Free Republic

In debating a lib today about the legality and constitutionality of the President's wire-tapping, I came across an article from National Review on this site located here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1551281/posts... Doing a simple search on Google I came across this PBS Online NewsArticle from 11\18\2002... I will excerpt this article with link but my question is- has a single person in the MSM brought this up?? Nov. 18, 2002, 5:30pm EST COURT UPHOLDS EXPANDED U.S. WIRETAPPING POWERS A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the U.S. government has an expanded authority to use wiretaps and other surveillance techniques in its efforts to...

The top deputy to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused two years ago to approve important parts of the secret program that allows domestic eavesdropping without warrants, prompting two leading White House aides to try to win the needed approval from Mr. Ashcroft himself while he was hospitalized after a gall bladder operation, according to officials knowledgeable about the episode. With Mr. Ashcroft recuperating from gall bladder surgery in March 2004, his deputy, James B. Comey, who was then acting as attorney general, was unwilling to give his certification to crucial aspects of the classified program, as required under the procedures...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An Ohio trucker has admitted to helping plan al Qaeda attacks in the United States after meeting terror chief Osama bin Laden at an Afghanistan terror training camp. Iyman Faris, 34, checked out the chances of destroying a New York bridge and tried to buy equipment for proposed al Qaeda attacks while appearing to be a law-abiding trucker, according to documents unsealed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. Faris pleaded guilty May 1 to providing material support to al Qaeda and to conspiring to do so, according to the documents. The charges together carry...

Mr. Ashcroft reduced the number of judges on the board to 11 from 23. "They just hacked off all the liberals is basically what they did," said Ms. Rosenberg, who served on the board from 1995 to 2002.

In "The Age of Anxiety," Haynes Johnson makes a depressing observation: "Although McCarthy and the leading players of his time… have long since passed from the scene, McCarthyism remains a story without an ending." ...McCarthyism... has become an all-purpose incantation, referring to everything from genuine political repression to folks not buying a singer's records.... Calling someone a McCarthyite has become a form of McCarthyism. ...Mr. Johnson ignores the genuine threat that communist spies posed to the U.S.; he elides the justified anticommunist efforts of the 1930s and 1940s with the abuses of McCarthyism; and he compares McCarthyism with modern-day conservatism....

Have you been watching this? Coverage is on right now CSPAN2. NAF's litigator Ms. Wolstein is fumbling, dodging, and throwing endless smoke and mirrors to judges who are questioning the NAF's opposition to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. It is absolutely amazing how much evasion and two-stepping this young woman is doing. She's been pinned down at least three times, reduced to "uh, um ,well, er..." and is stooping to Clinton ian evasion such as questioning the meaning of the word "intact" in intact D&E. Giving the example of "well, what if a toe falls off accidentally during delivery?"....

MEDICINE REGULATED BY STATES "The practice of medicine by physicians is an area traditionally regulated by the states, it is not?" O'Connor asked Solicitor General Paul Clement, the administration's top courtroom lawyer. It is not known whether O'Connor will still be on the court when it rules. She has said she will retire when her successor is confirmed by the Senate. Bush has chosen White House counsel Harriet Miers for O'Connor's seat. Justice David Souter said that 90 years of federal regulation have been aimed at stopping drug dealing and drug abuse. He described it as a "bizarre result" to...

The following is an excerpt of the transcript for Polically Incorrect from Tuesday night: Alec: Wait a second. But the problem is -- one of the problems is when you obviously get into free speech issues, when are people saying things that sound treasonous or subversive or they're rooting for the enemy or whatever you said? When do those things become viewed as dangerous and actionable by the government, and then, what's the next thing that they decide is dangerous and actionable by people in this country? This thing -- this attorney/client privilege thing that Ashcroft has cooked up is ...

I invite you all to sign the following petition..Please add your signature to this petition supporting John Ashcroft's work to end terrorism! The ACLJ will deliver this document to John Ashcroft, President George W. Bush and all members of the United States Senate. CLICK HERE TO SIGN PETITION.....

"...So it's my clear belief that the wall itself developed this culture which restrained in a substantial way the exchange of information in the intelligence and law enforcement communities. The Bellows report, which was part of some recommendations following the Wen Ho Lee case, indicated that it was part of the culture at the FBI that if one made a mistake and shared information that was later deemed to be inappropriate, it was called a career- ender, so that the risk of a person sharing information improperly was at least known in the culture of the law enforcement community to...

PORTLAND -- The Patriot Act is about to come under fire in Portland. Brandon Mayfield, the local Muslim mistakenly linked to the Madrid bombings, is fighting back. Friday he and his high profile attorneys go to court and the case is getting international attention. The federal court docket lists this case as Brandon Mayfield vs. John Ashcroft et al. Along with the former attorney general, he's also suing the FBI and the Department of Justice. Who knows if his case will ever go before a jury, but Friday a judge will hear arguments that could change the way the country...

It is no mystery why Frances Fragos Townsend, President Bush's homeland security adviser and a former mob prosecutor in Manhattan, was called The Hurricane by the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents she once worked with in New York. "You don't want to get on her bad side," said an admiring Pasquale J. D'Amuro, a former assistant director in the F.B.I.'s New York office. "If you think you're going to manipulate your way around, or not be aggressive in your approach, she'll rip you to shreds." That personality has served Ms. Townsend well since Mr. Bush gave her the job of...

With barely a word about it, workers at the Justice Department Friday removed the blue drapes that have famously covered two scantily clad statues for the past 3 1/2 years. Spirit of Justice, with her one breast exposed and her arms raised, and the bare-chested male Majesty of Law basked in the late afternoon light of Justice's ceremonial Great Hall. The drapes, installed in 2002 at a cost of $8,000, allowed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to speak in the Great Hall without fear of a breast showing up behind him in television or newspaper pictures. They also provoked jokes about...

Jerrold Nadler's Two Faces on Terror By Jacob LaksinFrontPageMagazine.com | June 13, 2005Last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Patriot Act had already been adjourned, but Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic blimpish congressman from New York and one of the leftmost members of the House Judiciary Committee, was too wound up to care: “We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it,” bellowed the hefty Nadler. By this, Nadler meant to defend his attacks on the alleged abuses of the (in fact) privileged  prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Thanks to the efforts of the...

Civil rights lawyers Thursday praised a federal appeals ruling requiring the Department of Justice to share a secret document showing why the federal government concluded local police officers can enforce federal immigration laws. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late Tuesday said the April 2002 report must be turned over to civil rights lawyers after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and his representatives repeatedly cited it to justify their decision to let local police have more authority.

The White House was "troubled," according to one source, about the reported actions -- or inactions -- of the Justice Department last week as Republicans in Congress made a last ditch attempt to rescue Terri Schiavo. "You actually had Arlen Specter and his Judiciary Committee out there trying to save this woman's life, and then you have Alberto Gonzales and his crew over at Justice basically putting up roadblocks," says a White House staffer. "This was not a good way for Gonzales to start his tenure there." Gonzales has been on the job at Justice for a little over two...

A congressional investigation has discovered that dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year. Over a nine month period, the panel discovered, 58 people suspected of ties to Islamic- based, militia-style or other groups applied to buy a gun, and 47 were approved. Yes, at the very same time U.S. troops were risking their lives to disarm terrorists in Iraq, 47 terror suspects were buying guns without so much as an official scowl. You see, it's not illegal for someone on a terrorist watch list to buy a...

"Extraordinary rendition" is the euphemism for seizing individuals and shipping them off to countries known to practice torture. By BOB HERBERT As a nation, does the United States have a conscience? Or is anything and everything O.K. in post-9/11 America? If torture and the denial of due process are O.K., why not murder? When the government can just make people vanish - which it can, and which it does - where is the line that we, as a nation, dare not cross? When I interviewed Maher Arar in Ottawa last week, it seemed clear that however thoughtful his comments, I...

Tommy Chong never was much of a stoner, but one of his most popular characters (“Man”) was. So when Tommy’s son Paris put Man’s face on the surfaces of seditiously shaped blown glass (bongs, pipes) and was blatantly entrapped into sending 5,000 bucks’ worth across state lines to undercover feds, Ashcroft’s Justice Department took the opportunity to send Tommy to the Wackenhut-managed Taft Correctional Institution for nine magical months, to punish him not only for financing and promoting his son’s glass-blowing studio but for, as the federal prosecutor put it, “glamorizing the illegal distribution and use of marijuana” in entertainment...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 - As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality. In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush's father, disclosed the tapes' existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them. Variously earnest, confident or prickly in those conversations, Mr. Bush weighs the political risks and benefits of his religious faith, discusses...