I read with great dismay the opinion piece by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell supporting pending legislation on the administration’s spying program and retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that carried out the domestic spying.
What Mr. McConnell gave us was more of the same vague fear mongering, without any substantiation that spying on Americans without court order was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. There has never been one shred of evidence that spying on Americans is the way to protect America, nor is there any evidence that spying on Americans will stop future terrorist attacks.
Indeed, the administration had plenty of warning before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, but failed to act, undermining the notion that acquiring information invariably leads to proactive deterrence. Intelligence agencies are awash in information from many sources, and can not possibly sort and analyze the data they are currently receiving. Adding to that flood of information with warrantless wiretapping will only exacerbate that problem. Intelligence agencies need better information, not just more of it, and you don’t get that type of good intelligence with blanket wiretapping of US citizens.
Mr. McConnell and the administration have not offered any evidence or rationale as to why they, and the telecom companies, should be above the laws of our nation. Playing the fear card is not a rationale, it is an appeal to emotion. If we are a nation of laws, then there can be no such thing as retroactive immunity for corporations that have potentially broken the law. Without congressional investigations, we would have no idea what we were granting immunity for.
Sincerely,
John R. Moffett Ph.D. Gaithersburg, MD
Dr. John Moffett is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area, who has published articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett is also the author and webmaster of the political opinion website www.Factinista.org, and is a Managing Editor at OpEdNews.com.
Professor Moffet, your letter to the Washington Post didn't even begin to address the unconstitutionality of the Bush-Cheney's regime's warrentless surveillance program.
This administration has chosen to openly defy a unanimous 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling -- backed up by a subsequent 1975 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that the Ford administration chose not to appeal -- that the government must obtain court warrants for electronic surveillance of Americans under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.
The Constitution is the supreme law of this country -- it says so right in Article VI, Section 3. and every elected officeholder, from the president on down, is required by his or her oath of office to "uphold and support" (in the case of the president, "preserve, protect and defend") the Constitution.
Implicit with that oath is a requirement that all officeholders obey the Constitution. Bush has clearly and blatantly violated the Constitution by authorizing electronic surveillance of Americans without court warrants. Likewise have the telecommunications companies who turned over their customer records to the federal government without first requiring the governemt to produce court warrants.
To grant these constitutional lawbreakers immunity from Fourth Amendment invasion-of-privacy lawsuits, as Bush is demanding, is to commit yet another violation of the Constitution -- the First Amendment right of citizens to petition their government for the redress of grievances.
Every member of Congress who supports telco immunity should be voted out of office this November for violating their oath of office to uphold, support -- and obey -- the Constitution!
by
Skeeter Sanders (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 65 comments)
on Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 3:41:24 PM
I just hope that Congress gets so much pressure from their constituents that they can't duck and cover, and wait for the next election.
It's up to the people to keep the pressure on. But if everyone is so burdened by work, and so entranced by entertainment, that they can't be bothered to complain to their representatives, then there isn't much hope that things will change.
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John R Moffett (78 articles, 14 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 587 comments)
on Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 5:38:15 PM
