Talking Points Tank

[rodeodance]

i got as an email.



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Progress Report: Speaking Softly, Carrying No Sticks
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 11:17:44 -0500 (EST)
From: American Progress Action Fund <[e-mail]>
To: xxxx

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Talking Points Tank
"On this particular Martin Luther King Day," former Vice President Al Gore said yesterday, "it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped - one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period." Gore used a large portion of his speech to the American Constitution Society and Liberty Coalition to criticize President Bush's eavesdropping program. "he American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power," Gore said. Since the New York Times broke the story about the program, the administration has tried to win the public to their side by saying the wiretapping had "saved thousands of lives" and was "very limited in nature." They have also argued that the Authorization for Use of Force after 9/11 "gave the president the right to conduct the domestic surveillance." None of the administration's argument are supported by the facts.

TALKING POINT #1 - NSA EAVESDROPPING KEY TO THWARTING TERRORIST ATTACKS: "This authorization is a vital tool in our war against the terrorists," Bush said in December. "It is critical to saving American lives." Vice President Cheney claimed wiretapping Americans had "saved thousands of lives." "It is, I'm convinced, one of the reasons we haven't been attacked in the past four years," he added. But a report in today's New York Times debunks the administration's claim that the program is vital to America's national security. In fact, the flood of "unfiltered information" from the NSA program "was swamping investigators" in the months after 9/11. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," a former F.B.I. official said. "The information was so thin," one prosecutor said, "and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up." Additionally, "some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy."

TALKING POINT #2 - A PROGRAM "VERY LIMITED IN NATURE": "The NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers, called from the outside of the United States and of known al Qaeda or affiliate people," Bush has said. "bviously I had to make the difficult decision between balancing civil liberties and, on a limited basis -- and I mean limited basis -- try to find out the intention of the enemy." "It is very limited in nature," Scott McClellan claimed. The truth is that after 9/11, the "stream" of information from the NSA to the FBI "soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month." Investigators were overwhelmed by the amount of information pouring into their offices. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration," said one former FBI official. Today's revelations support a previous New York Times report that found the "volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged." NSA whistleblower Russell Tice recently told ABC News "the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions."

TALKING POINT #3 - 9/11 AUTHORIZATION ALLOWED PRESIDENT TO LISTEN IN ON AMERICANS: Gonzales has argued that along with the President's role as Commander-in-Chief under Article 2 of the Constitution, the "authorization to use force, which was passed by the Congress in the days following September 11th, constitutes that other authorization...to engage in this kind of signals intelligence." Few dispassionate legal observers agree with this creative argument. As Gore pointed out yesterday, members of both parties "made statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically." Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) said yesterday that his initial thoughts are that Bush "didn't have the authority under the resolution authorizing the use of force." Added Specter: "The President has to follow the Constitution." In addition, the Administration’s legal arguments have been comprehensively refuted, in a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, by a distinguished group of former government officials, by a former General Counsel of the CIA, and by a former Department of Defense official.

TALKING POINT #4 - BLAME CLINTON: Gonzales is continuing the right-wing misinformation campaign about President Clinton's alleged use of warrantless searches. Some on the right have claimed Clinton "bypassed FISA by extending warrantless searches to include physical searches." Yet even the National Review's Byron York said, "Some people, for example, have said that Bill Clinton signed an executive order authorizing such surveillance; he did not." While reflexively attacking the messenger, Gonzales pushed this false assertion about Clinton as "inconsistent with what the former vice president was saying." "We used the law," Clinton said, contrasting his administration with Bush's. "We either went there (to the FISA court) and asked for the approval or, if there was an emergency and we had to do it beforehand, then we filed within three days afterward and gave them a chance to second guess it, because I thought it was a good — I think in the country you always have to try to balance these things out, so that's what we did."