With Bush's record why should we believe him on wiretaps?
By V.B. Price
Columnist
The Albuquerque Tribune
January 28, 2006
abqtrib.com
In the most convincing speech of his life, former Vice President Al Gore accused President Bush of "breaking the law repeatedly and persistently" by authorizing "eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens" and declaring he "has the unilateral right" to do so.
Gore, in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech, was referring to revelations that the National Security Agency has been conducting secret surveillance of Americans for four years, an allegation that the Department of Justice does not deny.
Do you believe Gore? Or do you believe the president who has now named NSA domestic spying a "terrorist surveillance program"? Is it possible that all the people caught up in NSA's electronic dragnet are terrorists? Do we know who they are? Could you be mistakenly included on the list? Whom do you believe? It's a question of credibility.
I find credible the opinion of 14 independent constitutional scholars who say the president, in a democracy, "cannot simply violate criminal laws behind closed doors because he deems them obsolete and impracticable."
In a letter to Congress, reprinted in the New York Review of Books of Feb. 9, these 14 legal scholars - including former FBI director and federal Judge William Sessions, the dean of the Yale Law School, a senior fellow of the conservative Hoover Institute, three former Justice Department officials, the former provost of the University of Chicago and the former Dean of the Stanford Law School - conclude that the president had no constitutional or legal authority to authorize secret domestic spying on Americans by the NSA without warrants or judicial oversight.
They assert that Congress "did not implicitly authorize . . . domestic spying . . . in the AUMF (2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against al-Qaida) and in fact expressly prohibited it in FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)."
They further assert that "construing FISA to prohibit warrantless domestic wiretapping does not raise any serious constitutional questions, while construing the AUMF to authorize such wiretapping would raise serious questions under the Fourth Amendment." The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from searches without warrants and probable cause.
Gore says the Bush White House holds to a theory of "the unitary executive," or, as Gore says, the "unilateral executive" - a president who can do anything he pleases without anyone knowing anything about it, such as detaining prisoners without due process, naming Americans as enemy combatants and holding them in secret, and refusing to reveal advisers on crucial public policy issues, such as the national energy strategy.
The president and his cohorts are compulsive creators of secrets. Gore expressed the wisdom of the Constitution when he said, "Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable, it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses."
To me, that's a credible assertion.
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Price is an Albuquerque freelance writer, author, editor and commentator.
Copyright 2006, The Albuquerque Tribune. |
