NSWBC Call to Patriotic Duty
By Sibel Edmonds & William Weaver – bradblog.com – December 30, 2005
Without whistleblowers the public would never know of the many abuses of constitutional rights by the government. Whistleblowers, Truth Tellers, are responsible for the disclosure that President George W. Bush ordered unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens. These constitutional lifeguards take their patriotic oaths to heart and soul: Rather than complying with classification and secrecy orders designed to protect officials engaging in criminal conduct, whistleblowers chose to risk their livelihoods and the wrath of their agencies to get the truth out. But will they be listened to by those who are charged with accountability?
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[This sent by a CitizensWatch reader]
[snip]
The following comments from Gen. Franks, excerpted from pages 125 and 126 of the hardcover version of Senator Bob Graham’s book, Intelligence Matters:
…General Franks asked for an additional word with me in his office. When I walked in, he closed the door. Looking troubled, he said, “Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq,” he continued. “The Predators are being relocated. What we are doing is a manhunt. … That’s not our mission and that’s not what we are trained to do.”
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By Michael Hirsh – Newsweek – December 27, 2005
Aug. 15, 2005 issue – During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, “didn’t choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill” the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent’s allegation “the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking.” Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.
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Go here for the original hyperlinked post:
http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2005/12/intelligence-failures.html
[revised Thursday PM, Dec. 29 2005]
Before deciding whether or not the Bush administration’s false statements about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were simple “intelligence failures”, it might be helpful to take a quick look at history.
Initially, the U.S. Navy’s own historians now say that the sinking of the USS Maine — the justification for America’s entry into the Spanish-American War — was probably caused by an internal explosion of coal, rather than an attack by the Spanish.
It is also now well-accepted that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which led to the Vietnam war was a fiction.
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Village Voice — December 28, 2005
Bush says he had to spy on the citizenry to ferret out hidden terrorists laying plans with forces abroad to strike us again. This doesn’t make much sense, because Bush had been ignoring numerous warnings before 9-11. The question is, why didn’t he take action to block Al Qaeda before—not after—the attacks?
Consider what the president and his subordinates ought to have known before the attack. This list borrows from compiler Paul Thompson’s exhaustive 9/11 Timeline, based on news reports from around the world.
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[Send Oakland Tribune old copies of 1984 -- They will forward to White House! -- Read on]
Editorial – Oakland Tribune – December 26, 2005
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/oped/ci_3337465
IT took 21 years longer than expected, but the future has finally arrived.
And we don’t like it. Not one bit.
We are fighting a war with no end to create a peace with no defined victory.
We occupy a foreign land that doesn’t want us, while at home our civil liberties are discounted.
We are told that it’s better not to know what our government is doing in our name, for security purposes. Meanwhile, our government is becoming omnipresent, spying on us whenever it deems it necessary.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell was right after all.
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[snip]
“I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge,” Senator Church said. “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
[snip]
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
By JAMES BAMFORD — December 25, 2005 – NY Times
Washington
DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country’s largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a “radio quiet” zone, the station’s large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
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“We have finally reached the constitutional Rubicon,” Turley says. “If Congress cannot stand firm against the open violation of federal law by the president, then we have truly become an autocracy.”
[snip]
Yes, the president committed a federal crime by wiretapping Americans, say constitutional scholars, former intelligence officers and politicians. What’s missing is the political will to impeach him.
By Michelle Goldberg
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/12/22/impeach/print.html
Dec. 22, 2005 | On Tuesday, Dec. 20, Washington Post polling editor Richard Morin participated in an online chat with readers. The liberal blog MyDD urged its users to take part, and evidently they did. In previous days, legal experts had declared that Bush had committed a federal crime by authorizing the surveillance of American citizens without a court order, and Morin was grilled about the issue of impeachment.
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The Senate’s six-month extension effectively kills a deal to make key provisions permanent.
By Richard B. Schmitt and Mary Curtius, LA Times – Dec. 22, 2005
WASHINGTON — In a major setback for the White House on a top domestic priority, the Senate on Wednesday passed a six-month extension of the Patriot Act, due to expire Dec. 31, even though President Bush had demanded that most of the law become permanent.
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Bush and domestic spying: Good for America?
President’s legal relativism is a threat to our principles
By Jonathan Turley — Page 11A, USA Today – December 22, 2005
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20051222/oplede22.art.htm
This week, President Bush is struggling to deal with rising accusations that he committed federal crimes in ordering the eavesdropping on hundreds, if not thousands, of people without court orders. It is a scandal that raises troubling questions not just for the presidency but also for the president.
In some ways, it was inevitable that we would find ourselves at this historic confrontation. Bush has long viewed the law as some malleable means to achieve particular ends, rather than the ends itself. In this sense, there is an eerie similarity between the views of Bush and two of his predecessors: Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
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