This Bastard needs his day in a War Crimes Tribunal, and a HANGING

Bush defends illegal spying on Americans: the specter of presidential dictatorship

By Barry Grey
19 December 2005

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President George Bush’s defense of his illegal authorization for the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor phone conversations and email in the US without court approval is an assertion of unchecked executive power.

By deciding, after the secret NSA program was revealed in Friday’s New York Times, to not only acknowledge it, but declare that it would continue so long as he remained president, Bush has escalated his administration’s attack on congressional oversight and the entire Constitutional setup in the US. His defiance of laws passed by Congress amounts to a bid to establish a form of presidential dictatorship.

Bush did not even address the controversy surrounding the NSA spying operation in his prime time speech on Iraq Sunday night. He merely made an oblique reference to it toward the end of his remarks, declaring that his responsibility to “protect our nation” required him to make “tough decisions.”

The decision to publicly defend the secret spy program, which has targeted thousands of American citizens and residents, and denounce its critics—in effect, accusing them of giving aid and comfort to terrorists—was taken after intensive deliberations Friday within the highest circles of the administration. It followed a successful filibuster in the Senate on Friday that blocked passage of a bill to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act—the measure passed within days of the 9/11 attacks that vastly expands the authority of police and intelligence agencies to spy on the American people.

With key provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the new year, the White House has rejected calls by Senate Democrats and some Republican senators to extend the act for three months, in order to work out a compromise that would retain the repressive essence of the law, while adding minor and largely cosmetic civil liberties safeguards.

In keeping with the basic modus operandi of the Bush administration, its response to the political crisis over the Patriot Act, itself fueled by growing mass opposition to the war in Iraq, is to up the ante. Bush and his key advisers, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, do so in the confidence that their critics in the media and the Democratic Party are themselves too cowardly and too compromised by their own complicity to mount any serious opposition.

They calculate that by going on the offensive, they can once again expose the impotence of the Democrats and further undermine any Congressional oversight of the actions of the White House.

Bush, in an interview Friday evening on the Public Broadcasting System’s evening news broadcast, refused to affirm or deny the existence of the NSA domestic spying operation. Meanwhile, Cheney and Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card were meeting with members of Congress to browbeat them into reversing their votes on the Patriot Act.

On Saturday morning, Bush took the unusual step of broadcasting his weekly radio address live from the White House. He denounced those who had voted to block the Patriot Act for “irresponsibly” undermining the “war on terror.” Then he acknowledged that he had authorized the NSA spying program in the weeks after 9/11 and had reauthorized it more than thirty times since. He claimed that he had the authority to do so based both on the authorization of force resolution passed overwhelmingly by Congress in the days after 9/11 and his inherent war-time powers as commander in chief.

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