The NYT has a good Editorial read up this morning. It addresses the Bush administration’s propensity to find something, anything…to drum up their fear factoring in order to gain more power to spy on Americans. The title is: Spies,Lies and FISA. From the second paragraph of the editorial:
There is no truth to any of those claims. No matter how often Mr. Bush says otherwise, there is also no disagreement from the Democrats about the need to provide adequate tools to fight terrorists. The debate is over whether this should be done constitutionally, or at the whim of the president. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, requires a warrant to intercept international communications involving anyone in the United States. A secret court has granted these warrants quickly nearly every time it has been asked. After 9/11, the Patriot Act made it even easier to conduct surveillance, especially in hot pursuit of terrorists.
I am sick of this President’s bs. I am sick of the lies and half-truths in order to toss the constitution out the window. It’s about power and control. What it isn’t about is making American safer. Its not about finding the terrorists either my dear reader. This is a country that follows the rule of law, or it was prior to this administration taking office. From the NYT editorial:
Mr. Bush and his team say they have safeguards to protect civil liberties, meaning surveillance will be reviewed by the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the inspectors general of the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. There are two enormous flaws in that. The Constitution is based on the rule of law, not individuals; giving such power to any president would be un-American. And this one long ago showed he cannot be trusted.
Congress needs to rent a huge set of balls and fix this mess. There is other way around it. The changes made during the summer recess expire in Feb of next year. We can not wait that long for Congress to fix their fuckup with regard to spying on Americans.
BushCo has made fear mongering its modus operandi in order to get what it wants. The republicans are responsible for the original damage done to our Constitution..but this time around the Democrats handed BushCo what it wanted. Those simple-minded mutha fuckas need to fix it. They need to fix it NOW. Nothing less will be acceptable.
