Monday, February 06, 2006
Wiretapping Hearings
The hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the warrantless wiretapping have begun.
What a sad hearing it was. The esteemed senators couldn’t even muster the courage to put the attorney general under oath, apparently to allow him to lie at will without any troublesome perjury charges. Remember this same senate wouldn’t put oil executives under oath either, and as we later found out those same executive lied to congress and the American people by denying they ever met with Dick Cheney to form our nation’s energy policy.
While Arlen Specter and the democrats on the committee were skeptical of the administration’s defense the republicans were buying it. This does not bode well for the hearings, which are shaping up to be a weak investigation at best. As I heard on the Ed Schultz Show today, I wonder if Bill Frist will pull Specter’s chairmanship.
The FBI, according to a recent New York Times article, were so deluged with tips from the NSA wiretapping program that they had trouble dealing with all of them. Essentially every one of them turned out to be a bad tip. Doesn’t that undermine the administration’s assertion that they are only spying on Al Qaeda? Apparently there are just thousands of Al Qaeda members who are doing nothing at all as far as the FBI can tell.
This entire argument strike me, and others, as being incredibly ridiculous. FISA, a law passed in 1978 to specifically govern these kinds of intercepts after FBI and NSA abuses in the Vietnam War Era, was ignored. This exact same debate was held in the Ford Era. Incidentally, Cheney was Ford’s Chief of Staff and Rumsfeld was a deputy.
This administration is trying to fight a war they lost in 1978. In doing so they broke the law. Congressional republicans trying to downplay, ignore, or excuse these actions are abetting criminals.
In previous administrations there were multiple congressional hearings on the matter and independent investigators. Today we have just one committee hearing arguments in a congress dominated by thralls to the White House. Justice will not be served in this setting.
It will be similarly difficult for lawsuits to win, as the plaintiffs will have to prove that they were harmed by the spying. This would require the White House to release records of who was spied on. We’ll see if anything like that happens.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 3:45 PM 
