Bush employees “Big Lie” technique to defend illegal spying on Americans

In fact, the practice directly contravenes the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures and violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978. That law was enacted in response to revelations of illegal government spying on Americans on a massive scale that emerged during the Watergate crisis. FISA established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a secret body to oversee and approve government requests for wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance. The law explicitly bars warrantless wiretaps.

So brazen is the administration’s defiance of the law and the constitutional principle of congressional and judicial oversight of the executive branch that one of the eleven judges on the secret FISA court resigned Wednesday in protest. This is a court which routinely grants government requests for wiretaps, usually within a few hours and, when requested, retroactively—a fact the White House ignores in claiming that it must bypass the court to quickly track the movement of terrorist suspects within the US.

One of Bush’s claims, that the NSA program does not target purely domestic communications, was exploded by a report in Wednesday’s New York Times. The article cited unnamed officials who affirmed that the NSA had intercepted communications to and from people within the borders of the US.

Vice President Cheney, speaking on Tuesday to reporters aboard Air Force Two as he flew from Pakistan to Oman, indicated the real motivations behind the administration’s decision to override legal limits on its powers to conduct electronic surveillance. According to press reports, he said, “Watergate and a lot of the things during the ’70s served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area.”

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