The Moderate Voice from time to time runs Guest Voice posts by people who are not regular contributors but make an interesting case on an issue. Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TMV or this site’s cobloggers. We post them because of the way they’re written and because they could also serve as a good basis for discussion in the comments section.
This was a piece we saw in an email list. We asked the writer who goes by the name Beast from the Middle East about posting it here and got the go ahead. The author’s has also just posted this as well on his blog HERE.
Bush’s NSA Wiretaps are Highly Illegal
When President Nixon broke the law and lied under oath, he was forced to resign. When President Clinton lied under oath in 1998, he was impeached by the House of Representatives. President Bush’s authorization of unwarranted wiretaps by the National Security Agency (NSA) constitutes a similar violation of law and presidential ethics.
The New York Times broke the story on December 16, 2005 that President Bush in 2002 had signed a presidential order allowing the NSA to monitor, without a warrant, the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens.
This revelation created a storm of controversy in December and the earlier months of 2006 that has yet to subside. Opposition to the wiretaps crossed party lines, as Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania joined their Democratic counterparts in condemning the deal. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed two separate lawsuits against the NSA in January.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects American citizens against unwarranted “search and seizure,” which certainly encompasses tapping into telephone conversations and emails. The Foreign Intelligence Services Act of 1978 created loopholes through which government organizations can get information about American citizens.
FISA created the secret Foreign Intelligence Service Court (FISC), whose sole responsibility was to grant warrants to government organizations seeking to eavesdrop on American citizens, provided these warrant requests meet some minimum criteria. If the NSA was only trying to monitor suspected terrorists, then why was it apprehensive to offer proof through appropriate channels in order to obtain a warrant?
“The FISA has worked pretty well from the time of President Carter’s day to the present,” said Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So why was it ignored by the NSA?
Bush apologists offer two reasons for bypassing FISC. The first reason is that FISC is a hindrance to the fast-paced action required in combating terrorism.
In reality, FISC has been pretty reliable and efficient in issuing warrants when there was legitimate cause for concern. The court issued about 500 FISA warrants a year from 1979 to 1995, with that number jumping to 1,758 warrants in 2004. Throughout this entire time, only four warrant requests were ever rejected—all in 2003.
The other reason offered for the wiretaps without warrant was that being in a state of war changes things. The Bush administration has cited a post-911 allowing the president to use force against Al-Qaeda as a legal way to justify the NSA incident.
“A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of our Nation’s citizens,” said former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. O’Connor’s views are upheld by looking at judicial precedence regarding wartime presidential powers.
In 1972 the Supreme Court decided a case (US v. US District Court, 407 US 29) where Pres. Nixon had ordered wiretaps on individuals plotting to blow up government buildings. The Court ruled that even the President’s power to defend the country from attack does not give him the power to order wiretaps on US citizens without proper warrants.
The legal and ethical justifications for the actions of the Bush administration and the NSA are flawed and invalid. Wiretapping U.S. citizens without a proper warrant is a clear rights violation, and can only lead to a slippery slope of continued infringements on our liberties in the name of “domestic security.”
The problem is a term as vague as “domestic security” can come to mean any form of dissent, and thus we can easily reach a situation where dissenters are subjected to harassment and monitoring. An example of this can be seen in recent revelations that the FBI, in February 2003, spied on 40 American citizens who gathered at a Denver bookstore to carpool to an anti-war demonstration.
If opposing a war can warrant FBI surveillance, who’s to say that war dissenters will not be subject to having their conversations monitored, without warrant, by the NSA? It will be interesting to see how President Bush will bring democracy to Iraq when the basic tenets of democracy and personal liberty are being systematically eroded here in the United States of America.
–Beast from the Middle East
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.