Impeachment over Bush’s wiretapping is being discussed by Republicans!…

of·fense
n.
A violation or infraction of a moral or social code; a transgression or sin.
A transgression of law; a crime.
Something that outrages moral sensibilities: Genocide is an offense to all civilized humans.
(fns) The act of attacking or assaulting.

intentionally
adv : with intention; in an intentional manner; “he used that word intentionally”; “I did this by choice” [syn: deliberately, designedly, on purpose, purposely, advisedly, by choice, by design] [ant: by chance, unintentionally]

Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

Main Entry: stat·ute
Pronunciation: ’sta-chüt
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin statutum law, regulation, from neuter of statutus, past participle of statuere to set up, station, from status position, state
1 : a law enacted by the legislative branch of a government —see also CODE, STATUTORY LAW
2 : an act of a corporation or its founder intended as a permanent rule
3 : an international instrument setting up an agency and regulating its scope or authority

Source: Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law, © 1996 Merriam-Webster, Inc.

Get it yet? The President takes an oath to uphold the Constitution. Peeping George violated the Constitution when he ignored the equality of the legislative and judicial branches by circumventing them and spying on American citizens without the required warrants. And then, he admitted it on national television. If you don’t get it, you really shouldn’t live here. You’re a threat to our safety from tyranny as well as terrorism.

Comment by Wooberstank — December 30, 2005 @ 6:28 pm

Just because you’re too blinded by the right and clearly far too ignorant to understand the Fourth Amendment doesn’t mean Peeping George didn’t violate it. He even admitted it on national television. What a dolt! His arrogance is his own undoing. As will yours be your own. Stay tuned…

Oh, really? Is that why we invaded Afghanistan in Ocotober 2001, and defeated the Taliban and al Qaeda there, before turning our attention to Iraq?

That report states that the Bush regime was told by Tenet, Clarke and Berger that the #1 threat to America was Al-Queda. Bush decided to focus on Iraq instead.

which is what happened.

That would have been a misleading question unless it mentioned these “citizens” were suspected of working with terrorists abroad.

Not quite Oh Wrong I, if that were the case, why did they NOT get the required warrants? If they (the tappies) were suspected of having terrorist ties then there would have been evidence of some sort they (BushCo) could have presented to the FISA court – but they didn’t present ANYTHING either prior to the tapping or after. And in the history of the court – up until Bush in 2002 – the court granted ALL requests for warrants.

And it appears that there has been a mass harvesting and data mining operation ongoing that the telecoms have cooperated in… you can’t separate out the terrorists or wanna be’s from everyone else in that kind of operation.

Oh, and don’t forget to IMPEACH BUSH!

Comment by kharma

I’m one of the boys and therefore exempt. You on the other hand really should be careful what you type….some people don’t deserve freedom you know. That’s why we have those new detention camps set up in W. Texas.

This is the kind of person you’re dealing with.

Arguing with I-Right-I about anything is like asking your cat to do your taxes. Good luck.

BTW, I defend I-Right-I’s right to voice his beliefs and not be called a traitor or some other vile epithet. He does not feel the same toward me. Pity. But the issue of character IS important here.

Let’s see what he has to say about this.

Here’s a wish for you all, your friends and loved ones, to have a joyous New Year. Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any tears.

Peace.

which is what happened.

That would have been a misleading question unless it mentioned these “citizens” were suspected of working with terrorists abroad. The question stands as it is the honest question. If you are a communist/terrorist/homosexual sympathizer I want the CIA,FBI,NSA and the Boy Scouts hounding your ass every minute. You don’t belong here and I don’t care where you were born or what color you are.

why do you suppose they chose to word the question that way… maybe because a question that was worded like this:

Should the NSA be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between American citizens without a warrant?

which is what happened would have generated a positive in the 10% range maybe.

John, now’s the time to initiate those impeachment proceedings we’ve discussed.

Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 23% disagree.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/NSA.htm

I plan on being a member of both the ACLU and the Federalist Society.

That spying had nothing to do with protecting the United States from a terrorist attack. The entire purpose of the NSA surveillance was to help the White House gain leverage, by whatever means possible, for a resolution in the UN Security Council to green light an invasion. When that surveillance was exposed nearly three years ago, the mainstream U.S. media winked at Bush’s illegal use of the NSA for his Iraq invasion agenda.

Back then, after news of the NSA’s targeted spying at the United Nations broke in the British press, major U.S. media outlets gave it only perfunctory coverage – or, in the case of the New York Times, no coverage at all. Now, while the NSA is in the news spotlight with plenty of retrospective facts, the NSA’s spying at the UN goes unmentioned: buried in an Orwellian memory hole.

A rare exception was a paragraph in a Dec. 20 piece by Patrick Radden Keefe in the online magazine Slate – which pointedly noted that “the eavesdropping took place in Manhattan and violated the General Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the Headquarters Agreement for the United Nations, and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, all of which the United States has signed.”

But after dodging the story of the NSA’s spying at the UN when it mattered most – before the invasion of Iraq – the New York Times and other major news organizations are hardly apt to examine it now. That’s all the more reason for other media outlets to step into the breach.

In early March 2003, journalists at the London-based Observer reported that the NSA was secretly participating in the U.S. government’s high-pressure campaign for the UN Security Council to approve a pro-war resolution. A few days after the Observer revealed the text of an NSA memo about U.S. spying on Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. “This leak,” he replied, “is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers.” The key word was “timely.”

Publication of the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg’s heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had been underway for many years. But with an invasion of Iraq still in the future, the leak about NSA spying on UN diplomats in New York could erode the Bush administration’s already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council. (Ultimately, no such resolution passed before the invasion.) And media scrutiny in the United States could have shed light on how Washington’s war push was based on subterfuge and manipulation.

“As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq,” the Observer had reported on March 2, 2003, the U.S. government developed an “aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of UN delegates.” The smoking gun was “a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency – the U.S. body which intercepts communications around the world – and circulated to both senior agents in his organization and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency.” The friendly agency was Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters.

The Observer explained: “The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea, and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York – the so-called ‘Middle Six’ delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the U.S. and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China, and Russia.”

The NSA memo, dated Jan. 31, 2003, outlined the wide scope of the surveillance activities, seeking any information useful to push a war resolution through the Security Council – “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises.”

Noting that the Bush administration “finds itself isolated” in its zeal for war on Iraq, the Times of London called the leak of the memo an “embarrassing disclosure.” And, in early March 2003, the embarrassment was nearly worldwide. From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big mainstream news. But not in the United States.

Several days after the “embarrassing disclosure,” not a word about it had appeared in the New York Times, the USA’s supposed paper of record. “Well, it’s not that we haven’t been interested,” Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale told me on the evening of March 5, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the story. But “we could get no confirmation or comment” on the memo from U.S. officials. Smale added: “We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting.” Whatever the rationale, the New York Times opted not to cover the story at all.

Except for a high-quality Baltimore Sun article that appeared on March 4, the coverage in major U.S. media outlets downplayed the significance of the Observer’s revelations. The Washington Post printed a 514-word article on a back page with the headline “Spying Report No Shock to UN.” Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times published a longer piece that didn’t only depict U.S. surveillance at the United Nations as old hat; the LA Times story also reported “some experts suspected that it [the NSA memo] could be a forgery” – and “several former top intelligence officials said they were skeptical of the memo’s authenticity.”

But within days, any doubt about the NSA memo’s “authenticity” was gone. The British press reported that the U.K. government had arrested an unnamed female employee at a British intelligence agency in connection with the leak. By then, however, the spotty coverage of the top-secret NSA memo in the mainstream U.S. press had disappeared.

As it turned out, the Observer’s expose – headlined “Revealed: U.S. Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War” – came 18 days before the invasion of Iraq began.

From the day that the Observer first reported on NSA spying at the United Nations until the moment 51 weeks later when British prosecutors dropped charges against whistleblower Katharine Gun, major U.S. news outlets provided very little coverage of the story. The media avoidance continued well past the day in mid-November 2003 when Gun’s name became public as the British press reported that she had been formally charged with violating the draconian Official Secrets Act.

Facing the possibility of a prison sentence, Katharine Gun said that disclosure of the NSA memo was “necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed.” She said: “I have only ever followed my conscience.”

In contrast to the courage of the lone woman who leaked the NSA memo – and in contrast to the journalistic vigor of the Observer team that exposed it – the most powerful U.S. news outlets gave the revelation the media equivalent of a yawn. Top officials of the Bush administration, no doubt relieved at the lack of U.S. media concern about the NSA’s illicit spying, must have been very encouraged.