Criminals

The arrogance is jawdropping:

President Bush acknowledged on Saturday that he had ordered the National Security Agency to conduct an electronic eavesdropping program in the United States without first obtaining warrants, and said he would continue the highly classified program because it was "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists."

In an unusual step, Mr. Bush delivered a live weekly radio address from the White House in which he defended his action as "fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities."

The logic in that bolded statement seems suspiciously similar to "destroying the village in order to save it." He had to subvert the Fourth Amendment in order to fulfill his constitutional duties. That's bullshit.

From Josh Marshall:

Here are some more details on the record of the FISA Court (the Court established in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) [adds wobblie: this would be the court which could have constitutionally issued the warrants that Bushco sought].

According to this table compiled from DOJ statistics at the EPIC website, the FISA Court did not reject a single warrant application from its beginning in 1979 through 2002. In 2003 it rejected four applications. In 2004, the number was again zero.

So, in a quarter century, the FISA Court has rejected four government applications for warrants.

This court was hardly a roadblock to investigations, but Bush and his legal eagles Abu Gonzales and Harriet Miers decided that the president's executive perogative were more important than the basic constitutional safeguards against tyranny.

I don't trust anyone in the Bush Administration. The have clearly and brazenly broken the law, not only in the case of the illegal surveillance of Americans, but on numerous other occasions. Bush and his merry band of marauders are not the people to whom we need to be ceding ever greater executive powers - and at least some members of the Senate are standing against the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act and the draconian police powers it grants the federal government.

Conducting spy operations on American citizens without a warrant is intolerable. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. The Bush administration is quickly becoming the world's most extensive criminal enterprise.