Category Archive

A little more than a week ago, the right-wingers heralded the results of a poll that they claimed showed a majority of Americans supporting Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping policy. Here’s what that poll found: Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people … Read More

A Congressional Research Service report "concludes that the administration’s justification for warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments," the Washington Post reports. The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. … Read More

Apparently, the controversy has forced the NSA to respond.  According to what the agency told CNN, nothing happened. A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Thursday that the National Security Agency did not target CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour or any other CNN journalist for surveillance. The senior official said that from time to time NSA surveillance overseas … Read More

The Left Coaster has a handy compendium of the right-wing talking points regarding the illegal NSA wiretapping, and demonstrates why each is false.

Atrios asked a question several days ago, and Bush apologists still can’t answer it: No one has yet managed to explain how revealing that the administration illegally spies on American citizens without obtaining warrants, instead of legally spying on people after obtaining such warrants, damages national security. The only plausible answer is that the revelation clues in suspected terrorists that … Read More

Re: my posts here and here It looks like NBC is looking into whether or not there was eavvesdropping on the CNN journalist,  Yestreday, NBC released the following statement: "Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on ‘NBC Nightly News’ nor on any other … Read More

Early today, I posted about Andrea Mitchell’s interview with James Risen.  In that interview, Andrea Mitchell pointedly asked Risen if he knew anything about government wiretapping of CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour.  Risen said "no", but it caused me (among others) to wonder what prompted the question in the first place.  Was Andrea Mitchell aware of something that nobody else is? … Read More

UPDATE:  The story has gotten weirder since I first posted it. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviewed James Risen, the NYT writer who broke the NSA wiretapping story.  Here’s the key segment of their interview: Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net? Risen: No, I don’t. It’s not clear to me. That’s one of the … Read More

Re the NSA wiretapping. It’s true that we don’t seem to understand much of the details about the scope or nature of the wiretaps.  But many (including my mother) have argued along these lines: "Who cares?  I haven’t done anything wrong, so I have nothing to worry about." Well, Clinton’s blowjobs in the White House didn’t affect anybody (other than … Read More

John Dean doesn’t see much difference between Nixon’s wiretapping and Bush’s.  A must-read.

Bush and his supporters argue that in matters of national security, Bush is legally allowed to bypass the courts as Commander-in-Chief. The problem is, this argument has been made before, and the Supreme Court (the final arbiter of what the law is) rejected that argument. I want to quote from United States v. Keith, a 1972 Supreme Court case.  Keith … Read More

A lot of conservatives and Repubs: (1)  William Safire (2)  John Comey, AG Ashcroft’s deputy, who refused to sign off on them in 2004 (3)  Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) (4)  Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) (5)  Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN)