign intelligence information or monitor the activities and communications of any person reasonably believed to be associated with a foreign enemy of the United States."

Also notice how the WaPo is downplaying the NSA surveillance in this article. They are saying that is intercepts calls that are "international". Of course we have all been told this is not the case and it does target in on domestic calls also. Nice bow down there WaPo. Apparently the pussies there also got scared of big bad Dick.

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent assessment of this latest act of pandering by Specter.

The little whores that are the Republican leadership have bowed down yet again:

Phone company executives won't be grilled by a Senate panel anytime soon about their roles in the Bush administration's eavesdropping program.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Tuesday he will hold off subpoenaing the telecommunications chiefs while he works with the White House on his legislation that would ask a secretive federal court to review the constitutionality of Bush's surveillance operations.

Democrats accused Specter of abdicating Congress' oversight responsibilities.

"Why don't we just recess for the rest of the year?" the committee's top Democrat, Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont, asked sarcastically. "Vice President Cheney will just tell the nation what laws we'll have."

Bush has acknowledged that the National Security Agency monitored — without court approval — the communications of terror suspects when one person was in the United States and another was overseas. Until Bush ordered the operations shortly after 9/11, a judge had to sign off on such monitoring.

So arguing about discriminating against the gay community is an agenda item but our civil liberties aren't? More proof these imperialistic, useless, do nothing, America hating Republicans need to be kicked out of Congress and out of the country!

Here are some choice quotes from this New York Times article today about the Hayden hearings and the NSA program:

"It would be very difficult to have a confirmation hearing for General Hayden when half the committee knows what he's been doing and the other half hasn't," said Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri.

[...]

"This is something that should have happened, frankly, long before now," said Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a Republican of Maine who serves on the Intelligence Committee. "Congress should be an ally in the war on terror, not an adversary."

[...]

Asked if Wednesday's session might prompt Democrats to tamp down their questions during Thursday's confirmation hearing, Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said: "I hope it does. It should."

Mr. Lott was among a handful of committee members previously briefed on the program. But he said: "I've never been comfortable with this administration's reluctance to give us proper briefings."

The confirmation hearings are going on now. The article also points out that John Rockefeller it recovering from major back surgery so Carl Levin is acting as the ranking Democrat on the committee. John says this is a good thing and I feel the same. Levin is definitely a man to stick by his guns and this is one instance where we really need that.

Now let's head over to the House. Things are even heating up there, but this time it is over Bush's plan on dealing with immigration:

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, who has pushed a tough border security bill through the House, accused President Bush on Wednesday of abandoning the legislation after asking for many of its provisions.

"He basically turned his back on provisions of the House-passed bill, a lot of which we were requested to put in the bill by the White House," Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., angrily told reporters in a conference call. "That was last fall when we were drafting the bill, and now the president appears not to be interested in it at all."

Sensenbrenner chairs the House Judiciary Committee and would be the House's chief negotiator on any final immigration package for Bush's signature. He said it was the White House that had requested two controversial felony provisions in the bill the House passed last winter.

Now when you got James "take his gavel and run" Sensenbrenner complaining about the White House then there is problems. Of course Sensenbrenner's plan is the harsh one which caused all the protests so if we had to pick between the two we might actually have to go with Bush on this one.

But the article does get better when it talks about the meeting Karl Rove held with House Republicans:

Sensenbrenner did not attend a closed-door meeting between Bush political adviser Karl Rove and House Republicans, but said that some members complained to him that Rove didn't stay around for many questions or hear what lawmakers had to say.

"The overwhelming majority of those that I talked to who were at the conference believe that he dissed the House Republicans," Sensenbrenner said.

Now if this comes as a shock to Sensenbrenner or anyone else in Congress then they have been asleep for the past 5 years. Bush DOES NOT "confer" with people - he tells people. Rove is the same way. Considering Bush has decided to add "signing addendums" to 750+ bills that have passed the Republican controlled Congress is proof enough he would rather break the law than do what they want.

Still, it looks like the Republican party is falling apart from the inside out even more now and this is something I will love to sit back and watch.

We hear that the administration "wants to be more upfront with the American people" yet Tony Snow is proving that false:

QUESTION: In his news conference with John Howard, was the president giving kind of a backhanded confirmation of the stories that the NSA is compiling telephone lists?

SNOW: No, he wasn’t. If you go back and listen to the answer he gave you, he was talking about foreign-to-domestic calls. The allegations in the USA Today piece, which we will neither confirm or deny, are of a different nature. So, no, he was not giving a backhanded confirmation.

(h/t Think Progress)

So how is it being upfront by not confirming or denying the report? Bush said today that they only intercept foreign calls or calls that could be tracked to al Qaeda. So either the USA today report is false or there are tens of millions of people in this country that are tied to al Qaeda. Which is it Mr. President? Be "upfront" with the American people.

It has gone way to far now:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

I got only one thing to say - JAIL. Every single one of them need sent to prison for crimes against the Constitution of the United States. We have completed the transition to becoming a police state.

USA Today/Gallup has a new poll out showing a majority of Americans disapprove of the NSA phone collection and an even larger majority want hearings. Atrios has all the details on it. This shows us now that America is not pleased and should show the Washington Post that you can not run a poll on the same day as a story breaks and have it done in a single day while expecting accurate results.

There have been numerous rumours over the past several months that vice-President Dick Cheney would be out of office in the near future. Some went on pure speculation, while others waged their bets on an accumulation of events surrounding Cheney.

It is time to look at this possiblity again. Not going through the previous reasons (ie. shooting a man in the face), but focusing on the news over the past 24 hours.

First off we find out that Cheney was a big push for domestic spying in the country:

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet fully clear.

This comes as no shock. Cheney has always been a big opponent of a more powerful Presidency. He envisions that the President should share the same power as a king or dictator and views things like balance of power or right of citizens as a nuisance.

Now while the NSA story has been the front pager of the past week, we still have the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation going on. Now we have a new revelation in that investigation that brings Cheney back to center stage:

The role of Vice President Dick Cheney in the criminal case stemming from the outing of White House critic Joseph Wilson's CIA wife is likely to get fresh attention as a result of newly disclosed notes showing that Cheney personally asked whether Wilson had been sent by his wife on a "junket" to Africa.

Cheney's notes, written on the margins of a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed column by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, were included as part of a filing Friday night by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the perjury and obstruction case against ex-Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The notes, Fitzgerald said in his filing, show that Cheney and Libby were "acutely focused" on the Wilson column and on rebutting his criticisms of the White House's handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence. In the column, which created a firestorm after its publication, Wilson wrote that he had been dispatched by the CIA without pay to Niger in February, 2002 to investigate an intelligence report that Iraq was seeking uranium from the African country for a nuclear bomb. Wilson said he was told Cheney had asked about the intelligence, but the White House subsequently ignored his findings debunking the Niger claims.

The NSA thing is getting bigger than anyone could every imagine:

A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.

In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.

"This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press.

All of the sudden that movie "Enemy of the State" seems to be coming to life.

Meanwhile Verizon is now being sued for possible violations of their privacy policy:

Two New Jersey public interest lawyers sued Verizon Communications Inc. for $5 billion Friday, claiming the phone carrier violated privacy laws by turning over phone records to the National Security Agency for a secret government surveillance program.

Attorneys Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer filed the lawsuit Friday afternoon in federal district court in Manhattan, where Verizon is headquartered.

The lawsuit asks the court to stop Verizon from turning over any more records to the NSA without a warrant or consent of the subscriber.