Power We Didn't Grant

I am reposting this as the other one inadvertently got deleted. I am also posting one blogger's comment following this so it doesn't get lost again.

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Tom Daschle wrote a good editorial piece about what the Senate approved with the Patriot act...and more important, what Bush and his ilk believed was granted, but in reality, exploited the act beyond what was intended.

In the face of mounting questions about news stories saying that President Bush approved a program to wiretap American citizens without getting warrants, the White House argues that Congress granted it authority for such surveillance in the 2001 legislation authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda. On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney said the president "was granted authority by the Congress to use all means necessary to take on the terrorists, and that's what we've done."

As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel's office over two harried days. I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up. I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.

Read the rest here.

WaPo further reports:

"The Justice Department acknowledged yesterday, in a letter to Congress, that the president's October 2001 eavesdropping order did not comply with "the 'procedures' of" the law that has regulated domestic espionage since 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, established a secret intelligence court and made it a criminal offense to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant from that court, "except as authorized by statute."


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Comment:

At 2:46 PM, Chancelucky said...
My biggest fear with all this is that we're not even going to find out a tenth of what was really going on.

I do notice that in defending themselves, they haven't been able to point to one real instance of thwarting an actual Al Qaeda plot with all their illegal surveillance, wiretapping, e-mail farming.