Oh, you lovely NSA…

So apparently Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is going to testify at a Senate hearing regarding the NSA and its legal situation with the wire tapping.

Now, over the past few weeks there has been a flurry of activity concerning the whole issue, ranging from the spying on CNN’s Christiane Amanpour to pointing out Bush’s April 2004 speech that brings up the issue of wire taps requiring a court order. Though it’s beating a dead horse, for the sake of my own amusement, here’s that chunk of Bush’s speech:

Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

There have been many websites that dissect the Patriot Act and the act is references, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, looking at what constitutes a legal wire tap and pondering the meaning of a “US person”. The various pieces refer to what is and what isn’t a terrorist, when the wire taps are legal and what needs to be ascertained before doing so. Many got excited to find the clause that says it is illegal to have a tap if it turns out a US person (not citizen) is to get caught up in the surveillance, however as a previous article states, “US person” does not include those working with terrorist groups.

While this is a good idea to look through the documents, it misses one key issue. All of the pieces of the FISA hinge on the President determining that the tap is legal and then getting a warrant via the Attorney General who submits the request to a secret committee whose entire purpose is deciding on cases like this. Your (or my) opinion of wiretapping is fairly unimportant, the ethics aren’t really the issue since it’s on paper there that someone can be spied upon if it is reasonable to think that they’re communicating with terrorists.

The thing is, Bush didn’t go to any Attorneys General (that’s the proper plural, look it up), and they didn’t give any warrants. Using the FISA to see if what Bush did is legal or not is a moot point, because he didn’t follow any of the protocol outlined therein. Whether or not FISA or the Patriot Act gives him permission to spy on these people is irrelevant as he never got the documents signed. It’s like illegal immigrants crying for their rights, if you aren’t complying with the system you aren’t protected by it.

As often as Gonzalez in on TV assuring us that Bush was within his legal rights to do what he did, one thing he hasn’t said was “he sent me the request, we issued the warrants”. As it turns out, the FISC was mildly involved with Bush’s wiretaps, and was swamped with such requests for a while. This is somewhat understandable as it’s part of his post-9/11 fiasco, but what’s most interesting is this passage:

“They wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn’t think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people,” said Bamford

Later in the article we find that Bush requested roughly 5,700 wiretaps, that a record 179 were modified or rejected in some manner. And yet, this system was apparently not enough, and thus Bush scrapped the system and started putting wiretaps in on his own, without permission. With nearly 6,000 such requests formally made, one can only wonder at how many he’s illegally made. The man wanted to eavesdrop on so many people he couldn’t feasibly ask for permission for all of them without hiring a staff to make all the forms and send them for him. He wanted so many wiretaps put in place it would have been a full-time job securing them all.

But of course, that’s an odd thing, because how are we going to sift through all of these correspondences? Cheney famously said that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented had we had surveillance that the Pres is putting out there. Ignoring the obvious argument that without 9/11 Bush wouldn’t have been able to coerce the country into a war and he wouldn’t have been able to put any law into place he wants, the fact remains that recorded correspondance wasn’t translated on time prior to 9/11.

The reports warning of an impending al Qaeda attack were there but Bush ignored them. The proof it was coming was there but we didn’t get it translated on time. Now Bush is claiming that we didn’t have enough information to prevent 9/11 and that’s why we need his God-approved, instructed even, help in gathering more information. Information that he will no doubt ignore or be lost in the shuffle so when another attack gets through, he’ll be able to get even more power.

Though to quote Jack Cafferty, “want to abuse our civil liberties? Just do it.” It truly boggles my mind to think that Bush would put so much effort in passing the Patriot Act, defending it in front of the world when he had no plans of doing anything it instructs him to. It’s not even that he made that comment and then got wiretaps without a court order. He was doing it all the while. Breaking his own laws, invading our privacy, and lying about it for years. What’s really scary is that a lot of people voted for him because of his morals.