Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Where's the impeachment!?!

George Bush has now adamantly publicly and repeatedly admitted to breaking the law. He has stated very clearly that he intends to continue breaking the law. His justifications for this completely unacceptable behavior are pathetic and bogus. Bush has ordered the NSA to conduct illegal domestic spying. There is a very easy to use mechanism for legal domestic spying. Why aren't they using it?

In 1978 congress passed and President Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA.) It set up a secret court who's only purpose is to issue warrants for domestic intelligence gathering. Once a year the Attorney General has to report to Congress how many requests they made, how many were granted, how many were modified, and how many were rejected. Usually the report letter is 1 page long. These letters are publicly available here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/#rept

By my figgerin there have been over 18,000 requests, a small handful of modifications some years and ZERO, zip, zilch, none, nada denials until 2004 during which there were 4 out of over 1,700 denied. That's about a 99.98% rate of approval. I don't think it's a big stretch to call the FISA court a rubber stamp. So why would the administration choose to circumvent this process which would make their actions perfectly legal? The main justification is that they needed to act quickly and didn't have time to get a warrant. Bullsh!#. Under FISA a search or wire tap can begin immediately and a request for a warrant can be submitted up to 72 hours later.

There are a very limited number of possible explanations for why they would break the law like this. Maybe they are pathological and can't help breaking the law... The most rational reason is that they wanted to conduct spying on people that they knew the FISA court would deny. Since the FISA court approves about 99.98% of all requests, that's a pretty scary thought. Who might they be spying on? Probably anti-war activists. Probably political opponents. I wouldn't be surprised to eventually find out that they were spying on the Kerry campaign. The pundits and mouthpieces of this administration have repeated called all of their political opponents traitors and "with the terrorists." It's not a big leap to think that they believe their rhetoric and acted on it.

So WHY THE HELL haven't articles of impeachment been introduced?

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