Quote:
President Acknowledges Approving Secretive Eavesdropping
Bush Also Urges Congress to Extend Patriot Act
By Peter Baker and Lexie Verdon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 17, 2005; 12:12 PM
President Bush today acknowledged that he had secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international communications of Americans and other domestic residents with known links to al Qaeda.
The controversial order has been approved by legal authorities in his administration, Bush said, and he added that members of Congress had been notified of it more than a dozen times.
He defended his decision to sign the secret order, calling the program a "vital tool in our war against terrorists" and "critical to saving American lives."
"This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security," a stern-looking Bush said. "Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends, and allies. . . .And the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad."
"I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks, and I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al Qaeda and related groups," Bush added.
The disclosure of the program, first reported in yesterday's editions of the New York Times, raised strong protests from congressional leaders of both parties, and key members of Congress yesterday called for hearings into the president's action.
Bush today also strongly urged the Senate to pass the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism bill passed overwhelmingly by Congress shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Key provisions of the law are scheduled to expire at the end of the month, but concerns have been raised recently its effect on the possible erosion of Americans' civil liberties. Yesterday, with the news of the NSA domestic eavesdropping program reverberating around Capitol Hill, opponents of the bill in the Senate blocked efforts to pass renew the Patriot Act.
"That decision is irresponsible, and it endangers the lives of our citizens. The senators who are filibustering must stop their delaying tactics, and the Senate must vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act," Bush said. "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment."
Noting that the act expires in two weeks, he said, "The terrorist threat to our country will not expire in two weeks."
The president used his weekly Saturday morning address to the country to talk about the growing furor over the NSA secret eavesdropping program. In a sign of the interest in the speech, instead of the usual taped radio speech, the president spoke live this morning and it was carried on television. The speech ran about seven minutes, slightly longer than his usual radio addresses.
He chastised the news accounts, saying, "The existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."
Bush said that he authorized the program "using constitutional authority vested in me as commander-in-chief." He argued that the program is consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, and used "to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."
"The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time," Bush said. "And the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad."
He said the surveillance is reviewed about every 45 days and fresh intelligence about the subjects is considered. Those involved in the reviews include the "nation's top legal officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the president." The NSA's top legal officials, including NSA's general counsel and inspector general, are also part of the review, he said.
"The American people expect me to do everything under my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties," Bush said, "and that is exactly what I will continue to do so long as I am the president of the United States."
Bush took no questions after his comments.
|
source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...700456_pf.html
yet another bad day for cowboy george and the mayberry machiavelleans.
in these remarks not only do you get the same rationale being floated by the white house as you saw the right try out here yesterday, but there is also a dollop of the defense against fake intel problems as well--congress knew too---there is no question that the white house understands (why anthropomorphize the building?) that the surveillance was illegal--the opinion from the justioce dept was no doubt of the same hypernarrow and utenable character as the torture memos that shaped another delightful area of bushpolicy---
the justification is not legal, it is raison d'etat.
you cant make that kind of argument in a context where the public does not believe you. raison d'etat as defense presupposes "traction"--when it gets none, it collapses right away---it is not a logical argument, it is an appeal to hysteria.
such are the wages of lying to the american public about war.
poor cowboy george, out there being hoisted on his own petard.
i am a bit curious about the radical divergence in worldview between the conservative set and the rest of us with reference to the appeal to emotions/hysteria/paranoia: it seems that the conservatives here in the main have a very different understanding of the "war on terror" than others do.
questions:
do you really believe that the analogy between the "war on terror" and the cold war is viable?
does that analogy not grotesquely alter the character of this phantom enemy "terrorism" making it something unified when it is not, altering its organization to mirror that of a nation-state, changing its scale to equal that ussr (processed through the fever dreams of the extreme right in america)?
it is evident that this phantom enemy "terrorism" is not and cannot operate within a conventional war scenario---so there is no continuity between events/attacks/whatever---if that is the case (and it is, look around), how do you justify acting as though the situation was wholly otherwise? in other words, what basis is there for the argument that any and all violations of law on the part of the bush squad in areas of "security" are justified because of the magnitude of the threat? what threat?
it is clear, both from the bushspeech and from the posts defending him that used the same "logic" here that there is a direct relation between the sense of threat and support for these policies. what i see in conservative defenses is something like you find in anarchist publications that gather information about strikes etc., together in order to argue that revolution is a constant possibility just below the surface of things--the result is a constant state of ennervation and a rationale for refusing to integrate at other levels into the social order around them. if you assemble enough infotainment geared around generating/structuting a sense of being-threatened, you can develop a finely pitch level of hysteria without a problem.
the question are the results of this kind of assembly of information (filtering of information, selective usage of it, etc) is operational amongst folk on the right andnot operational elsewhere?
which follows which: does supporting the bush administration lead to indulgence in this sense of paranoia, or does a predisposition toward this kind of paranoia factor into support for bush et al?