It seems that this was a step towards obtaining the optimum of a unitary executive implementation - an executive branch virtually a closed community and ultimately responsible only onto itself and containing within itself oversight, decision-making, execution and accountability.
The nature of the designated enemy in ensuing war was entirely up to the executive branch to describe to the people – as only it had full access to intelligence reports.
The enemy turned out to be eternal, without borders, willing and able to use all aspects of social life for its motives – economy, information, communication, transportation, military. The same, as it became clear, was true of the war - and thus of the powers of the presidency according to the men with the plan for a unitary executive.
There can be no doubt when looking at the behavior of decisions made and behavior of the President and his staff following the declaration of “war on terror”, that all efforts made to expand the powers of the executive branch, and the supreme control of the President over that branch and those powers, intensified.
There is little doubt, as well, that these efforts had been underway and planned for some time before 9/11 as unveiled plans have shown.
With time and public outcry over what was seen as clear failures of the government in general and the administration in particular, it became more difficult to push and make creative interpretations of the law without getting unwanted attention and push back. Popular opinion and anger set a path for Democrats to reclaim political voice and seats, and whether they were pushed to it or always had been wanting to many of them began challenging and questioning decisions and actions taken by the administration under the auspices of national security.
One of the aspects of this systematic and planned attempt at extending the power of the executive was the matter of what was often referred to as the “Warrantless Wiretapping”.
President Bush, in 2001, secretly set up several secret programs – many of them still secret – that involved gathering of information and communication between people both within and outside USA, Americans and foreigners.
One program that was leaked was his so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program to wiretap. But it included Americans, which would require a warrant from the Foreign Surveillance Court – a designated body with the exclusive authority to review and approve of reasons for intercepting communication where one or more parties are located inside the USA. A violation of FISA is a felony and each violation can result in five years in prison. Even though all this was revealed by then, Congress approved of a much broader program by the passing of the Protect America Act than even the Terrorist Surveillance Program. In practice they not only legalized what Bush was doing before, but made it very unlikely that the Bush administration officials will be brought to justice for what seemed obvious felonies that they had been committing since 2001.
This all occurred even though in August 2007 Congress had a majority of Democrats in both houses.
On August 06 2007 Independent media broadcast Democracy Now featured Glenn Greenwald, political - legal blogger for Salon.com, who is also a constitutional attorney, and Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild.
They engaged with the host Amy Goodman in a discussion of both the recently passed Protect America Act and the Democrats failure to pursue the Bush administrations programs violating FISA by wiretapping Americans without warrant.
During the course of the show, however, Greenwald touched upon a much more sinister and, still, unexplored context of which the secret program of warrantless wiretapping was only a small fraction.
“This week, this last week, it was just revealed, in order to defend Alberto Gonzales, that when the President ordered the NSA program back in 2001, he did so as part of an executive order of which warrantless eavesdropping was but one of numerous covert spying programs aimed at Americans, the content of which we still do not know. And two months earlier, James Comey [former Depute Attorney General of USA] testified before the Senate that he and Ashcroft [former Attorney General of USA] and others had discovered that whatever it was that they were doing from 2001 to 2004 was so illegal, so unconscionable, that they had all decided to resign en masse from the government unless that behavior ceased immediately. The other interviewee, Mrs. Cohn, filled in with more about the fuller scope of this secret program of information collection: “…what came out is that the government admitted for the first time that what they were talking about was not really this Terrorist Surveillance Program, but rather data mining. And this is the first time that the administration has actually admitted that they are doing this data mining, which the USA Today leaked. The data mining intercepts millions and millions of phone calls and email communications to track what the patterns are, but experts inside the administration say that, in fact, they also have access to the content of the communication. So we have no idea, and Congress probably doesn’t either, of the scope of all of these so-called intelligence activities, which, by all accounts, are not making us any safer”.
And I had the opportunity this weekend at YearlyKos to interview several senators, including Senator Chris Dodd, and I asked him whether or not senators have any idea of how they have been using their secret spying in order to spy on Americans, what these additional programs are, what it is that we’re doing that made James Comey and John Ashcroft threaten to resign from the government. He has absolutely no idea, nor do the other senators”
