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.
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”
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”.
There were many oversight hearings into the Justice Departments actions and intentions when it had been revealed that the President had conducted wiretapping outside legal regulations and without formal congressional approval or process. The same department also found itself being questioned about the dismissal of several US attorneys, and whether improper reasons had played into the decision to replace them. At the center was US Attorney General – basically chief legal council to the President – Alberto Gonzales, head of the Justice Department. It was easy for those who followed these hearings to get the impression that Gonzales did not do a very good job during these sessions. He mainly claimed he could not recall, or he could not say due to classified information and ongoing investigation or some other reason.
However, as an article in Slate Magazine reflected:
“…it occurs to me that when I find myself in enthusiastic agreement …//…that Alberto Gonzales disgraced himself yesterday, I may have missed something important. Assuming the president watched so much as 10 minutes of his attorney general being pole axed by even rudimentary questions from the Senate judiciary committee, it strains credulity to believe that Gonzales still has Bush's "full confidence."
Until you stop to consider that the president wasn't watching the same movie as the rest of us and that Gonzales wasn't reading from the same script. Perhaps what we witnessed yesterday was in fact a tour de force, a home run for the president's overarching theory of the unitary executive.
The theory of the unitary executive is a radical vision of executive power in which the president is the big boss of the entire executive branch and has final say over everything that happens within it. At its core, the theory holds that Congress has very limited authority to divest the president of those powers. An expanded version of this theory was the legal predicate for the torture memo: "In light of the president's complete authority over the conduct of war, without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority in these areas. … Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."”
It was largely thanks to personal consciousness and responsibility of individuals within the agencies of the executive branch, that information about some aspects of this massive push for practical implementation of the unitary executive theory escaped the stranglehold of secrecy.
These were precisely the same people that the strategists for the implementation of the unitary executive theory had felt the need to be kept in dark for fear that they might do precisely what they actually did.
People inside the administration that felt that there were attacks on the Constitution and violations of both the law and their own sense of right and wrong, ordered by the White House. We are all in debt to the courage of these people.
The divide between corporate owned media and independent media became practically significant in the dealing with these leaked pieces of an overall pattern. It was mainly in the independent media that dots were connected to point to something larger than just separate incidences of presidential overreach.
Sadly this was also true for the response from the Democrat opposition – even though they regained majority in both houses of congress in November 2006.
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