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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (731660)	3/13/2006 5:00:41 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

There's no debate. Bush violated the LAW. He admits it. John Dean, former counsel to Nixon who knows about presidential corruption writes on the subject of the illegal spying on citizen...Here's an excerpt: the Fourth Amendment - which is at the heart of the debate over the NSA surveillance and data collection focused on Americans - has merely reverted back to what Akhil Amar argues its language requires: that searches need only be "reasonable." It was not until 1948 that Justice Jackson wrote in Johnson v. United States that "reasonable" was not enough for a search; rather the standard should be higher - "probable cause." Jackson perceptively added, "The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." In other words, it's for the courts, not the executive branch, to judge whether a search is legal. Why did Jackson reach this conclusion? "Any other rule would undermine 'the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects,'" he explained, "and would obliterate one of the most fundamental distinctions between our form of government, where officers are under the law, and the police-state where they are the law." These distinctions sting in an era where the NSA has refused to operate "under the law" - that is, under FISA and, indeed, under the Fourth Amendment itself. Jackson's reaction to the police-state (read: the state hallmarked by totalitarianism or fascism) is indicative of the rights that grew from these negative histories. As Richard Primus writes in The American Language of Rights, "Reaction against Sovietism and Nazism helped bring about major shifts in the rights of free expression, racial equality, and individual privacy. A new vocabulary of 'human rights' arose to carry the content of those political commitments and to link them with a broader idea rarely seen in the generation before the war but ascendant thereafter: that certain rights exist and must be respected regardless of positive law." Needless to say, positive law - in the form of statutes, and Supreme Court precedents interpreting the Constitution -- followed. To those who don't worry about giving up their rights, programs like the NSA's may seem fine. But others of us appreciate the blood and treasury this nation expended, both indirectly and directly, in securing those rights. And I am convinced my generation will fight to the end to prevent the zeal of good intention in fighting terror, from letting the terrorists win by permitting the government to take those rights. writ.news.findlaw.com