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Originally Posted by aceventura3
I don't know the number. I don't want to know the number because I don't want the information made public. I still believe it is a national security issue.
Agree or not, the reasonable cause in my opinion is "communications with known terrorists". I think it reasonable to "spy" on people who are communicating with known terrorists. In my view Bush should not have given authorization for this kind of "spying" unilaterally. However, I may have done the same as he did given the circumstances. Hindsight is 20/20.
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The number of wiretaps (not the names) with a FISA warrant are made public and provided to Congress on an annual (not quarterly or semi-annual as I noted in an earlier post) basis....
including the years, 2002-2005, when nearly all FISA requests were granted (LINK), yet Bush still went outside the law to authorize additional wiretaps of US citizens without a warrant. The new FISA law requires annual reporting as well.
So why shouldnt the number of citizens who were subject to warrantless wiretaps under Bush's illegal TSP program be held to the same standard and shared with Congress as well? What does the administration have to hide?
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It is no longer secret, I am not sure how the illegal "spying" was made public.
The motivation to keep the program secret was to make known terrorists think they could freely communicate.
I think the media played an important role in brining this to light.
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It was made public, through the media, by an NSA employee who had serious and justifiable concerns that the program violated the Constitutional rights of citizens.
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But more directly answering your question, One of the links pointed out the legal arguments used by the Bush administration. I thought those arguments were pretty weak.
And the most important question of all:
Since the passage of the 2001 Use of Force resolution by Congress, has Bush invoked this alleged presidential authority under the resolution in order to undertake or authorize any other activities beyond warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. ...If Congress wants to investigate that question, they should. But you do realize it is a different question, don't you?
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The links you provided offered the opinion of legal scholars on what they assumed were the legal arguments of the Bush administration.
The Bush administration should provide a detailed legal justification describing in detail how the 2001 resolution provided this new extraordinary power for the president to ignore existing law. We should not have to rely on outside legal scholars to suggest what they "think" was the legal justification offered by Bush/Gonzales.
Because...the question of whether the Bush administration used the same rationale for other potentially illegal activities is NOT a separate question but gets to the heart of the issue of how Bush used the resolution to circumvent existing law and certainly is within the pervue of the Judiciary Committees.
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Perhaps the Presidential Records act is un-Contitutional, I don't know. But if I believed it was, and I were President, I would destroy records as much as I wanted until I was challenged on the issue.
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If Bush believes the Presidental Records Act is unconstitutional, he should have the Solicitor General of the US file a case with the Federal district court or ask for a fasttrack for USSC review.
Until such time, destroying records is an unlawful act and should be investigated by Congress.
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Perhaps Congress should investigate things like this rather than what was in the needle of what a trainer may of or may not of stuck in someone's a$$ - don't you agree?
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I agree with you on this last hearing.
But if you recall, the hearings on this subject initially also focused on the pervasiveness of steroids and HGH in non-professional sports (ie high school and college) and if there needed to be a stronger federal education and enforcement role in response to the growing use of such "performance enhancing" drugs by kids.