FISA: Why Care So Much?

   A lot of the MSM and many ordinary people in the United States can't seem to understand why people like myself and many others, along with various activist groups, are so up in arms over the FISA Bill and it's retroactive immunity for the telecoms and the Bush administration. Let's face it. By giving the phone companies retroactive immunity for illegally spying on us for George Bush and his partners in crime, our New Congress has basically given George Bush and his partners in crime a free pass from any accountability to the congress or to " We, The People " for Bush's illegal, criminal activities since moving into the White House. Our Congress has given Bush and ATT and Verizon the okay to go ahead and intercept our emails, IM's, faxes, and our phone calls without having any legal basis for doing so.

   Congress, on Thursday, gave the Bush administration an early Christmas present by giving him and his crime partners the rights to your privacy. Privacy isn't yours anymore in any form. Our Democratic Congress helped George Bush, the telecoms, and the rest of the Republicans steal your right to privacy, plain and simple! Nothing else needs to be said as there was/is no reason that this bill should have passed in its present form. The Democrats sold you and I out for a few dollars from the telecoms, towards their re-election. There is no other reason that makes any sense what so ever! We have been robbed and I am one mad motherfucker and I am not going to take this one laying down!

Hunter@ DailyKos

Why do so many people care so much about a mere technical issue such as whether such-and-such is legal or illegal?

I can count three reasons.

1. It goes to the heart of illegal actions by this administration. The Bush administration has broken law after law, and been enmeshed in scandal after scandal, and been met with no substantive actions. There are investigations that never end; there are stern letters that are never answered; there are subpoenas that are simply ignored. So to respond to a clearly illegal act by, of all possible things, writing legislation that offers retroactive immunity for those acts, maintains the secrecy of those acts, and declares that the Bush administration itself will be responsible for the future integrity of those acts -- it is patently asinine. It is an insult. It demonstrates a complete lack of regard for the law, and for the very responsibilities of each branch of government. In this, it is symbolic of the entire current Congress, which has proved itself all but nonfunctional when it comes to checking abuses by the executive branch -- or even by their own branch.

2.It is a Constitutional question, and of a sort that the administration has fought long and hard to cripple. Among the more basic premises of the Bill of Rights is the notion of probable cause; your government may not conduct searches or seizures without a warrant, and the judicial branch shall judge the merit of those warrants. But the Bush administration wishes simply nullify that entire concept, if those searches are electronic in nature. It takes no imagination at all to observe that once one type of widespread, warrantless, causeless electronic search is deemed to be outside of 4th Amendment protections, an entire series of other electronic searches will follow. That is, after all, the entire reason the Bush administration pursued these searches illegally, rather than attempting to change FISA law in advance; they have every intention of creating a precedent for future searches, and they now have been given exactly that.

3. It was easy. I mean, Jesus H. Christmas, it has been the easiest thing in the world -- all they had to do was not do it. It's not freakin' rocket science -- but thanks to the efforts of a number of Democrats, not just Rockefeller and Hoyer but people like Reid and Pelosi, they just couldn't not put immunity in. We were never told why it was so all-fired important -- they would never grace us with any non-childish, non-condescending, non-flagrantly-insulting explanation. But instead of just not passing bills granting immunity, we had Reid treating Dodd more shabbily than he ever treated any Republican, and Hoyer apparently going around Pelosi, and all manner of prodding and dealing by Democrats to get immunity for these acts. It is baffling, and the only rationale available seems to be the most cynical one -- it is merely doing the bidding of companies that provide substantive campaign contributions. No other explanation would seem to suffice.

So those are the reasons. Because of all the issues we've faced, in the last few years, this one was an absolute no-brainer, the one thing that the Democrats, no matter how stunningly incompetent, humiliatingly ineffective or bafflingly capitulating they may be, could manage to win simply by sitting on their damn hands. But no; it took serious work to lose on this one. Serious, burning-the-midnight-oil work to manage to quite so cravenly negate their own oversight duties.

And that is why this will not be forgotten anytime soon. A caucus willing to go to these lengths to satisfy the illegalities of the Bush administration is not one that can easily be defended. It is understandable that it would take a great deal of courage to enforce Congressional subpoenas. We can understand that voting against funding for the war could be risky, if we were to presume that Bush would simply keep the troops in the Iraqi desert to rot regardless of funding.

But this one? This petty, stinking issue of granting retroactive immunity to companies that violated the law, such that they need not even say how they violated the law, or when they violated the law, or how often, or against who, and the whole thing started before 9/11 so it is clear that terrorism wasn't even a prime factor for doing it -- that whole mess is now absolved, no lawsuits, no discovery, no evidence allowed to be presented?

No, that one is indefensible. It is indefensible because it requires not just passive acceptance of a corrupt administration performing illegal acts, but legislators actively condoning those acts with the stroke of a pen. The Democrats are determined to set themselves as partners in committing crimes, then absolving them; there should be nothing but contempt for such acts.

Technorati Tags: FISA,Protect America Act,telecom amnesty,George Bush,Democrats,warrantless wiretaps

Iran's Few Of The United States In Iraq

  All that we seem to hear about when it comes to Iraq is the tale of the " security " agreement that President Bush has been trying to shove down the Iraqi's throats. We already know what our government wants to do with Iraq and that it was only our government that had any input when it came to writing this agreement.

   The press in Iran has a different look at this agreement, which you may find somewhat interesting. It certainly is a different viewpoint from what we hear from our press.

  Tehran Times

June 21, 2008

U.S. colonialism in Iraq
By Ardeshir Ommani

Earlier this month, that part of humanity that respects its own freedom and dignity was a witness to an impending conclusion of a unilateral ‘security’ agreement between the U.S., the sole author of this forced concession, and the Iraqi government.

The one-sided accord is an example of colonial rule and a pseudo-legal foundation for the extension of the violent U.S. occupation of that country. By means of this so-called treaty, with no time and space limitations, George W. Bush’s Washington intends to disguise its ugly and brutal treatment of the people of Iraq with a veneer of legality, such that in the eyes of the least-informed American people, and some of the European members of the UN Security Council, the presence of the U.S. military machine in Iraq and the Persian Gulf region would not be construed as an indefinite continuation of the U.S. military occupation. Furthermore, the agreement would probably be exploited to serve as a basis for using Iraq’s territory as a launch pad for more wars against regional countries.
Meanwhile, in talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Tehran in early June, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei made his rejection of this proposed ‘security pact’ clear by stating that “occupiers who interfere in Iraq’s affairs through their military and security might” are the main cause of Iraq’s problems and are the “…main obstacle in the way of the Iraqi nation’s progress and prosperity.”
Clearly, there is no doubt that the continued aggression of U.S. forces in Iraq should not be tolerated by the Iranian people.
Some years ago, when the early draft version of today’s pact was in its infancy, the nationalist forces and religious leaders of Iraq were led to believe that signing the agreement would sooner or later lead to U.S. troop withdrawal and Iraq’s independence. But today that presumption has been turned on its head and it has become transparent to everyone that the U.S. objective is to pull the noose tight and attain the position of the permanent hangman of modern history. Today some Iraqi officials are trying to convince the Iraqi and Arab popular masses that the agreement will result in the invalidation of paragraph seven of the UN resolution on Iraq that made the U.S. the guarantor of Iraq’s security until the end of this year.
At the same time as this hoax is being pushed, the U.S., by attempting to depict Iran as a serious threat in the Persian Gulf region, is making every effort to define the agreement between Washington and Baghdad as a means to maintain Iraq’s security as a shield against Iranian interference in Iraq and the region. What hypocrisy: the invader of Iraq and Afghanistan claims to be an agent of peace and security!
This agreement imposes capitulation on Iraq for decades to come. It is revealing that the details of the ‘agreement’ have not been made public or grasped by the people of Iraq, who will have very little say in the matter and that is why the package is being furiously pushed through the Iraqi Parliament before its terms are thoroughly exposed. This so-called ‘security agreement’ could more correctly be called ‘The Legitimization of America’s Occupation of Iraq’. According to some reliable Iraqi sources, the agreement does not assure Iraq’s independence, national integrity, and national sovereignty as an inalienable right.
The empire also has to deal with its own American public, which is war-weary and demanding an end to the occupation. The intent of the Bush administration is to blur the differences between the Democratic and Republican candidates on the question of immediate troop withdrawal. Should the White House be able to impose such an enslaving order on the people of Iraq, the chance of Senator McCain’s election improves, while the lot of Senator Barack Obama plummets. It seems tricky George has a card up his sleeve for stealing yet another election.
Once again, the sorcerer in the White House is orchestrating another fabrication. If the current administration can pull this off, they intend to proclaim to the American people that the Iraqi people have agreed to the continuation of the U.S. occupation of their country and “want us to stay to protect them.”
On the other side of this cruel and long occupation stands a fighting force, led by Moqtada al-Sadr, who announced and called for widespread demonstrations against the disreputable and colonial infliction. Responding to the call on Friday, June 1, 2008, hundreds of thousands of indignant and offended Iraqis poured into the streets of all major cities and their reaction was a clear refutation of George W. Bush’s plot: they burned American flags in the hundreds.
Should this Washington document between the invader and the invaded succeed, it would be a clear violation of the national sovereignty of Iraq, to say the least. Meanwhile, the U.S. will continue to plunder Iraq’s natural resources and subject its labor force to the most de-humanizing exploitation and degradation.
The patriotic forces, first and foremost the laboring people’s movement, led by Moqtada al-Sadr, along with other nationalist organizations, have expressed their outrage over such an agreement, which would capitulate their country’s independence to an occupying power. Nevertheless, some Iraqi officials speak in favor of signing the agreement. A draft of this ‘agreement’ emerged for the first time in 2006. It was meant to serve as a legal document legitimizing the crimes committed by individual U.S. servicemen and contract mercenaries (Blackwater comes to mind) against Iraqi citizens with no involvement in the national conflict. The document deprives the Iraqi state apparatus of the right to arrest or prosecute any American involved in service to the occupation, even when he or she commits crimes not related to the U.S. war effort. In the last quarter of 2007, the Bush administration once again brought the issue of the ‘agreement’ forward for discussion in the Iraqi Parliament.
It could safely be said with a high degree of certainty that, for a long time, the U.S. has not been a country that is able to convince other nations to follow its path to peace, democracy and lasting prosperity, the way it has been showcased by an army of advertisers promoting the old cliché of American exceptionalism. In the minds of the overwhelming majority of humanity, including the nations of Western Europe that the U.S. has for almost a century taken for granted, the U.S. socioeconomic system has increasingly become a symbol of violence and fraud. The history of the last half century in particular brilliantly shows that the U.S. has been synonymous with wars, killings, palace coups, threats of annihilation, strangulating sanctions, and false allegations about many countries and nations on earth. Iraq and Afghanistan are only the latest examples

Technorati Tags: United States,Iraq,Iran,democracy,George Bush