Inspired by the front page of HuffingtonPost, here are some editorials from around the nation today....
Th Kansas City Star: Surveillance puts rights at risk
| The Bush administration’s secret use of the National Security Agency to spy on people within the United States without court-approved warrants raises immediate legal and constitutional concerns.
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution forbids “unreasonable searches” and sets out specific requirements for warrants, including “probable cause.” Congress needs to step in quickly to find out exactly what has happened. Lawmakers must make it clear to President Bush that, as the Supreme Court noted last year, the struggle with foreign enemies does not simply give him a blank check to do whatever he wants. The judicial system that the Bush administration keeps trying to bypass may also need to weigh in again at this point. The courts have a responsibility to protect the public’s Fourth Amendment rights. |
The Denver Post: Domestic liberties require protection
| Opposition to a mindless reauthorization of the entire Patriot Act comes from both sides of the ideological spectrum and from members of both political parties. And no wonder. Friday's revelation about NSA spying demonstrates that the administration has lost its sense of balance between essential anti-terrorism tools and encroachment on liberties. What's the cliché here? If we give up our liberties in the name of anti-terrorism, the terrorists have already won. |
The Los Angeles Times: Bigger brother
| PRESIDENT BUSH WAS CAVALIER on Friday night when he told Jim Lehrer on PBS that a report about the National Security Agency eavesdropping on U.S. citizens was "not the main story of the day." He is entitled to his own news judgment, but it reveals a lot about his willingness to disregard constitutional safeguards and civil liberties while pursuing the war on terrorism. To the rest of us, the revelation in the New York Times that the National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on people within the United States without judicial warrants was stunning. In one of the more egregious cases of governmental overreach in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush secretly authorized the monitoring, without any judicial oversight, of international phone calls and e-mail messages from the United States. |
The Washington Post: Spying on Americans
| As with its infamous torture memorandum, the administration appears to have taken the position that the president is entitled to ignore a clearly worded criminal law when it proves inconvenient in the war on terrorism. That argument is not as outlandish in the case of FISA as it is with respect to the torture laws, since administrations of both parties have always insisted on the executive's inherent power to conduct national security surveillance. Still, FISA has been the law of the land for 2 1/2 decades. To disrupt it so fundamentally, in total secret and without seeking legislative authorization, shows a profound disregard for Congress and the laws it passes.
What's more, Mr. Bush's general assurances that the program is legal offer no indication of what legal authority, if any, permits this surveillance of what he described as "the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations." In the torture context, the administration abandoned the argument that the president could simply disregard laws prohibiting brutal interrogations and moved on to other legal theories. There is reason to think something similar has happened here. Does the administration now claim that warrantless surveillance of hundreds of people by an agency generally barred from domestic spying is consistent with FISA? Does it claim that the congressional authorization to use military force against al Qaeda somehow unties the president's hands? Other than claiming it has done nothing illegal, the administration is not saying. |
The NY Times: This Call May Be Monitored ...
| But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant - just as he had earlier decided to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army regulations when it came to handling prisoners in the war on terror. Indeed, the same Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who helped write the twisted memo on legalizing torture, wrote briefs supporting the idea that the president could ignore the law once again when it came to the intelligence agency's eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mail messages.
"The government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties," he wrote. Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them. |
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Big Brother Bush / The president took a step toward a police state
| Without a serious leap of imagination, particularly with the list of those under surveillance not available to anyone outside the NSA and the Pentagon, it is also possible to project that political critics of the Bush administration could end up among those being tracked. The Nixon administration, a previous Republican administration beleaguered by war critics, maintained "enemies lists."
The White House needs to tell the Pentagon promptly to destroy the records of protesters as required, within three months. It also needs promptly to tell the NSA to return to following the rules, to get the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before monitoring Americans' communications. The idea that all of this is being done to us in the name of national security doesn't wash; that is the language of a police state. Those are the unacceptable actions of a police state. |
And in case images are your thing, from the Christian Science Monitor:
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