19 December 2005 (# 14)
Undoubtedly you’ve been asking yourself that question, as have many of us. In my letter to you on December 18, 2005, I noted that in 2002, the FISA Court approved every request – 1228 of them.
So, why would Mr. Bush subvert the efficient and proven FISA process?
David Sirota has asked them same question and has an interesting perspective that he blogged at
Huffington Post:… the President has tried to deflect attention by repeatedly saying he needed to order these operations to protect Americans. Fine –
but it still doesn't answer the real question. If the surveillance operations he ordered were so crucial and so important to protecting our country, how come he didn't get a warrant? Surely something so critical to our security would have easily elicited a warrant from a FISA court already inclined to issue warrants in the first place, right?
And that gets us right back to the most important question:
why would the President deliberately circumvent a court that was already wholly inclined to grant him domestic surveillance warrants?
The answer is obvious, though as yet largely unstated in the mainstream media:
because the President was likely ordering surveillance operations that were so outrageous, so unrelated to the War on Terror, and, to put it in Constitutional terms, so "unreasonable" that even a FISA court would not have granted them.Link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/the-most-important-questi_b_12499.htmlJust how is that a student at Dartmouth doing a term paper on Mao earns a visit from Homeland Security officers because he requested a copy of the “Little Red Book” from the library (
http://tinyurl.com/az65m), Gov. Dean? What about, as Mr. Sirota also notes, the fact that:
Two years ago, the New York Times reported that the administration is using the FBI to "collect extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators." Then, just a few months ago, the Times reported that the FBI "has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups." And just this past week, NBC News obtained a 400-page Pentagon document outlining the Bush administration's surveillance of anti-war peace groups. The report noted that the administration had monitored 1,500 different events (aka. anti-war protests) in just a 10-month period.
Link as above.
Who authorized all that activity? Are these instances when Mr. Bush and his minions did not seek FISA Court approval? Are these, and other instances of FISA and 4th Amendment violations the reason why the White House and John Bolton refused to answer the Congress on their requests for information regarding Bolton’s access to and use of NSA intercepts of communications among US citizens?
On May 25, 2005,
Newsweek published an article entitled
“Last-Minute Letter” that contained the following:
During the confirmation hearings of John Bolton as the U.S. representative to the United Nations, it came to light that the NSA had freely revealed intercepted conversations of U.S. citizens to Bolton while he served at the State Department …
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In his letter to the Foreign Relations Committee, Rockefeller indicated that he believes Bolton's use of the uncensored NSA information to congratulate a State Department official was "not in keeping" with Bolton's declaration to the NSA that he only wanted the censored information so he could better understand the meaning of the original intelligence report. Two congressional officials involved in Senate investigations of Bolton said that
the underlying argument now being made by Bolton's critics was that if he was willing to ignore NSA rules and use uncensored NSA intercept information on Americans to congratulate someone, he might be equally willing to use similar top-secret information to undermine the work of a bureaucratic rival.Link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7983335/site/newsweekIn an earlier
Newsweek report by Mark Hosenball entitled
“Spying: Giving Out U.S. Names” we find something of considerable importance about what Bolton may have been doing and why Bush would not want the FISA court in the loop:
According to information obtained by NEWSWEEK, since January 2004 NSA received—and fulfilled—between 3,000 and 3, 500 requests from other agencies
to supply the names of U.S. citizens and officials (and citizens of other countries that help NSA eavesdrop around the world, including Britain, Canada and Australia) that initially were deleted from raw intercept reports.
Sources say the number of names disclosed by NSA to other agencies during this period is more than 10,000. About one third of such disclosures were made to officials at the policymaking level; most of the rest were disclosed to other intel agencies and, perhaps surprisingly,
only a small proportion to law-enforcement agencies.Link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7614681/site/newsweekGov. Dean, if it was important to know the names of these US citizens for reasons of terror and other threats to our National Security, then why were only a few disclosures to law-enforcement agencies made? Just who are these US citizens and what use was made of the information gathered about them and, most importantly, what did Bolton, Bush, and other members of Bush’s administration do with all that information?
Gov. Dean, we have a self-confessed felon and self-confessed violator of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America in the White House. He and every minion who participated in these crimes against US citizens must be removed from their current positions and prosecuted.
Impeachment of Bush and Cheney is no longer a matter of who controls the Congress. Articles of Impeachment must be used as
the "America, Or Not?" litmus test of 2006 by which we determine those Members of Congress who uphold the law and defend the Constitution and those Members who do not.
We need to apply that
"America, Or Not?" litmus test irrespective of it being an election year.
It is NOT a political stunt.
It is a diligent, robust mechanism by which we enable every American to evaluate how each Member of Congress adheres to the rule of law and their Oath of Office.
Thank you for your continued leadership,
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