{"id":1608,"date":"2007-10-30T10:49:25","date_gmt":"2007-10-30T10:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/politics\/when-president-does-it-its-not-illegal\/1608\/"},"modified":"2007-10-30T10:49:25","modified_gmt":"2007-10-30T10:49:25","slug":"when-president-does-it-its-not-illegal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/politics\/when-president-does-it-its-not-illegal\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;When President does it, it&#8217;s not illegal&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.crooksandliars.com\/2007\/10\/29\/when-the-president-does-it-that-means-that-it-is-not-illegal\/\">By Nicole Belle<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.crooksandliars.com\/Media\/Download\/22878\/1\/moyers-executive-privilege-abuse.wmv\">Download<\/a>\u00a0(Windows) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crooksandliars.com\/Media\/Download\/22878\/2\/moyers-executive-privilege-abuse-102607.mov\">Download<\/a> (Quicktime)<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>BILL MOYERS:<\/strong> Remember \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Lives_of_Others\">The Lives of Others<\/a>\u201d &#8211; the movie that won this year\u2019s Academy Award for best foreign language film\u2026.a story of life under East Germany\u2019s secret police. The critic <a href=\"http:\/\/rogerebert.suntimes.com\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20070920\/REVIEWS\/70920002\/1023\">Roger Ebert said<\/a>: \u201c<em>The movie is relevant today, as our government ignores habeas corpus, practices secret torture, and asks for the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on its citizens. Such tactics, he said, did not save East Germany; they destroyed it, by making it a country its most loyal citizens could no longer believe in.<\/em>\u201d You want to say it couldn\u2019t happen here but we\u2019ve been close before. During the cold war with the Soviet Union and then the hot war in Vietnam, a secret government mushroomed in this country. \u2026(<a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/moyers\/journal\/10262007\/transcript1.html\">transcript<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In 1975 the Select Senate <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/moyers\/journal\/10262007\/profile2.html\">Committee headed by Sen Frank Church<\/a> (D-ID) began looking into allegations <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gwu.edu\/~nsarchiv\/NSAEBB\/NSAEBB222\/index.htm\">first reported by Seymour Hersh<\/a> in the NYT and found that the CIA, NSA, FBI and other federal agencies had been involved in everything from plots to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aarclibrary.org\/publib\/church\/reports\/ir\/contents.htm\">assassinate foreign leaders<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aarclibrary.org\/publib\/church\/reports\/vol1\/contents.htm\">illegal storage of poisons<\/a> and biological warfare agents including <u>anthrax<\/u>, warrantless <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aarclibrary.org\/publib\/church\/reports\/vol4\/contents.htm\">opening of mail<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aarclibrary.org\/publib\/church\/reports\/vol5\/contents.htm\">wiretapping<\/a> and other <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aarclibrary.org\/publib\/church\/reports\/vol2\/contents.htm\">intel-gathering on US citizens<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aarclibrary.org\/publib\/church\/reports\/vol3\/contents.htm\">misuse of the IRS<\/a> , just to name a few of the abuses by the Executive Branch they discovered. One of the ways Congress responded to try and restore checks and balances was by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which established a secret court to oversee all domestic wiretapping activity. Bill Moyers looks at the undoing of Congress\u2019 checks and balances put in place following the Church Committee hearings and the unprecedented expansion of Executive authority in the wake of 9-11. You can watch the entire episode online <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/moyers\/journal\/10262007\/profile.html\">here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Nicole Belle Download\u00a0(Windows) Download (Quicktime) BILL MOYERS: Remember \u201cThe Lives of Others\u201d &#8211; the movie that won this year\u2019s Academy Award for best foreign language film\u2026.a story of life under East Germany\u2019s secret police. The critic Roger Ebert said: \u201cThe movie is relevant today, as our government ignores habeas corpus, practices secret torture, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[32],"class_list":{"0":"post-1608","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-politics","7":"tag-cia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608","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=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}