Why won’t the Bush administration obey the law?
Posted by Moonage on 22 Dec 2005 | Tagged as: National Politics
Dahlia Lithwick of Slate has a LONG article on why the Bush administration won’t obey the law. She sums up the gist of her opinion as such:
At the start of this "war," Congress thought it was authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan. But now we’ve learned that in so doing it also gave the president limitless powers to break the law. Congress thought it was passing the Patriot Act. But it was actually giving the government broad and seemingly open-ended new surveillance authority. We believed the executive branch to be bound by the rule of law€by the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions and the ancient writ of habeas corpus. But the president was redefining torture, disregarding international conventions, and granting himself broad discretion to name and imprison enemy combatants for years on end.
The issue she totally ignores when coming to her conclusions and deriding those that agree with Bush is that the US legal system has not found ANY of those things to be be illegal. Not one. She just assumes it’s all illegal and runs with it. She then takes that leap of faith and does what I criticized Schumer and Feingold for doing ( in which I was promptly called an idiot for pointing out ):
Americans believed they were bargaining in good faith with their government over the original deal struck in 1978 when Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA was supposed to represent a compromise between security and civil liberties, by making it illegal to spy on Americans without judicial oversight but setting the bar for such oversight quite low. Even as amended by the Patriot Act€which further lowered the standards for a FISA warrant€the statute still purported to adhere to the fundamental bargain: Americans would not be spied upon by their government without basic constitutional checks in place.
She ties FISA in with The Patriot Act. None of the issues she raises in the first paragraph have anything to do with the issues she’s raising in the second. That is the same leap of faith I pointed out in Feingold’s text. Bush had no more or less rights to spy on people pre-Patriot Act than post-Patriot Act. By arguing against the Patriot Act ( which she is doing through the backdoor by saying Bush has abused it illegally ), she’s not even addressing the issues she’s complaining about. Go ahead, gut every single provision of The Patriot Act if it makes the Lithwicks and Feingolds happy. And once you do, Bush ( read Clinton, Carter, or any president ), will have exactly the same capability as they had before in regards to wiretapping. All The Patriot Act does is expand the technology, it does NOT expand the definition of who is wiretapped.
She goes on, it gets tiresome:
There are two explanations for the Bush administration’s failure to stay within the boundaries of the legal structures for which it’s bargained: One is that the administration believes it is fighting this war on its own; the courts, the Congress, and the American people are all standing in its way. The other is that the administration is convinced that none of our statutes or policies or systems will actually work in a pinch. Our laws aren’t just broken. They are unfixable.
I don’t recall anyone in the Bush administration ever suggesting that. Ever. She cites and quotes Alberto Gonzales:
The former argument was offered this week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who defended the secret spy program with the astonishing claim that Congress wasn’t told because Congress would not have passed it.
The quotes I read are:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Soledad, provides that you must get a court order to engage in electronic surveillance … except as otherwise authorized by Congress. We believe that other authorization by Congress exists in the authorization to use military force that was passed by the Congress in the days following the attacks of September 11, yes.
Ms. Lithwick is taking Gonzales’ statements WAY out of context. That’s the only way she can justify her totally erroneous garbage. Bottom line, no law has been broken. It’s been charged, Ms. Boxer loves tossing around the word "impeachment", but neither Lithwick, the media in general, Feingold, or even Michael Moore can point to where Bush has broken the law. That’s a major point when considering making the argument of "Why won’t the Bush administration obey the law?". The question I have is "Why won’t Slate back up their comments"?. Point to the example of the law being broken ( as proven in court, not by the media ), then make your case.
And, for what it’s worth, Gonzales also is the only person that seems to understand how wiretaps fit into The Patriot Act ( although no one is listening ):
While the €śwall€ť primarily blocked the flow of information from intelligence investigators to law enforcement investigators, another set of barriers, before the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, often prevented law enforcement officials from sharing information with intelligence personnel and others in the government responsible for protecting the national security. Federal law, for example, was interpreted generally to prohibit federal prosecutors from disclosing information from grand jury testimony and criminal investigative wiretaps to intelligence and national defense officials even if that information indicated that terrorists were planning a future attack, unless such officials were actually assisting with the criminal investigation. Sections 203(a) and (b) of the USA PATRIOT Act, however, eliminated these obstacles to information sharing by allowing for the dissemination of that information to assist Federal law enforcement, intelligence, protective, immigration, national defense, and national security officials in the performance of their official duties, even if their duties are unrelated to the criminal investigation. (Section 203(a) covers grand jury information, and section 203(b) covers wiretap information). Section 203(d), likewise, ensures that important information that is obtained by law enforcement means may be shared with intelligence and other national security officials. This provision does so by creating a generic exception to any other law purporting to bar Federal law enforcement, intelligence, immigration, national defense, or national security officials from receiving, for official use, information regarding foreign intelligence or counterintelligence obtained as part of a criminal investigation. Indeed, section 905 of the USA PATRIOT Act requires the Attorney General to expeditiously disclose to the Director of Central Intelligence foreign intelligence acquired by the Department of Justice in the course of a criminal investigation unless disclosure of such information would jeopardize an ongoing investigation or impair other significant law enforcement interests.
So, once again, Feingold, Schumer, Lithwick, et al, how does gutting The Patriot Act affect wiretaps? All The Patriot Act did was enable some new technology to be used ( roving wiretaps ), and allow the various entities to share the information the wiretaps obtained. What it did NOT do is expand Bush’s ability to order them.
For what it’s worth, the debate over the Patriot Act is not over because the Senate extended it. It will be over when it’s either dead or permanently enacted. The media has obviously taken it’s side, I have taken mine. We need The Patriot Act. I feel a lot safer with it than without. It has also been WAY OVERBLOWN in what it does by people like Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Moore. Most of the civil liberties you thought you lost with the Patriot Act you never had in the first place.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.
I would hope Dahlia would have learned to check her stories better before becoming a senior editor.
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