BUSTED BIG TIME
Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on
Spying in U.S. After 9/11, Officials Say

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

Click here for the rest.

You know, I really should have jumped on this story, which broke Thursday evening, the moment I heard it and posted it here. This thing has a great deal of potential. I mean, there's a chance with this that the stake finally makes it into Bush's cold and evil undead heart. But when I saw the headlines, instead of actually reading the article, instead of posting it, I thought, "well, that figures." I completely spaced on the significance: I've been reading story after story for years about abuse after abuse coming down from the White House that it's gotten pretty difficult for me to be able to tell what people are actually going to freak out about.

I wonder if that's what it was like for the far left back during the Nixon administration--they already knew Tricky Dick was corrupt and evil, and had plenty of evidence for it; how could they possibly know that the third rate burglary and shoddy cover-up known as Watergate would be the straw that broke the camel's back? I don't want to get ahead of myself; this NSA domestic wire tap scandal may not bring down Bush, but as far as I can tell, it's got a better chance of doing so than any other shocking revelation so far.

According to the Times, no less than twelve officals involved with the operation have talked about it to reporters, so it definitely happened. And these wire taps were all conducted without warrants, which could have easily been gained from the almost always sympathetic FISA court. And the scale is massive; this operation spied on thousands of American citizens. I'm not sure what the GOP talking points on this are, and there might not be any because it's looking like a lot of Republicans are pissed off too, but it's looking like a pretty clear cut violation of fourth amendment prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure.

In short, Bush showed in as black and white a way as possible that he thinks he's above the rule of law, and not just any law: Bush violated what the Supreme Court refers to as the "fundamental rights" of large numbers of US citizens, clearly not an accident.

Could this be the beginning of the end? I sure hope so.

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