MB Civic

Reclaiming the Issues: “Why Is Bush Spying on Democrats?!?”
By Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams

Monday 10 July 2006

Every time Democrats and progressives speak out about George W. Bush’s spying on Americans without mentioning that he may also be spying on Democrats, they’re playing into Karl Rove’s “National Security Frame” and actually strengthening Republican electoral chances in November.

To short-circuit this, Democrats need to invoke the ghost of Richard Nixon.

If they don’t, even Pete Hoekstra’s new revelations that there are even more as-yet-unreported secret spying programs that Bush has been hiding from Congress will be used by Rove to say to average voters, “See? We’re really looking out for you!”

The Bush administration doesn’t deny it has been spying on Americans – they brag about it. They’re listening to our phone calls, reading our emails, and looking at our bank transactions. They’re gathering databases about our medical records, what we charge on our credit cards, and where we travel.

When Democrats point out that this is illegal without a court order, Rove simply floods the airwaves with Republicans who say, “We’re doing it to protect you!”

The average American doesn’t think this all the way through, and the Rovian frame seems like pretty commonsensical. In fact, it’s at the heart of the right-wing rant.

For example, when some unfortunate and nearly illiterate idiots talked about attacking New York last week, the Bushies and the corporate press trumpeted the sting operation that led to these clueless wannabees’ arrest as a “triumph in the war on terror!” Limbaugh intoned sternly that liberals would have prevented the United States from discovering such criminals, and all over America dittoheads nodded in agreement.

What’s been entirely lost in the discussion about Bush administration spying is why so much of what Bush is doing is illegal.

And that takes us back to Richard Nixon, the last Republican to have an active domestic spying program without judicial or bipartisan congressional oversight. The one whose Bush-like abuses led to the FISA and other, similar laws.

Nixon said he was spying on Americans to keep us safe from communists. We were in the middle of a war, after all. The Soviets were out to get us (and armed with real weapons of mass destruction), and the North Vietnamese weren’t far behind. He had to spy on Americans, he said, to protect the liberties of Americans.

Problem was, he had turned the tool of domestic surveillance against his political enemies (and those who weren’t, like journalist Daniel Schorr, but whom he believed were). Nixon was spying on Democrats, and trying to cover it with the fig leaf of “national security.”

Set aside all the highbrow talk about separation of powers and intent of the Founders, and this is what the FISA and other, similar, laws boil down to – stopping the president from spying on his political opponents. To prevent political abuse, he has to check in with a judge or a congressional committee before using our super-spies.

Imagine if Bill Clinton had been found to have a domestic spying program going on – even after the bombing of Oklahoma City and the first World Trade Center hit. Republicans would have been foaming at the mouth. “What’s he hiding?! It must be that he’s spying on us!!”

Yet Democrats seem unwilling to even raise the possibility of Bush administration political espionage, and the compliant corporate press hasn’t raised a peep. Even though there’s a precedent for Republicans – and, more recently, Bush Republicans – spying on Democrats.

Remember November of 2003? Using naked political espionage, Bush Republicans used intelligence gained in an illegal spying operation to outflank Democrats.

Republicans in the Senate – including a staffer for Republican Senator Orrin Hatch – hacked into the computers of several Senate Democrats, including Ted Kennedy and Dick Durbin. Reading Kennedy’s and Durbin’s correspondence, the Republican operatives discovered the strategy the Democrats intended to use to attack Republican high court nominees. They leaked fifteen bits of Kennedy’s discussions to The Wall Street Journal and other Republican-friendly sources, who used the information to successfully trash and thwart the Democratic plans.

As the story began to unfold several months later, the headline from The New York Times on February 10, 2004, read: “Democrats Suggest Inquiry Points to Wider Spying by G.O.P.”

But it stopped there, because Republicans control the Senate. Despite loud Democratic objections, Bill Frist has never allowed a serious investigation by the Senate’s members into the data theft – even though these Republican burglars were actually more competent than those busted at Watergate.

Americans should demand that the Bush administration follow the law and gain court orders and/or serious congressional oversight for their domestic spying, because we don’t want America to become a gulag-nation where average citizens are afraid to speak out about political issues, or where opposition politicians are routinely neutralized by such spying.

And the easy way for Democrats to drive that point home – and to snatch from the hands of Rove the “we’re protecting you” torch he bears every time another Bush spy scheme is unveiled – is to start yelling: “I want to know why Bush, Gonzales, and Negroponte are spying on Democrats!?!”

When Democrats stop giving Bush a pass on this and start pointing out that Republicans from Nixon in 1972 to Orrin Hatch in 2003 have been caught spying on Democrats, the average American will get the reason for congressional and judicial oversight.

Inside-the-Beltway Democratic strategists wrongly take it for granted that Americans understand the potential consequences of unrestrained presidential spying activities. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t give it a second thought.

But they will when Democrats begin to demand – loudly – to know which Democrats, Democratic Party donors, and people who vote for Democrats have been spied on.

When did Bush use the voter databases that Republican politicians like Jeb Bush and Ken Blackwell have compiled to compare the bank accounts, phone records, and doctor’s records of people who vote as Democrats?

When did Bush use his illegal NSA wiretaps to listen in on Democratic Party political strategy sessions?

When did Bush begin snooping into the private lives of average people who committed the crime of registering as Democrats?

What information has he gathered by reading our emails? What is he doing with it? Who’s on his “enemies list”?

Not only is this the only way to neutralize Rove’s “we’re doing it to protect you” frame, there’s also a reasonable possibility that Bush actually is using his illegal domestic spying programs to target everybody from elected Democrats to average voters.

His administration and party have already been busted by the BBC for targeting Democratic voters in Florida and Ohio to strip them of their right to vote; have already been convicted in Federal Court of jamming Democratic phone banks on election day; have already been outed for targeting groups like the Raging Grannies and The League of Women Voters for “terrorist” surveillance.

Who was spied on first? Probably every Democratic politician in America. (We know they got Kennedy and Durban!)

Who was spied on after that? Probably every journalist and liberal author, columnist, and progressive talk show host in America.

Who will be spied on next? Probably you.

Pass it on and raise some hell. Why is Bush spying on Democrats?

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network and Sirius. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books include “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,” “Unequal Protection,” “We The People: A Call To Take Back America,” “What Would Jefferson Do?” and “Ultimate Sacrifice.” His next book, due out this autumn, is “Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It.”

Go to Original

Domestic Spying Program Faces First Challenge
By Henry Weinstein
The Los Angeles Times

Tuesday 11 July 2006

A veteran judge will rule on the legality of the NSA’s warrantless anti-terror surveillance. Greenpeace is among the petitioners.

Detroit – An attempt to halt the National Security Agency’s controversial domestic surveillance program generated intense legal debate Monday before a veteran federal judge, with opponents branding it a threat to American citizens and defenders contending it is legal and essential to national security.

The case is the first major legal challenge to the warrantless wiretapping program, with the Justice Department squaring off against lawyers representing several groups and individuals that seek to have the program declared unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who is expected to be the first to rule on the issue, asked only one question during the hearing and gave no indication of how she would rule or when. It was the second hearing she has held within a month on the complex legal issues surrounding the program.

Taylor has scheduled no further hearings, and told the lawyers she would take the case “under advisement,” meaning that she would weigh their arguments and issue a ruling.

After the program was revealed by the New York Times, the government admitted that it had launched a domestic wiretapping initiative after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. NSA personnel listen in on phone calls and obtain e-mails into and out of the U.S. involving suspected terrorist affiliates. The program bypasses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, created after government spying abuses in the 1970s, that approves search and wiretapping warrants in some intelligence and terrorismrelated investigations.

In January, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Greenpeace and several individuals, who expressed fear that the government was spying on them, filed a lawsuit here challenging the program. The first hearing before Taylor was June 12.

Similar suits are pending in federal courts in New York, Oregon and Texas but have had no major hearings, and Taylor’s decision could be influential as other jurists consider the issue.

The ACLU filed the suit in Detroit in part because the area has a large Muslim population. One of the plaintiffs Nazih Hassan, of nearby Ypsilanti, is a member of the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations and has said he fears he has been a target of eavesdropping because he frequently talks with Muslims abroad.

Since the suit was filed, the government has attempted to allay concerns of the area’s Arab Americans. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former NSA chief who is now CIA director, has said the program is narrowly tailored toward Al Qaeda and “is not a drift net over Dearborn” or other towns with large Muslim communities.

In court Monday, Justice Department attorney Anthony J. Coppolino urged Taylor, a longtime judge appointed to the federal bench by President Carter, to throw out the case on two grounds. None of the plaintiffs had shown that they had suffered injury and therefore they had no legal standing to sue, he said, and that if Taylor decided the plaintiffs had standing, the case still should be dismissed because of the “state secrets” doctrine.

The “state secrets” privilege, laid out in a Supreme Court decision in 1953, prohibits disclosure of information in legal proceedings when there is “a reasonable danger” that the evidence would “expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged.”

That is clearly the issue in this instance, Coppolino said, because the case involves a challenge to an “ongoing program” of surveillance against Al Qaeda that is integral to the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

He said President Bush had the authority to launch the program after Sept. 11 because of his inherent authority and because of the authorization for use of military force issued by Congress after those attacks.

Because of the program’s nature, Coppolino said, the government cannot disclose whether it is conducting surveillance on any of the plaintiffs, including the American-Islamic group; James Bamford, author of two books on the NSA; or Noel Saleh, a Detroit lawyer frequently involved in civil liberties cases. Coppolino said that if the government revealed whether it was or was not spying on a particular individual or group it could harm the entire program.

Among rulings he cited to support his arguments was a 1978 decision by the federal appeals court in Washington that upheld the dismissal of a case alleging that the government had spied illegally on opponents of the Vietnam War.

That decision said that by revealing whether “internal communications” had or had not been intercepted, “the individual himself and any foreign organization with which he has communicated would know what circuits were used.

“Further,” the court said, “any foreign government or organization that has dealt with a plaintiff whose communications are known to have been acquired would at the very least be alerted that its communications might have been compromised or that it is a target.”

Coppolino said the government could not “reveal even innocuous sounding information” about the NSA surveillance program because it might give Al Qaeda insights into how the program was run, putting the nation further at risk.

ACLU attorney Ann Beeson said the government’s position was so expansive that it “would preclude judicial review in every case where the president chose to ignore Congress whenever he wants to wiretap Americans.”

She said government officials had revealed sufficient information about the program that the judge could rule without further fact-finding. That is crucial to the ACLU’s argument because it would give the judge an opportunity to rule without delving into the program’s inner workings, avoiding the risk of revelations government officials say would harm the country.

Beeson said the June 29 Supreme Court decision that Bush did not have the power to set up special military trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without the approval of Congress should leave no doubt that there were limits on presidential power in military affairs. In that 5-3 decision, the high court rejected Bush’s claim that the commander in chief can make the rules during an unconventional war.

“It is hard to fathom how the subject matter of this case could be a ‘state secret,’ ” Beeson said, given how much energy administration officials have put into publicly defending it.

She said her clients, who include scholars, journalists and lawyers, had suffered “real injuries” because the NSA program had impeded their ability to do research, e-mail people in foreign countries and engage in other activities protected by the 1st Amendment. She said some attorneys representing suspected terrorists had to make “expensive trips” abroad because their ability to communicate with people by phone or computer had been impeded by the surveillance program.

Outside court, Beeson said that she hoped the judge would rule soon, and that she was concerned that the government was invoking the “state secrets” doctrine more and more.

“It was intended to be a shield” to protect a limited amount of information and “they are attempting to turn it into a sword” to scuttle lawsuits challenging government power, Beeson said.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he was troubled that Bush administration officials talked about exporting democracy but were “trying to circumvent democratic processes” at home.

Asked why government officials should have to go to court to get a warrant before wiretapping, Walid replied: “We have a president, not a king.”