Bush Administration At The Zenith Of Their Desperation

The administration this week releases a new 'defense' of their warrantless wiretapping program, even though it's the same lame defense they've already been using that holds water worse than a New Orleans flood wall... Let's humor the Attorney General and see what he came up with-

NY Times: Administration Lays Out Legal Case for Wiretapping Program

The Bush administration today offered its fullest defense of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, saying that congressional authorization to defeat Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks "places the president at the zenith of his powers in authorizing the N.S.A. activities."

In a 42-page white paper, the Justice Department expanded on its past arguments in laying out the legal rationale for why the N.S.A. program does not violate federal wiretap law and why the president is the nation's "sole organ" for foreign affairs...

[You can see the document- here]

Sole organ? And these guys are the strict constitutional constructionists? Zenith of his powers? Is this a Saturday morning cartoon?

We're now in the post-irony phase of the defense and they've just started letting Orwell's ghost write these documents.

In order to buy this defense, we need to trust the President and ignore a lot of things... We need to ignore that the Congressional Research Service stated already this defense doesn't hold water. We need to ignore that numerous Senators (both Republican and Democrat) have stated the Afghanistan resolution didn't grant the President this power. We need to ignore that Tom Daschle stated (and was backed up by many still in the Senate) that the President specifically asked for these extra powers and was denied by the Congress. We must ignore that Congress wasn't notified fully of the program as legally required. We must ignore that the even the #2 man in the Justice Department objected to the program. We must ignore that the President almost went out of his way to reassure Americans all wiretapping was being done with court approval. We must ignore that there was nothing that prevented the President from legally initiating wiretapping of terrorist suspects within the FISA laws (despite the White House spin, this isn't about Americans objecting to surveillance of terrorists, but rather doing so illegally). We must ignore that even wartime needs don't make going around FISA necessary, since the law accomodates for emergencies and was revised after 9/11. We must ignore that this was not a 'limited' program as the President states it is. And we must ignore that there is ample proof that innocent Americans, political activists, etc, have been targeted by this warrantless program.

Finally, we must ignore that if this defense is accepted by Congress, then there is truly no limit to the President's powers and we have betrayed our very system of government.

So the question is... How much is Congress willing to ignore?