Specter Of Evil
Posted on 06/07/2006 4:35:35 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
US Vice President Dick Cheney was accused today by a top lawmaker from his own Republican party of obstructing a congressional probe into the legality of the US domestic spying program.
In a letter to the vice president that he said was "neither pleasant nor easy" to write, US Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Mr Cheney of trying to dissuade members of the panel from agreeing to hold a closed door hearing on the program.
Senator Specter has vowed to hold hearings into revelations about the secret compilation of phone records by the National Security Agency, and has said he would summon the CEOs of three telephone companies - AT and T, Verizon and BellSouth - to testify.
But the veteran MP wrote in his letter to the vice president that he learned that Mr Cheney had been working to undermine his efforts to mount the hearings.
"I was advised yesterday that you had called Republican members of the Judiciary Committee lobbying them to oppose any Judiciary Committee hearing - even a closed one - with the telephone companies," Senator Specter wrote.
"I was further advised that you told those Republican members of the Judiciary Committee that the telephone companies had been instructed not to provide any information to the committee, as they were prohibited from disclosing classified information.
"I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence - really determine - the action of the committee without calling me first," wrote Senator Specter, who again threatened to issue subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify.
He said, however, that he hoped to avoid "a constitutional conflict between the Congress and the president".
News reports last month disclosed that the Bush administration had collected billions of US telephone records in its war on terrorism, although the government, which has not admitted the existence of the program, insisted that the privacy of Americans has not been compromised by any of its surveillance activities.
Reports of the program had fuelled fears here that the Bush administration was sacrificing civil liberties in its efforts to prevent new acts of anti-American terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Senator Specter, in his letter to Mr Cheney, slammed the Bush administration's insistence on using domestic wiretaps without judicial or congressional approval, saying the program "denigrates the constitutional authority and responsibility of Congress".
Since the disclosure of the "data mining" efforts, he has called on the Bush administration to be more forthcoming about the details of the program, which the NSA has conducted without seeking warrants from a special court established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Treacherous ass!!!!
Here we go again!! Scandal here,scandal there.
And this is bad because?
Given the White House's inscrutable attitude towards party politics, I'm not so sure.
What does Scottish Law say about it?
Good. Let Arlen sputter away with Blitzed.
With Senate Republicans like Specter, Warner, Graham, and McCain, it's a wonder Bush ever gets anything done on anything.
veteran MP ?
It's written for an Aussie audience. "MP" = Member of Parliament = Member of Congress
Major Pain???
Specter is proof that there is no God. Any righteous God would have never created this piece of anal dreck!
So Specter leaked a private letter to the vice president regarding an intelligence matter?
S P E C T R E haunting
as in marx/engels
If only they knew enough to take our advice!
Maybe Cheney should respond with a letter questioning why Arlen got murdering hippie Ira Einhorn out on $4,000 dollars bail so he could run free in Europe for another 16 years.
True! I wish they would have at least listened to us about Arlen.
That is the key - Specter thinks this is all about him, and he's going to throw a childish tantrum until the spotlight is pointed in his direction. Specter is clearly too immature and unfit to hold a position of public trust and responsibility...
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