Free Republic

NEW YORK - The American Civil Liberties Union today ran a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post criticizing the president for authorizing the National Security Agency to engage in illegal surveillance of Americans. The ad invokes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights pioneer who was an innocent victim of illegal government wiretapping and draws the correlation between abuse of government power and illegal warrantless wiretapping authorized by President Bush. "It has never been acceptable for the government to spy on Americans without having to go to court and present evidence as to why the individual is under suspicion....

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans'...

The FBI has initiated an intense investigation into the increase in purchases of large numbers of disposable cell phones by individuals who emanate from the Middle East and Pakistan. The cheap cell phones, which do not require purchasers to sign a contract or have a credit card, have many legitimate uses, and are popular with those who have bad credit or for use as emergency phones tucked away in motor vehicle glove compartments. But, according to law enforcement commanders, since they can be difficult or impossible to track, the phones are widely used by organized crime gangs, drug traffickers and...

Do you think the President exceeded his authority in ordering the wiretaps?

WASHINGTON - Rejecting Democratic requests, the Justice Department's independent watchdog says it does not have jurisdiction to open an investigation into the legality of the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program. In a three-paragraph letter circulated Tuesday, Inspector General Glenn Fine instead forwarded the request to Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility, which reviews allegations of misconduct involving employees' actions when providing legal advice. President Bush's decision to authorize the nation's largest spy agency to monitor - without warrants - people inside the United States has sparked a flurry of questions about the program's legal justification. Bush and his top aides say...

Dana Priest of The Washington Post sounds shocked - shocked! - to discover that George W. Bush ordered a complete remobilization and reinvigoration of the CIA immediately after September 11th: "The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al-Qaida has grown into the largest CIA covert-action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over clandestine tactics . . . ." This is news? Isn't this just what W. told the country he would do in the aftermath of September 11th? "Ours will...

AL-QAEDA is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to documents revealed to the Sunday Mirror. Terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their "kill rate" from an explosion. The chilling new threat is revealed in papers distributed to British military camps in Iraq and across Europe. Under the heading "HIV/Hepatitis" the document states: "There is evidence that terrorists might be deliberately recruiting volunteers with diseases that are spread by blood transference." Experts have found that bones and other blood-spattered fragments...

The Bush Administration's use of warrantless wiretaps in the war on terrorism continues to generate controversy, and Congress is planning hearings. The issue is not about circumventing normal civilian Constitutional protections, after all. The debate concerns surveillance for military purposes during wartime. But what the critics are really insisting on here is that the President get a warrant the minute a terrorist communicates with an associate who may be inside in the U.S. That's a loophole only a terrorist could love. Jimmy Carter's Attorney General, Griffin Bell, emphasized when FISA passed that the law "does not take away the power...

The Left -- from The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel to Newsweek's Jonathan Alter -- has pulled out the impeachment card and is brandishing it as the weapon that will drive George W. Bush from the White House. This could be more than talk. Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is consulting with legal eagles as she explores the idea.I must say, I am tickled at their efforts. I supported impeaching the perjury-prone President Clinton, but preferred censure to removing him from office. I also saw the damage to Republicans who pushed to chase Clinton out of office.But the Bush-haters won't heed history,...

The bright holiday atmosphere of the end of 2005 in New York was eclipsed only by the dark political clouds created by George W. Bush's political enemies. The lovely clear weather in Manhattan is continually muddied by venomous attacks on the American president from his media and political foes for having dared to order the wiretapping of conversations held by American citizens as part of his war on Muslim terror. The sounds of "Jingle Bells" mingling with Hanukka songs last week in New York was incessantly interrupted by a cacophony of talking heads on television arguing whether the president was...

THE WASHINGTON Post on Friday reported the existence of a massive covert program within the CIA to catch, detain and interrogate terrorists worldwide. Like President Bush's NSA program to eavesdrop on terror suspects without waiting for a warrant from the notoriously sluggish FISA court, the CIA program has drawn its share of short-sighted condemnation, as if 9/11 never happened. Here is how the Post described the nation's ability to gather intelligence on terrorists nearly four and a half years ago: "The CIA faced the day after the 2001 attacks with few al Qaeda informants, a tiny paramilitary division and no...

I head back to the classroom tomorrow and am looking for a news article that lays out the NSA "spying" story in a clear, easy-to-understand manner. I want to be sure that the article addresses the historical precedent of Presidents using executive orders to initiate wiretaps. I want to get my kids (junior high and high school) caught up on the news. Any suggestions?

An interesting comment was left on Ed Morrissey’s blog last night about the NSA Wiretaps and who may be responsible for the leak: All this speculation about whistle blowers and such….and the exempt media continues to portray these leaks about NSA somehow as Bush’s fault., or that the whistle blowers were acting under the highest most genuine of principles and concerns for the Constitution…all of it simply mind boggling. Well, rather gthan sit back home out in the great middle of America, I decided to go to the source…headed for DC after Christmas…been an informative trip. Anyway, how is this...

I’ve recently been in touch with an anonymous source of mine who’s in contact with someone inside Newsweek. It appears that Newsweek had also known about the NSA Wiretap Story, but sat on it. My source says the following: "Isikoff basically had the NSA story wrapped up, but Newsweek thought there were too many security concerns involved, so they decided not to run it" Isikoff is referring to one of Newsweek’s ace reporters, Michael Isikoff. This is a big development, because it implies two things. First off, someone in the government leaked this information to several sources, including the New...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate. A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined. The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests...

Bush Reaches Out And Taps ... Your Phone And Mine December 22, 2005 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I’m sure President Bush had a hard time figuring out what Christmas present to give us Americans. Peace in Iraq? Impossible. Balanced budget? Too many tax cuts. Bipartisanship? Against his nature. Still, you think he could’ve come with a better idea ... than tapping our phones. And make no mistake about it: What Bush is doing is totally against the law. Bush and his lackeys insist he has legal authority under the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan, the Constitution, and the Foreign...

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...

Ever since The New York Times broke the story that President Bush had directed the National Security Agency to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for certain domestic monitoring duties, commentators and members of Congress have been batting the word "wiretap" around in a way that fundamentally muddies the waters. If we're going to rationally debate FISA limits, we need to clarify the distinction between law enforcement wiretapping and broadband signals intelligence. A wiretap is a specific monitoring program placed on a circuit-switched line of an individual person, or on a trunk group that may be part of a central...

WASHINGTON -- Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval. A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined. The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to launch secret National Security Agency spying on...

A former U.S. Senate majority leader says he never agreed to let the Bush administration eavesdrop, without court approval, on phone calls that cross U.S. borders. Democrat Tom Daschle contradicts President Bush, who says Congress granted him the authority in legislation authorizing the use of force against al-Qaida after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post Friday, Mr. Daschle says lawmakers granted the president extra powers to pursue al Qaida, but specifically turned down a White House request to use those powers inside the United States. President Bush last week confirmed he secretly...