{"id":118570,"date":"2014-05-15T18:47:10","date_gmt":"2014-05-15T18:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=118570"},"modified":"2014-05-16T05:29:22","modified_gmt":"2014-05-16T05:29:22","slug":"illegal-nsa-surveillance-americans-secret-authorizations-granted-bush-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/illegal-nsa-surveillance-americans-secret-authorizations-granted-bush-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Illegal NSA Surveillance of Americans: Secret Authorizations Granted by Bush and Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The May 13th PBS \u201cFrontline\u201d documents that on 4 October 2001, President George W. Bush signed a secret authorization for the NSA to see the \u201cmetadata\u201d (the to-whom, and from-whom) records for all phone calls, and also \u201ca lot of content of phone\u00a0calls. They\u2019re actually recording the voices \u2013 not for all of our calls, but for\u00a0a lot of U.S. telephone calls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Titled\u00a0\u201cUnited States of Secrets,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0this documentary reports that only about a half-dozen people were informed of this operation, which was called \u201cthe Program.\u201d NSA chief Michael Hayden was informed of it, and he supported it. Attorney General John Ashcroft was informed of it, but he opposed it as being illegal, a direct violation of the 4th Amendment, and also possibly of the 1st Amendment. The Justice Department was sidelined from it. President Bush\u2019s order was drafted not by the President\u2019s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales (though he supported it), but by David Addington, VP Dick Cheney\u2019s Legal Counsel, who was not so much asked whether it was Constitutional, as he was asked to come up with an argument for its being Constitutional, even if only a fig-leaf argument \u2013 which it turned out to be. Cheney actually ran the country, and Bush rubber-stamped whatever came out of Cheney\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

Within 30 minutes after the President signing the order, Addington placed it into his office safe, and he showed it to very few people, only on a need-to-know basis.<\/p>\n

President Bush is shown as saying to the public, \u201cNothing has changed, by the way. When we\u2019re talking about\u00a0chasing down terrorists, we\u2019re talking about getting a court order before we do\u00a0so.\u201d And: \u201cIt\u2019s important for our fellow citizens\u00a0to understand constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing\u00a0what is necessary to protect our homeland because we value the Constitution.\u201d These statements were simply lies from him, and there was no \u201ccourt order\u201d for anything in \u201cthe Program.\u201d For a long time, the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court wasn\u2019t even informed about the existence of \u201cthe Program.\u201d So: it didn\u2019t even have FISA Court authorization.<\/p>\n

Employees at NSA who balked at breaking the law, and who refused to do what they thought to be wrong, at least unless and until they saw legal authorization for it \u2013 which they were not presented to them \u2013 were threatened by their superiors. Some were fired. Others tried to contact reporters, and were then prosecuted. The Bush Administration wrecked their lives, broke up some marriages, and prosecuted one of them all the way into the Obama Administration, which threatened him with prison and then gave up when he was finally financially stripped and his marriage destroyed.<\/p>\n

Arthur Sulzberger, the controlling owner of The New York Times, and his Editor, Bill Keller, blocked their own reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, from publishing the fact (communicated by the leakers) that that Bush\u2019s statements that everything was hunky-dory legal were lies. Thus, Bush was able to win re-election against John Kerry in 2004. But, then, Risen got a book contract, and so was able to publish the truth after the 2004 election (which was what principally concerned Bush \u2013 his re-election); and, so,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0finally allowed the truth to be published also in their pages, after the \u201celection,\u201d and thus too late for the public to absorb the fact that they\u2019d been deceived by Bush about this.<\/p>\n

The news report was headlined on 16 December 2005,\u00a0\u201cBush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in the United States After 9\/11, Officials Say.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Online, it was headlined\u00a0\u201cBush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0The responses to this news story (such as were shown there at the print version) were largely from conservatives (people who trusted Bush\u2019s honesty), who accused the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0of being a voice of the Democratic Party, though the reality of this situation was more like the exact opposite. The reality was that the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0hid (actively suppressed) this information, for as long as possible.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the story itself misrepresented even some basic facts, in the direction of softening Bush\u2019s lies. For example, the opening two sentences of it were: \u201cMonths after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to\u00a0government officials.\u00a0Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible \u2018dirty\u00a0numbers\u2019 linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.\u201d Here is how Frontline reports the actual event, not the\u00a0NYT\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0reporting of it: \u201cOn October 4th [2001], in a secret\u00a0signing with Cheney, the president officially authorized \u2018the program\u2019.\u201d The\u00a0NYT<\/em>-implied Bush reluctance, of \u201cMonths after the Sept. 11 attacks,\u201d was a fiction. Cheney immediately, on 9\/11, told his people to come up with proposals for whatever they thought needed to be done, and said that he would get it done; and Bush was 100% supportive of that must-do, can-do, will-do, attitude, and of \u201cthe Program.\u201d Furthermore, the description provided by\u00a0NYT<\/em>\u00a0of the Program, understated its scope; and, to refer to \u201cthe court-approved warrants ordinarily required\u201d was itself a lie, because those warrants were a legal\u00a0requirement<\/em>, which had been legislated shortly after Richard Nixon was booted from the White House for Watergate, and adherence to that law wasn\u2019t just \u201cordinarily required,\u201d but it was\u00a0always adhered to<\/em>, because NSAers didn\u2019t want to go to prison. This documentary makes that fear, of breaking the law, clear. Furthermore, to say that \u201cmessages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States\u201d were the scope of this \u201cProgram,\u201d which actually encompassed virtually all telecom traffic of the hundreds of millions of American citizens, would be ludicrous if such a lie could be funny at all. So: the\u00a0NYT\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0report was highly sanitized.<\/p>\n

This documentary also reports Barack Obama\u2019s lies. It shows candidate, Senator, Obama promising, \u201cNo more secrecy. That\u2019s a commitment that I make to you as\u00a0president!\u201d And, \u201cI will provide our\u00a0intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and\u00a0take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.\u00a0That means no more illegal wiretapping of\u00a0American citizens.\u201d And, \u201cNo more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is\u00a0not who we are. That\u2019s not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.\u201d And, then, finally: \u201cBARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: The laws\u00a0that are written will be more open to the public. No more secrecy. That\u2019s the\u00a0commitment I make to you as president!\u201d (And he now was President.) All of those promises, from Obama, were also lies.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, this documentary makes clear that both Bush and Obama have consistently tried to imprison whistleblowers, within the NSA and elsewhere, who attempted to get word out about this rampant law-breaking by the Federal Government. Edward Snowden was just the last of a long line of those. At one point, practically the entire top rung of the U.S. Justice Department were preparing to resign over this matter. NSA Senior Executive Thomas Drake was fired over it, prosecuted with the threat of life imprisonment, and then, when Obama ultimately couldn\u2019t find anything serious to charge him with, just stripped financially to pay his legal expenses. And, of course, Obama still wants to kill Edward Snowden for exposing this \u201cProgram.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, this documentary is itself largely a cover-up. It presents \u201cthe Program\u201d as being a response to 9\/11, but actually the desire and intention to do it began almost as soon as George W. Bush entered the White House.<\/p>\n

On October 11th of 2007,\u00a0wired.com<\/a>\u00a0bannered\u00a0\u201cNSA Domestic\u00a0Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9\/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and Ryan\u00a0Singel reported that Joseph Nacchio, the CEO of the phone company Qwest,\u00a0claimed in court documents that he had been sentenced to prison because he\u00a0had\u00a0decided in February 2001, just a month after George W. Bush entered the White House,\u00a0that he could not authorize his company to participate in warrantless wiretaps\u00a0of Americans because such wiretaps would be illegal. Nacchio\u2019s April 2007\u00a0statement to the court was just now being released by the court, and\u00a0said that he\u00a0\u201crespectfully renews his objection to the Court\u2019s rulings excluding testimony\u00a0surrounding his February 27, 2001 meeting at Ft. Meade with representatives\u00a0from the National Security Agency (NSA) as violative of his constitutional\u00a0right to mount a defense. Although Mr. Nacchio is allowed to\u00a0tell the jury that\u00a0he and James Payne [Qwest\u2019s government liason] went into that meeting expecting\u00a0to talk about the \u2018Groundbreaker\u2019 project,\u201d a multi-billion-dollar NSA telecom\u00a0contract (it didn\u2019t yet have the name \u201cthe Project\u201d), and that he \u201ccame out of the meeting with optimism about the prospect\u00a0for 2001 revenue from NSA, the Court has\u00a0prohibited Mr. Nacchio from eliciting\u00a0testimony regarding what also occurred at that meeting. [REDACTED, but\u00a0presumably referring to demands by NSA for Qwest to permit federal snooping on\u00a0Americans without court warrants.]<\/p>\n

The Court has also refused to allow Mr.\u00a0Nacchio to demonstrate that the\u00a0agency retaliated for this refusal by denying\u00a0the Groundbreaker and perhaps other work to Qwest.\u201d In other words, Mr. Nacchio\u00a0was alleging that this huge federal contract had been denied to Qwest because\u00a0Qwest had refused to participate in Bush\u2019s illegal warrantless snooping on\u00a0phone and e-mail\u00a0communications of Americans. This is before 9\/11. In 2001, Nacchio sold some of his\u00a0Qwest stock shares, and the Bush Administration charged him with insider\u00a0trading, because Qwest\u2019s share-price declined after that sale. \u201cNacchio\u00a0unsuccessfully attempted to defend himself by arguing that he actually expected\u00a0Qwest\u2019s\u00a02001 earnings to be higher because of secret NSA contracts, which, he\u00a0contends, were denied by the NSA after he declined in a February 27, 2001\u00a0meeting to give the NSA customer calling records.\u201d The court refused to allow\u00a0Nacchio to present to the jury any information regarding the NSA\u2019s demands\u00a0which Nacchio had turned down. Consequently, according to Nacchio\u2019s lawyer, he\u00a0was convicted and received a 6-year prison sentence.<\/p>\n

Two days later, on October\u00a013th, the Washington Post bannered\u00a0\u201cFormer CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and reported: \u201cA former Qwest Communications\u00a0International executive, appealing\u00a0a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew\u00a0opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest\u00a0refused to participate\u201d in Bush\u2019s NSA surveillance against Americans. \u201cFormer\u00a0chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio,\u00a0convicted in April of 19 counts of insider\u00a0trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept.\u00a011, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.\u201d That would have placed it probably back in February 2001.<\/p>\n

If Nacchio\u2019s allegations were true, then Bush was already\u00a0organizing the illegal wiretapping against Americans months before 9\/11 even\u00a0occurred, and Nacchio\u2019s prosecution was retaliation against his non-cooperation\u00a0with Bush\u2019s illegal NSA program.<\/p>\n

A week later, on October 22nd, the\u00a0WP<\/em>\u00a0headlined\u00a0\u201cImmunity\u00a0for Telecoms May Set Bad Precedent, Legal Scholars Say.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0The Bush\u00a0Administration was trying to push through Congress immunity for Verizon and\u00a0ATT, which, unlike Qwest,\u00a0had<\/em>\u00a0participated in Bush\u2019s illegal spying against\u00a0Americans.<\/p>\n

Bush\u2019s proposal, now in 2007, was to retroactively legalize what those\u00a0companies had done, even though this would constitute a form of\u00a0ex post facto<\/em>\u00a0law: It would retroactively change the law in order to immunize those two\u00a0companies. This type of\u00a0ex post facto<\/em>\u00a0law is known as an \u201camnesty law,\u201d because\u00a0it amnesties,\u00a0or retrospectively legalizes, rather than illegalizes, the defined\u00a0activities. Article I Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution states: \u201cNo \u2026 ex\u00a0post facto Law shall be passed.\u201d That includes an amnesty law (certainly of this type, though not necessarily of illegal immigration, since that isn\u2019t a criminal violation). To Republicans, and to the conservative\u00a0Democrats who also were pushing Bush\u2019s legislation, the U.S. Constitution was\u00a0merely an\u00a0inconvenience; only the Bible was the Law, to them.<\/p>\n

On 5 November 2007, the Electronic Frontier Foundation\u00a0headlined\u00a0\u201cAT&T Whistleblower to Urge Senate to Reject Blanket Immunity for\u00a0Telecoms,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and reported that a retired AT&T technician, Mark Klein, said,\u00a0\u201cMy job required me to enable the physical connections between AT&T\u00a0customers\u2019\u00a0Internet communications and the NSA\u2019s illegal, wholesale copying machine\u00a0for domestic emails, Internet phone conversations, web surfing and all other\u00a0Internet traffic.\u201d The following day, the\u00a0Austin American-Statesman<\/em>\u00a0bannered\u00a0\u201cAT&T Whistleblower: Say No to Telecom Immunity,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and Rebecca Carr\u00a0reported\u00a0that Klein said \u201cI have first-hand knowledge of the clandestine collaboration\u00a0between one giant telecommunications company, AT&T, and the NSA to\u00a0facilitate the most comprehensive illegal domestic spying program in [U.S.]\u00a0history.\u201d Then, the next day, on November 7th, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0bannered\u00a0\u201cA\u00a0Story of Surveillance: Former Technician \u2018Turning In\u2019 AT&T Over NSA\u00a0Program.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Ellen Nakashima reported Klein as saying, \u201cThis splitter was sweeping\u00a0up everything, vacuum-cleaner style. \u2026 The NSA is getting everything.\u201d Moreover,\u00a0this AT&T facility which he installed \u201ccarry not just\u00a0AT&T\u2019s customers\u00a0but everybody\u2019s.\u201d Klein described specific AT&T \u201clinks to 16 entities,\u201d\u00a0including Global Crossing, Verizon, Level 3, Sprint, and Qwest. It was the\u00a0central hub for all international U.S. telecommunications traffic. ABC\u00a0headlined concerning only the internet aspect,\u00a0\u201cBig Brother Spying\u00a0on\u00a0Americans\u2019 Internet Data,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and reported Klein as asserting that, \u201cAn exact copy\u00a0of all Internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables \u2013 e-mails,\u00a0documents, Web browsing, voice-over-Internet phone conversations, everything \u2014\u00a0was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although, according to Nacchio\u2019s testimony, George W.\u00a0Bush\u2019s laying the groundwork for illegal spying against regular American\u00a0citizens began well before the 9\/11 attacks, the press in the United\u00a0States continued to parrot unquestioningly, in their stenographic \u201cnews\u201d stories, the White\u00a0House\u2019s line, that the\u00a0spying program began\u00a0as a response to 9\/11 in order to\u00a0prevent a recurrence<\/em>. Long afterward, Bush was still successful in getting the\u00a0AP,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, and other \u201cnews\u201d organizations, to put this dubious\u00a0assumption before the American public, as a supposedly established fact, in\u00a0\u201cnews reports.\u201d On 14\u00a0March 2008, georgia10 at\u00a0dailykos.com<\/a>\u00a0headlined\u00a0\u201cDear Media:\u00a0Please Stop Repeating This Lie.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0She documented there cases in which the media\u00a0had recently presented this Bush assertion as if it were an established fact.\u00a0The pleading here was in vain. America\u2019s major \u201cnews\u201d media are propaganda\u00a0agencies.<\/p>\n

On 16 December 2007,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0headlined\u00a0\u201cWider\u00a0Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and reported that, \u201cAt stake\u201d in\u00a0the battle over retroactive immunization of the traitorous telecom companies\u00a0which had served the aspiring dictator \u201cis the federal government\u2019s extensive\u00a0but\u00a0uneasy partnership with [these criminal elements in, not with (as here\u00a0implied) all] industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance.\u201d A\u00a0lawsuit \u201cclaims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met\u00a0with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss\u00a0replicating a\u00a0network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to\u00a0all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When these meetings with telcos were occurring, requesting\u00a0these companies to provide the Bush Administration access which was prohibited\u00a0by existing laws, such as the FISA act, President Bush was simultaneously\u00a0shoving off anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, who was futilely trying to get\u00a0the\u00a0Administration to pay attention to the Al Qaeda threat. So, Bush\u2019s Big\u00a0Brother effort here had nothing whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda or other\u00a0terrorist groups. The Executive Order of the President, that Bush signed in\u00a0October 2001 \u201clegally\u201d authorizing this spying, was merely using 9\/11 as the\u00a0convenient excuse, a pretext, for something that Bush had planned all along. A lawyer for\u00a0one of the whistle-blowing telecom employees said, \u201cWhat he saw \u2026 was\u00a0decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush\u00a0administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans.\u201d\u00a0George W. Bush, at the time this news story appeared, December 16th six years\u00a0after the Program\u2019s start, was threatening the U.S. Senate, by saying that he would veto any FISA\u00a0reauthorization which failed to provide his demanded unconstitutional\u00a0retroactive immunity for the telephone companies which had participated in\u00a0Bush\u2019s police-state initiative. He needed them to be immune, because otherwise he himself would not be. After all: they were doing\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0bidding.<\/p>\n

Thus, it was even more shameful that America\u2019s major media\u00a0continued peddling Bush\u2019s lie that the illegal surveillance program was a\u00a0response to 9\/11 \u2013 a deception that is reinforced by this Frontline piece on 13 May 2014.<\/p>\n

On the same day, December 16th of 2007, the headline that appeared\u00a0of this news at\u00a0rawstory.com<\/a>\u00a0wasn\u2019t the Republican newspaper\u2019s tepid and\u00a0misleading \u201cWider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry,\u201d but was instead\u00a0the very direct and honest:\u00a0\u201cAT&T Engineer Says Bush Administration Sought to\u00a0Implement\u00a0Domestic Spying Within Two Weeks of Taking Office.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0An\u00a0attention-grabber like that isn\u2019t what a U.S. President wants in a headline\u00a0for such a news report. This news story also didn\u2019t \u201cbury the lede\u201d as the\u00a0NYT\u00a0<\/em>had done. Instead, it opened directly, by saying: \u201cNearly 1,300 words into\u00a0Sunday\u2019s\u00a0New York Times article revealing new details of the National Security\u00a0Agency\u2019s domestic eavesdropping program, the lawyer for an AT&T engineer\u00a0alleges that \u2018within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was\u00a0planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans\u2019 phone usage.\u2019\u201d\u00a0The\u00a0New\u00a0York Times<\/em>\u00a0is the supreme master of news-slant, not just \u201cburying the lede,\u201d\u00a0but burying truth.<\/p>\n

On account of the widespread lie that Bush\u2019s surveillance\u00a0program was a response to 9\/11, Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal\u00a0bannered on 14 March 2008,\u00a0\u201cDemocrats Dig In for Surveillance Battle,\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/a>and\u00a0reported a \u201cPartisan Battle\u201d over retroactive telecom immunity, because 74% of\u00a0Republicans\u00a0(and a lower 52% of all respondents) polled by Princeton Survey\u00a0Research Associates had said that, \u201cGovernment surveillance of suspected\u00a0terrorists without court permission\u201d is \u201cGenerally right,\u201d while 57% of\u00a0Democrats (and 44% of all respondents) said it\u2019s \u201cGenerally wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

America\u2019s conservative masses were passionately supportive\u00a0of this surveillance; they were driven by fear, even if they were playing into\u00a0the hands of the worst forces; and their pettiness was destroying everything\u00a0that made the United States great. They didn\u2019t at all fear America\u2019s tyrant at that time,\u00a0George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

Surveillance without a warrant isn\u2019t just \u201cGenerally\u00a0wrong\u201d; it\u2019s always wrong. Lawbreaking by Government is always wrong,\u00a0especially when it threatens basic constitutional freedoms, and most especially when\u00a0it threatens the introduction of a police state.<\/p>\n

In June 2008, a large minority of congressional Democrats\u00a0joined all but one Republican in a FISA \u201ccompromise,\u201d H.R. 6304, which seemed\u00a0to give the President what he wanted, because otherwise, without it, Democrats\u00a0would likely lose crucial seats in Congress, representing conservative\u00a0districts, where\u00a0fear of alien Muslim terrorists exceeded even their fear of\u00a0immigrants and of other aliens in general. On 20 June 2008, Massimo Calabresi\u00a0in\u00a0TIME<\/em>\u00a0bannered\u00a0\u201c Behind the Compromise on Spying,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and he explained how stupid\u00a0it would have been for congressional Democrats to support the U.S.\u00a0Constitution\u00a0during this key election year. America\u2019s high-school-civics teachers had failed\u00a0disastrously, and so America\u2019s voters possessed virtually no idea of what a\u00a0constitutional democracy really is, much less of how to continue to be one.<\/p>\n

How, for example, could American voters intelligently evaluate\u00a0the Republican\u00a0and Democratic Presidential candidates\u2019 respective positions on warrantless\u00a0wiretapping? A political game was being played here, and voters were the\u00a0ultimate chips to be won or lost in this game. They weren\u2019t the ultimate deciders;\u00a0the ultimate deciders were the players of the game. It was no democracy.<\/p>\n

However, this new snooping law didn\u2019t actually provide\u00a0Bush protection after all. Buried in its Title II, Section 802 of the\u00a0revised FISA law, was an obscure clause which restricted legal immunity to only\u00a0things telecoms did that were \u201cauthorized by the President during the period\u00a0beginning on\u00a0September 11, 2001.\u201d That was its key clause, and it hadn\u2019t been\u00a0in the previous versions of the bill. In this new version, there was no\u00a0immunity at all for anything which was illegal and which the President had\u00a0authorized prior to 9\/11, such as had been revealed by Joe Nacchio, and also by\u00a0the AT&T\u00a0whistleblower, Mark Kline, both of whom referred to illegal\u00a0snooping demands by Bush occurring in February of 2001.<\/p>\n

Bush couldn\u2019t very well veto this bill once it passed\u00a0Congress; he had to sign it into law, because he claimed publicly that 9\/11 had\u00a0caused this snooping, that this snooping was a response to 9\/11. And\u00a0Republicans in Congress couldn\u2019t vote against the bill either, because it gave\u00a0both them and the President\u00a0what they were publicly demanding. The Democrats\u00a0were now essentially calling the Republicans\u2019 bluff on their demands, and doing\u00a0it during a Presidential election year, in which the Republican Party was now\u00a0widely loathed, and when Republican Representatives and Senators feared the\u00a0real prospects of\u00a0losing their seats. Basically, congressional Democrats had\u00a0congressional Republicans, and the Republican President, caught in a political\u00a0trap, from which there was no way out. So, the supposed telecom-immunity was,\u00a0essentially, a fiction. On 18 September 2008,\u00a0rawstory.com<\/a>\u00a0bannered\u00a0\u201cDomestic Spying\u00a0Lawsuit Targets Bush, Cheney, NSA,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and reported that, \u201cBased on news\u00a0reports and information obtained from former AT&T employee Mark Kline, EFF\u00a0[Electronic Frontier Foundation] alleges a massive surveillance apparatus has\u00a0been trained on Americans to vacuum up information on virtually every\u00a0telephone\u00a0call, e-mail and Internet search to feed a massive database maintained by the\u00a0NSA. \u2026 Information on the lawsuit and a link to the 55-page filing is\u00a0available on EFF\u2019s Web site.\u201d<\/p>\n

So: As soon as Obama came into the White House, he not only continued, virtually unchanged, George W. Bush\u2019s bailouts of Wall Street, non-enforcement and non-prosecution against banksters, and rabid prosecutions against whistleblowers in government, but he also refused to prosecute George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for their lawless regime. He thereby established the precedent that the U.S. President is, in effect, above the law, that he\u2019s supposed to enforce. He made this a bipartisan dictatorship.<\/p>\n

We do not have a free press. It\u2019s a propaganda operation, by, and for, the people at the top.<\/p>\n

Investigative historian\u00a0Eric Zuesse<\/strong>\u00a0is the author, most recently, of\u00a0\u00a0They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0\u00a0and of\u00a0\u00a0CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/span><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse RINF Alternative News The May 13th PBS \u201cFrontline\u201d documents that on 4 October 2001, President George W. Bush signed a secret authorization for the NSA to see the \u201cmetadata\u201d (the to-whom, and from-whom) records for all phone calls, and also \u201ca lot of content of phone\u00a0calls. They\u2019re actually recording the voices \u2013 not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-118570","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}