Friday, April 07, 2006

Gonzales says calls in U.S. could be tapped without warrant

Well, this throws about half of the popular arguments in support of Bush's monitoring of international calls out the window. What's it going to take for people to realize that this administration is going to keep expaning their power until someone makes them stop? First, Bush wanted the Patriot Act, and so he stressed that any monitoring could only be done with a warrant. Then his illegal NSA program was revealed, and they stress that it's just about international calls. Now, apparently they wouldn't rule out monitoring domestic calls. Is it really such a stretch to think that some, just some of the calls they are monitoring have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism? I don't think it is. Especially since, if that were the case, all they would need to do is demonstrate that to a court somewhere and almost no one would give them any crap about it. Since they won't do that, there's no other logical explanation than that they are doing something different than what they claim. They may even be doing it with good intentions and the firm belief that it makes us safer, but that doesn't change the fact that it's against the law and is not their decision to make.

Also, I'm tired of all the roundabout legal explanations we get for why the President has authority to do these things. Besides the fact that they are all bullshit and don't really apply, they don't address the real issue. Frankly, I don't give a fuck that if the President has some obscure legal authority to listen to my phone calls through some loophole or legal manuevering even it is completely valid. The point is that he should not have that power. Instead of Congress tripping all over themselves to legalize what the administration is already doing, they should be telling the President that he has broken the law and needs to stop, and if he somehow manages to pull some valid legal justification out of his ass for why he has the power to do the kinds of things he's doing, then Congess needs to take steps to take that power away from him because he shouldn't have it.

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