Bush's Life of Constitutional Crime

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02202008.html

February 20, 2008

Bush's Life of Constitutional Crime
Lies and Spies
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

President George W. Bush and his director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, are telling the American people that an unaccountable executive branch is necessary for their protection. Without the Protect America Act, Bush and McConnell claim, the executive branch will not be able to spy on terrorists, and we will all be blown up. Terrorists can only be stopped, Bush says, if Bush has the right to spy on everyone without any oversight by courts.

The fight over the Protect America Act has everything to do with our safety, only not in the way that Bush and McConnell assert.

Bush says the Democrats have put "our country more in danger of an attack" by letting the Protect America Act lapse. This claim is nonsense. The 30 year old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gives the executive branch all the power it needs to spy on terrorists.

The choice between FISA and the Protect America Act has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, at least not from foreign terrorists. Bush and his brownshirts object to FISA, because the law requires Bush to obtain warrants from a FISA court. Warrants mean that Bush is accountable. Bush and his brownshirts argue that accountability is an infringement on the power of the president.

To escape accountability, the Brownshirt Party came up with the Protect America Act. This act eliminates Bush's accountability to judges and gives the telecom companies immunity from the felonies they committed by acquiescing in Bush's illegal spying.

Bush began violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in October 2001 when he spied on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court.

[shraby]

1. That act should have been named

Protect George Bush Act.

[ThomWV]

2. Kick - just so plenty of people get this short article drawn to their attention

[seafan]

3. Paul Craig Roberts' hair is on fire.

Bush's Life of Constitutional Crime

By Paul Craig Roberts
February 20, 2008

.....

Bush pressured telecom companies to break the law in order to enable his illegal spying. In court documents, Joseph P. Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest Communications International, states that his firm was approached more than six months before the September 11, 2001, attacks and asked to participate in a spying operation that Qwest believed to be illegal. When Qwest refused, the Bush administration withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Nacchio himself was subsequently indicted for insider trading, sending the message to all telecom companies to cooperate with the Bush regime or else.

Bush has not been held accountable for the felonies he committed and for leading telecom companies into a life of crime.

As the lawmakers who gave us FISA understood, spying on people without warrants lets a political party collect dirt on its adversaries with which to blackmail them. As Bush illegally spied a long time before word of it got out, blackmail might be the reason the Democrats have ignored their congressional election mandate and have not put a stop to Bush's illegal wars and unconstitutional police state measures.

Perhaps the Democrats have finally caught on that they cannot function as a political party as long as they continue to permit Bush to spy on them. ..... With the Protect America Act, Bush and his brownshirts are trying to establish the independence of the executive branch from statutory law and the Constitution. The FISA law means that the president is accountable to federal judges for warrants. Bush and the brownshirt Republicans are striving to make the president independent of all accountability. The brownshirts insist that the leader knows best and can tolerate no interference from the law, the judiciary, the Congress, or the Constitution, and certainly not from the American people who, the brownshirts tell us, won't be safe unless Bush is very powerful.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison saw it differently. The American people cannot be safe unless the president is accountable and under many restraints.

Pray that the Democrats have caught on that they cannot give the executive branch unaccountable powers to spy and still have grounds on which to refuse the executive branch unaccountable powers elsewhere.

Republicans have used the "war on terror" to create an unaccountable executive.

.....

Meanwhile, Bush, the beneficiary of two stolen elections, has urged Zimbabwe to hold a fair election. America gets away with its hypocrisy because no one in our government has enough shame to blush.

"Blackmail" has crossed many other minds as well, as we observe the abject failure of Congress to rein in this malignant executive.


(bold type added)

[Karenina]

6. Indeed, it IS! And has been for some time.

LOVE that last line!

[lovuian]

4. If they think that they can do whatever they want without

consequences because a law book has a sentence in it

they should learn their lesson
they violated every rule in the law book

Bush has made Justice a pharce

but he will reap what he has sowed

[Senator]

5. If It Is "Blackmail," Then They Are Not Victims But Co-Conspirators

Their oaths of office do not include exceptions for personal, or party/political/electoral, considerations.

Fellow Americans are dying in foreign lands. Even a failed impeachment effort may well reduce the ultimate deathtoll.

Impeachment is our ONLY moral, patriotic option.

--

[lonestarnot]

7. Lack of standing we... We can't stand up w/o the Constitution and it's just a gd piece of paper.

[kenfrequed]

8. Is it impeachment yet?

Seriously people, have we had enough yet?

19% approval. Nineteen Friggin Percent!!!!!