The movement to impeach President Bush is gaining momentum, according to US Liberals Guide Deborah White. An early December Rasmussen Reports survey suggested about one-third of Americans would support impeachment, and that was before revelations of domestic wiretaps without warrant. Christmas Eve revelations related to this include news that the Administration has monitored Muslim mosques and homes for abnormal levels of radiation since 2002 - without warrants or court orders - and NSA has also obtained back-door access to domestic and international telecommunications - voice and internet traffic - as part of the warrentless-domestic wiretapping scheme:
Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks... The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches...Writing for MSNBC last week, Howard Fineman predicts:
The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.
As best I can tell -- and this really isn’t my beat -- the only people who knew about the NSA’s new (and now so controversial) warrant-less eavesdropping program early on were Bush, Cheney, NSA chief Michael Hayden, his top deputies, top leaders of the CIA, and lawyers at the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office hurriedly called in to sprinkle holy water on it.Andy Ostroy provides perspective, reminding readers of the events of late 1998:
Which presents the disturbing image of the White House as a series of nesting dolls, with Cheney-Bush at the tiny secret center, sifting information that most of the rest of the people around them didn’t even know existed. And that image, in turn, will dominate and define the year 2006 -- and, I predict, make it the angriest, most divisive season of political theater since the days of Richard Nixon.
We are entering a dark time in which the central argument advanced by each party is going to involve accusing the other party of committing what amounts to treason. Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of destroying the Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of destroying our security.
[A] highly partisan U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Bill Clinton, making him just the second U.S. president in history to be impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868 following the Civil War. Clinton's offense? Lying under oath about his unimpressive high-school-quality sexual dalliances with intern Monica Lewinsky. Pretty tame stuff, and not quite a threat to anyone or anything except a flimsy red dress and a Rhodes Scholar's dignity.
And AmericanBlog wonders why talk radio dismisses current revelations as maybe "violat[ing] a law."
There are several websites devoted to impeachment, including ImpeachBush.org, ImpeachBush.tv, ImpeachBushNow.org, The Four Reasons of Responsible Citizenship. Citizens who wish to meet like-minded neighbors can turn to ImpeachBush.Meetup.Com.
Blogs covering this issue: The Conservative Voice, Eva Marie's Blog, Hammer of Truth, Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Necropolitan Times, Slashdot, Letters to the editor: Shout ‘impeach Bush' From The Rooftops (The Day, New London, CT) ; Impeach Bush (Philadelphia Daily News) .
Do you think President Bush should be impeached?
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The house will remain in the GOP’s hand in 06 due to the gerrymandering of the past 20 or 30 years. There are to many safe seats, so this will not come to pass. Huff and puff all you want but all you will get is blue in the face. Frannkly, I don’t look good in blue. Besides, revenge is a really bad reason to do something like this.
Here is another Rasmussen that needs to be addressed by the author.
Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 23% disagree.
Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Americans say they are following the NSA story somewhat or very closely.
Just 26% believe President Bush is the first to authorize a program like the one currently in the news. Forty-eight percent (48%) say he is not while 26% are not sure.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/NSA.htm
Here is more from that same poll.
Eighty-one percent (81%) of Republicans believe the NSA should be allowed to listen in on conversations between terror suspects and people living in the United States. That view is shared by 51% of Democrats and 57% of those not affiliated with either major political party.
The impeach Bush crowd can huff and puuf but impeaching Bush is NOT going to happen!
Hello, Bubba:
The question isn’t “should we or shouldn’t we” listen to conversations of suspected terrorists.
The question is why didn’t the President follow the law? Even Colin Powell wondered why the President didn’t ask for authorization. It appears that one of the reasons might be that the 11-member secret court found some of the requests spurious (ie, without merit). Before the Bush Admin – the court had modified only 2 of thousands of requests for wiretaps. In this administration, the court has modified almost 200 and issued its first rejection.
So … why do you believe that these illegal wiretaps are OK when a process exists for legal ones?
Kathy
Kathy,
You assume these were illegal wiretaps. I reject your assumption.
The NYT Op-eds from yesterday explains this all far better than I could.
A few quotes from the op-ed.
The president has the constitutional authority to acquire foreign intelligence without a warrant or any other type of judicial blessing. The courts have acknowledged this authority, and numerous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have espoused the same view. The purpose here is not to detect crime, or to build criminal prosecutions – areas where the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirements are applicable – but to identify and prevent armed attacks on American interests at home and abroad.
and to answer your question
Although the administration could have sought such warrants, it chose not to for good reasons. The procedures under the surveillance act are streamlined, but nevertheless involve a number of bureaucratic steps. Furthermore, the FISA court is not a rubber stamp and may well decline to issue warrants even when wartime necessity compels surveillance. More to the point, the surveillance act was designed for the intricate “spy versus spy” world of the cold war, where move and countermove could be counted in days and hours, rather than minutes and seconds. It was not drafted to deal with the collection of intelligence involving the enemy’s military operations in wartime, when information must be put to immediate use.
and
Even if Congress had intended to restrict the president’s ability to obtain intelligence in such circumstances, it could not have constitutionally done so. The Constitution designates the president as commander in chief, and Congress can no more direct his exercise of that authority than he can direct Congress in the execution of its constitutional duties. As the FISA court itself noted in 2002, the president has ‘inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance.’
In this instance, in addition to relying on his own inherent constitutional authority, the president can also draw upon the specific Congressional authorization “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks “in order to prevent any future attacks of international terrorism against the United States.” These words are sufficiently broad to encompass the gathering of intelligence about the enemy, its movements, its abilities and its plans, a core part of the use of force against Al Qaeda and its allies. The authorization does not say that the president can order the use of artillery, or air strikes, yet no one is arguing that therefore Mr. Bush is barred from doing so.
and
The Constitution’s framers did not vest absolute power in any branch of the federal government, including the courts, but they did create a strong executive and equipped the office with sufficient authority to act energetically to defend the national interest in wartime.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/opinion/27casey.html?ex=1293339600&en=b60a9e5284a90d65&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
The actual question should be: Who Leaked Nat’l Security info to the press? This is damaging to the War on Terror. It is a Federal Crime aka FELONY to leak this infomation. When will you investigate that up as YOUR story? Instead of pie in the sky, huff and puff fantasyland imaginary impeachment of this president.
Kathy,
Warrantless Searches of Americans? That’s Shocking! Except when it happens every day.
When not cavalierly talking “impeachment,” here’s the Left’s talking point of the day:
What makes this president think he can invade the privacy of Americans without a warrant?
I don’t know. Could it be the powers, long recognized by federal law, to:
*Detain American citizens for investigative purposes without a warrant;
*Arrest American citizens, based on probable cause, without a warrant;
*Conduct a warrantless search of the person of an American citizen who has been detained, with or without a warrant;
*Conduct a warrantless search of the home of an American citizen in order to secure the premises while a warrant is being obtained;
*Conduct a warrantless search of, and seize, items belonging to American citizens that are displayed in plain view and that are obviously criminal or dangerous in nature;
*Conduct a warrantless search of anything belonging to an American citizen under exigent circumstances if considerations of public safety make obtaining a warrant impractical;
*Conduct a warrantless search of an American citizen’s home and belongings if another person, who has apparent authority over the premises, consents;
*Conduct a warrantless search of an American citizen’s car anytime there is probable cause to believe it contains contraband or any evidence of a crime;
*Conduct a warrantless search of any closed container inside the car of an American citizen if there is probable cause to search the car — regardless of whether there is probable cause to search the container itself;
*Conduct a warrantless search of any property apparently abandoned by an American citizen;
*Conduct a warrantless search of any property of an American citizen that has lawfully been seized in order to create an inventory and protect police from potential hazards or civil claims;
*Conduct a warrantless search — including a strip search — at the border of any American citizen entering or leaving the United States;
*Conduct a warrantless search at the border of the baggage and other property of any American citizen entering or leaving the United States;
*Conduct a warrantless search of any American citizen seeking to enter a public building;
*Conduct a warrantless search of random Americans at police checkpoints established for public-safety purposes (such as to detect and discourage drunk driving);
*Conduct warrantless monitoring of common areas frequented by American citizens;
*Conduct warrantless searches of American citizens and their vessels on the high seas;
*Conduct warrantless monitoring of any telephone call or conversation of an American citizen as long as one participant in the conversation has consented to the monitoring;
*Conduct warrantless searches of junkyards maintained by American citizens;
*Conduct warrantless searches of docks maintained by American citizens;
*Conduct warrantless searches of bars or nightclubs owned by American citizens to police underage drinking;
*Conduct warrantless searches of auto-repair shops operated by American citizens;
*Conduct warrantless searches of the books of American gem dealers in order to discourage traffic in stolen goods;
*Conduct warrantless drug screening of American citizens working in government, emergency services, the transportation industry, and nuclear plants;
*Conduct warrantless drug screening of American citizens who are school officials;
*Conduct warrantless drug screening of American citizens who are school students;
*Conduct warrantless searches of American citizens who are on bail, probation or parole.
These could conceivably be some of the things that the president is thinking about, though certainly not all. I neglected, after all, to mention the long-established “inherent authority” of the president to “conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information,” recognized by federal appeals courts and assumed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review in 2002.
Where does this president get such crazy ideas? Obviously, he should be impeached.
Article by: Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200512201735.asp
Kathy,
By the way, a legal process exists for obtaining warrants for ALL of the above items. So why doesn’t law enforcement obtain a warrant each and everytime for them? Simple answer is because it is NOT required and it is permitted by Federal laws, which have been upheld in the past under Repub. and Democrat Admin.
The question should be: Who and Why leaked national security info to the press. Why isn’t the MSM attempting to figure out who is it that committed this felony?
Just reviewed Bill Moyers special on impeachment.The best reason is that that power is not passed on to the next President no matter who he is,WE MUST STOP BUSH NOW!!!!