Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Swift and the BFAA
So we have White House procurement chief David Safavian pleading guilty…
Orrin Hatch took to the offensive today, saying that the most important thing the government should be doing right now is…(drum roll, please)…banning flag burning. Oh, yes, I agree. Now that Congress voted a pay raise for itself while voting down an increase in the minimum wage, we can move on to the real issues.
Congress held a hearing yesterday to air its grievances against the Bush Administration regarding his use of signing statements, an issue I have covered before. Michelle Boardman, deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, maintained that it is President Bush’s duty to ensure that Congress does not pass an unconstitutional law.
This is the administration’s view in plain language. Please tell me where in the constitution the president has the right to unilaterally determine what laws are constitutional or not.
As I wrote a day or two ago, the Supreme Court is the authority that may overturn laws it deems constitutional, not the president. This is civics 101. This is such a basic concept that high school students understand it. It takes an administration with a stunning amount of gall to come before Congress and tell it that the president has the right to ignore laws he deems inappropriate.
Once again, as with the NSA wiretapping scandal and many others, the administration looks Congress in the eye, pees on the Constitution, and dares it do something about it.
The administration has also been busy slapping the New York Times, which ran a story a few days ago concerning the CIA and Treasury department’s covert operation to monitor bank transactions. The administration was, of course, furious at the disclosure.
The program centers around a “messaging service” called Swift, which transmits communications between thousands of banks worldwide. The crux of the controversy about this program is that because Swift is “based overseas and has offices in the United States, it is governed by European and American laws,” according to the Times. The administration has used broad subpoenas instead of specific court orders to acquire massive amounts of information. This has led to critics voicing concern over the lack of due process.
Of course, the lack of due process in anything this president’s administration does has never troubled republicans and right-wing people in this country. As Glenn Greenwald has put it (as cogently as usual), “What the Times revealed is the lack of oversight and checks on these intelligence-gathering activities, not the existence of the activities themselves, which were already well known.” It had already been made public that the administration was searching Swift for suspicious transactions. What the Times adduced that it was doing so in a broad and legally suspicious way.
But the usual suspects were out in force throwing the word “treason” around at anything that even looked like the New York Times. Brit Hume was flat-out snarling. Bill Kristol was advocating criminal prosecution of the Times. Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) also leveled the treason charge at the Times. Senator Pat Roberts, a man who is Dead to Me, cynically asked Bush’s intelligence agencies to assess whether Bush’s program had been harmed by the disclosure Bush called “disgraceful.”
Glenn cites the Boston Globe for its revealing article about how this administration’s efforts to monitor financial transactions, incuding Swift transactions, have been published and well known.
I can’t help but wonder if the right is really angry over the disclosure of this program because they erroneously think it might hurt terror prosecutions or if they are instead angry because it has revealed yet another instance of the administration seizing heretofore unseen powers in its effort to prosecute suspected terrorists.
And, finally, a tip o’ the hat to Papa Bear Bill O’Reilly, who finds new ways to say something completely indefensible every day of his God forsaken life. This one simply takes the cake. In fact, it is so completely reprehensible, it is such an unambiguous sign of the love of fascism inherent in Bill (and his cohorts in FOX News and right-wing media) that it deserves a truly special award. I am announcing that the first Bitterharvest Facist Adulator Award shall go to none other than Bill O’Reilly. God bless you, Bill.
By the way, check out Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly. Simply hilarious.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 5:09 PM 
