BCT Editorial – 2/22/06

This page was last updated on February 22, 2006.

Good soldiers; Editorial; Beaver County Times; February 22, 2006.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“When the Bush White House loses U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, you know its domestic spying program is setting off alarms.”

[RWC] Unless a plane flight from the U.S. to a foreign country is a domestic flight, the NSA terrorist surveillance program is not “domestic spying.” Since the program targets only communications between the U.S. and suspected terrorists in foreign countries, and the editorial author knows this, I can only assume the editorial author is lying in a clumsy effort to advance his agenda.

“Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said over the weekend that he wanted the Bush administration’s NSA domestic surveillance program brought under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, something the Bush administration is balking at.

“In addition to backing the court’s role, he also said congressional oversight of the program is needed.

“That represents a reversal on his part, and should concern the White House because Roberts has always been more than willing to support this administration.

“However, the more the Bush administration pushes its the-president-can-do-anything-he-wants interpretation of the Constitution, the more good soldiers like Roberts he risks alienating.”

[RWC] The Times wants us to believe the Bush administration position is out of the ordinary. It is not. As noted in a previous critique, both Presidents Carter and Clinton issued executive orders similar to those issued by the Bush administration. In fact, Bill Clinton authorized a warrantless search of an American citizen’s (Aldrich Ames) home on U.S. soil. While there, government agents also planted listening devices, also without warrant.

Consider the following excerpt from a New York Times article: “Administration officials were also encouraged by a November 2002 appeals court decision in an unrelated matter. The decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which sided with the administration in dismantling a bureaucratic ‘wall’ limiting cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, cited ‘the president’s inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance.’”

In 1994, Clinton’s Deputy U.S. Attorney General Jamie Gorelick told the House Intelligence Committee that “The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes.”