Another Domestic Spying Program?

We are all familiar with the famous hospital confrontation between Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft. Like everybody else who heard that story I thought it referred to the well known terrorist surveillance program. Alberto testified in 2006 that there hadn't been any controversy about that program within the DoJ. Last week the the Justice Department said it wouldn't retract or revise that testimony. So what gives. Well Monday the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Gonzales a letter demanding all correspondence pertaining to the hospital room confrontation. The last paragraph of that letter says

If you do not consider the surveillance program that was the subject of discussion during the hospital visit and other events that former Deputy Attorney General James Comey described in his May 15, 2007 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee to be covered by the requests made above, please provide all documents described in those requests relevant to that program, as well.

In other words, there might be another, completely unknown surveillance program out there. Gonzales and the highly politicized Republican DoJ is in charge of certifying that program. Feel safe? Me neither.

I am not sure loyal Bushies know the difference between al Qaeda, an editorial cartoonist or the Democratic party. Nor am I sure they care. For future reference only one of the three (al Qaeda) is an enemy of the state. Regardless of what Tom Delay or Karl Rove say the others are loyal Americans.

Laura McGann speculates over at TPMMuckraker. One of her readers who sounds pretty knowledgeable opines that the program is aimed at Internet traffic. He guesses the NSA can and does "read" every single email sent any where, by anybody, all of the time. Maybe they can find Karl Rove's missing emails?

We don't know, but it is interesting that George Bush who has proven himself utterly incompetent in every other respect, always gets his way with the Democratic Congressional leadership. It's like he reads their mail. Hummmmmmmm. I wonder.

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"A Clear Impeachable Offense." Jonathan Turley.

"The problem comes down to the failure of Congress to deal with what is a very ugly and unfortunate fact. This would be a clear impeachable offense. I don't know of a more potential charge of impeachment within the modern presidency." Jonathan Turley.

To quote Glenn Greenwald in Salon

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.

It cannot be overstated. We are not talking about the conclusions of some liberal activist judge with a political grudge. In this case the violations of the law and constitution were so egregious that

the President's own political appointees -- the two top Justice Department officials, including one (Ashcroft) who was known for his "aggressive" use of law enforcement powers in the name of fighting terrorism and at the expense of civil liberties -- were so convinced of its illegality that they refused to certify it and were preparing, along with numerous other top DOJ officials, to resign en masse once they learned that the program would continue notwithstanding the President's knowledge that it was illegal.

What does it take folks?

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Exactly How Bad Was The Domestic Spying Program Anyway?

I know you are probably bored with the entire Gonzales/Ashcroft Hospital Story, but if you watched the video you probably realize that the program Ashcroft and Comey refused to certify was so bad damn near everybody at the top of the Justice Department was willing to walk if the President didn't relent.

Paul Kiel over at TPMMuckraker has just published an anonymous, but an extraordinarily well written and knowledgeable comment from one of its readers providing us a lot of background and asking a lot of pointed questions. If the New York Times can republish anonymous sources we ought to be able to republish anonymous blog comments.

When the warrantless wiretap surveillance program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form the program took in that period, although some details have been leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off on it. In fact, Comey reveals, the entire top echelon of the Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required. They just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running such a program.

This wasn't an emergency program; more than two years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies. It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been saying, for weeks, that they would withhold approval. But at the eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of the program, unaltered.

I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over, it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the process, he’s not doing it for kicks. Similarly, when the President sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man, and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being stubborn.

It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the rules under which the government can obtain physical search warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story, but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional investigation that we ought to be having.

Never forget that it is now firmly established that the Administration has been running the DoJ as an arm of the Republican party. If we Americans don't get to the bottom of this story our very way of life could be at risk. Our mission, citizen journalists, is to legally find out and share all we can about the NSA's surveillance program or at least demand our Representatives and Senators investigate for and report to us.

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