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December 16, 2005

Secret wiretaps=impeachable offense?

If you still support the Bush Administration after reading this story, then your partisan political sickness may be terminal:

President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.

The super-secretive NSA, which has generally been barred from domestic spying except in narrow circumstances involving foreign nationals, has monitored the e-mail, telephone calls and other communications of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people under the program, the New York Times disclosed last night.

The aim of the program was to rapidly monitor the phone calls and other communications of people in the United States believed to have contact with suspected associates of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups overseas, according to two former senior administration officials. Authorities, including a former NSA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, were worried that vital information could be lost in the time it took to secure a warrant from a special surveillance court, sources said.

There is no defense for actions such as these.

Wiretapping US citizens without a warrant?

This is against the law. There is absolutely no excuse for the President of the United States to violate the civil rights of US citizens..even to stop terrorism.

I can't imagine that this isn't an impeachable offense.

I recognize that there are a lot of scared Americans out there. Terrorism is a scary business.

But terrorism has been with us for centuries. And we've had US citizens die from terrorism on our soil prior to 9/11. When Eric Rudolph murdered abortion doctors and bombed the US Olympics in Atlanta..did we allow secret wiretaps of suspected abortion doctor killers and other suspected whacked out US citizens? When Tim McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City...did we start those activities then? When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates at Columbine High School, did we start secret wiretaps of suspected angry high schoolers?

This is insanity. Any quarter of American society that supports allowing the POTUS to secretly wiretap Americans without having secured a warrant is either so blindly partisan or so blindly scared that they are beyond the reach of common sense.

Posted by Carla at December 16, 2005 09:14 AM