Brekend Nieuws | Forum | Brits Nieuws | Het Nieuws van de V.S. | Het Nieuws van de wereld | Politiek Nieuws | Nieuws sc.i-technologie | Het Nieuws van de oorlog & van het Terrorisme | Het Nieuws van sporten | Multimedia | Vastgestelde Homepage

Zaterdag, 7 Juni, 2008

Door DE WILDE VAN CHARLIE | Een hoogste adviseur aan Senator John McCain zegt M. McCain gelooft dat het programma van President Bush's van aftappen zonder waarborgen wettig was, een positie die schijnt om hem in dichtere groepering met de vegende theorieën van uitvoerend gezag te brengen dat door het het beleids wettelijke team van Bush wordt geduwd.

In een brief die online door Nationaal Overzicht wordt gepost deze week, zei de adviseur, Douglas holtz-Eakin, M. McCain geloofde dat de Grondwet M. gaf. Bush de bevoegdheid om te machtigen Het Agentschap van de nationale Veiligheid om internationale telefoongesprekken van Amerikanen de' te controleren en e-mail zonder waarborgen, ondanks een federaal statuut van 1978 dat hofonoplettendheid van toezicht vereiste.

M. McCain gelooft dat „noch het beleid noch de telecommunicatie verontschuldigen voor acties nodig hebben zich die de meeste mensen, behalve A.C.L.U. en de proefadvocaten, begrijpen waren constitutioneel en aangewezen in het spoor van de aanvallen op Sept. 11, 2001,“ M. Holtz-Eakin schreef.

En als M. McCain wordt verkozen voorzitter, M. Toegevoegde holtz-Eakin, zou hij alles doen hij terroristenaanvallen, „kon verhinderen met inbegrip van het vragen van de telecommunicatie voor aangewezen hulp om intelligentie tegen buitenlandse bedreigingen voor de Verenigde Staten te verzamelen zoals erkend bij Artikel II van de Grondwet.“

Hoewel een woordvoerder voor M. McCain, de vermoedelijke Republikeinse presidentiële benoemde, ontkende dat de meningen van de senator over toezicht en uitvoerende macht waren verschoven, zeiden de wettelijke specialisten de brief die met verklaringenM. tegenover elkaar wordt gesteld. McCain die eerder over de grenzen van presidentiële macht wordt gemaakt.

In een gesprek over zijn meningen over de grenzen van uitvoerende macht met de Bol van Boston zes maanden geleden, M. McCain stelde sterk voor dat als hij de volgende bevelhebber in leider werd, hij zich verplicht zou overwegen om een statuut uit te voeren beperkend wat hij in nationale veiligheidskwesties deed.

M. McCain werd gevraagd of hij dat de voorzitter constitutionele bevoegdheid had om toezicht op Amerikaanse grond voor nationale veiligheidsdoeleinden zonder een waarborg te leiden, ongeacht federale statuten geloofde.

Hij antwoordde: „Er zijn sommige gebieden waar de statuten niet, zoals in het toezicht op mededelingen overzee van toepassing zijn. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.”

Following up, the interviewer asked whether Mr. McCain was saying a statute trumped a president’s powers as commander in chief when it came to a surveillance law. “I don’t think the president has the right to disobey any law,” Mr. McCain replied.

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that while the language used by Mr. McCain in his answers six months ago was imprecise, the recent statement by Mr. Holtz-Eakin “seems to contradict precisely what he said earlier.”

Mr. McCain’s position, as outlined by Mr. Holtz-Eakin, was criticized by the campaign of his presumptive Democratic opponent in the presidential election, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Greg Craig, an Obama campaign adviser, said Wednesday that anyone reading Mr. McCain’s answers to The Globe and the more recent statement would be “totally confused” about “what Senator McCain thinks about what the Constitution means and what President Bush did.”

“American voters deserve to know which side of this flip-flop he’s on today, and what he would do as president,” Mr. Craig said in a phone interview.

Tucker Bounds, a McCain campaign spokesman, said Mr. McCain’s position on surveillance laws and executive power “has not changed.”

“John McCain has been an unequivocal advocate of pursuing the radicals and extremists who seek to attack Americans,” Mr. Bounds wrote in an e-mail message, adding that Mr. McCain’s “votes and positions have been completely consistent and any suggestion otherwise is a distortion of his clear record.”

Asked whether the views Mr. Holtz-Eakin imputed to Mr. McCain were inaccurate, Mr. Bounds did not repudiate the statement. But late Thursday Mr. Bounds called and said, “to the extent that the comments of members of our staff are misinterpreted, they shouldn’t be read into as anything otherwise.”

Neither Mr. McCain nor Mr. Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office who primarily advises the campaign on economic issues, was available for comment, Mr. Bounds said.

Mr. McCain has long distanced himself from the Bush administration on legal issues involving detention and interrogation in the fight against terrorism, an approach that has sometimes aroused suspicion among conservative supporters of the Bush administration.

But more recently, as Mr. McCain has worked to consolidate his party’s base, he has taken several positions that have won him praise from his former critics while drawing fire from Democrats.

In February, for example, Mr. McCain voted against limiting the Central Intelligence Agency to the techniques approved in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation, which complies with the Geneva Conventions. Mr. McCain said the C.I.A. needed the flexibility to use other techniques so long as it did not abuse detainees.

He also voted for legislation that would free telecommunications companies from lawsuits alleging that they illegally allowed the N.S.A. to eavesdrop on their customers’ phone calls and e-mail without a warrant. The legislation would also essentially legalize a form of surveillance without warrants going forward.

But Mr. McCain had previously stopped short of endorsing the view that Mr. Bush’s program of surveillance without warrants was lawful all along because a president’s wartime powers can trump statutory limits.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a National Review columnist who has defended the administration’s legal theories, wrote that Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s statement “implicitly shows Senator McCain’s thinking has changed as time has gone on and he has educated himself on this issue.”

And Glenn Greenwald, a Salon columnist and critic of the Bush administration’s legal claims, wrote that the statement was a “complete reversal” by Mr. McCain, accusing the candidate of seeking “to shore up the support of right-wing extremists.”

The reaction to Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s statement is the latest link in a chain of disputes over Mr. McCain’s positions on surveillance over the past two weeks.

On May 23, the McCain campaign sent a volunteer lawyer, Chuck Fish, to be the candidate’s surrogate at a conference on computer policy. Mr. Fish spoke at a panel discussion on whether phone and Internet companies should be granted immunity from lawsuits for having helped Mr. Bush’s surveillance program.

Mr. Fish suggested that Mr. McCain wanted to impose conditions — like Congressional hearings — that would ensure that such “forgiveness” would not signal that the telecoms should feel free to disregard communications privacy laws in the future if a president tells them to.

After Wired magazine wrote about Mr. Fish’s remarks on its blog, raising the question of whether Mr. McCain’s position had become more skeptical about immunity, the McCain campaign put out a statement saying that Mr. Fish was mistaken. Mr. McCain supported ending the lawsuits without conditions and his position had not changed, the campaign said.

On May 29, The Washington Post quoted Mr. Holtz-Eakin as saying that Mr. McCain did not want the telecoms “put into this position again” and that “there must be clear guidelines for their participation and sufficient vetting” in any future situation.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s comments in turn drew fire from Mr. McCarthy. In a blog posting on the National Review Web site, he demanded to know whether Mr. McCain believes the Constitution authorizes a president to lawfully go “arguably beyond what is prescribed in a statute” during a national security crisis.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin laid out Mr. McCain’s position on the president’s claimed constitutional powers to bypass surveillance laws in a letter to Mr. McCarthy, who this week called the statement “extremely significant” and said it “marks a welcome evolution on the senator’s thinking about executive power.”

See More:Big Brother Bush USA News 

Have Your Say: Adviser Says McCain Backs Bush Wiretaps
Please note, only selected comments will be published.

Or discuss this report in our new forums

RSS TrackBack URL

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 12:40 am and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Loading ...

ADVERTISEMENTS

SITE MAPS

7/7 Afghanistan Alternative Energy Art BBC Big Brother Bilderberg Biometrics Bush CIA Climate Change Cover Up Cults Culture Database State David Hicks David Ray Griffin Democrats Demos Drugs Education EU False Flag FBI Fraud Free Speech Freemasons G8 Globalization Guantanamo Health News History ID Cards Internet Iran Iraq Israel Law Marches MI5 MI6 Microsoft Military MoD Money Music NASA Neocons NSA Oil Pakistan Podcast Police State Propaganda RFID RINF Rumsfeld Science Secrecy Security Space Sports Spying Stephen Lendman Technology Terrorism Tony Blair Torture TV UK News UN USA News Video Voting Warfare White House Wolfowitz World News Yahoo
2003 - 2005 Archives | 2005 - 2007 Archives | 2007 - 2008 Archives | Current Archives | Past Version