Month: March 2006

Why is it up to Russ Feingold to call for censure of the President (which really just amounts to an unconstitutional bill of attainder with no penalty) for using the military to tap our phones? Why is he all alone?

The entire Senate ought to be voting for a resolution calling for the House to hurry and pass up some articles of impeachment for them to convict and remove on. These folks are supposedly our representatives up there, and what do we get? A bunch of nothing. According to Craig Gilbert at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,

“In dismissing the notion of censure, some senators argue not that the wiretapping is necessarily legal, but that the question is unanswerable for now, either because too little is known about the program or because the courts haven’t put the big constitutional issues to rest. Chief among them: whether a 1978 law against warrantless domestic wiretapping is trumped by the president’s inherent constitutional powers as commander in chief.”

Now, Michael “I never recommended war to anyone” Ledeen may have read over at the Powerline blog that using the military to tap Americans’ phones without warrants is just as legal as can be, but the plain and simple language of the fourth amendment leaves no room for error: the executive may not search us without the consent of an independent judge, and then based only upon sworn testimony describing the probable cause to believe evidence of a crime will be found:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The unconstitutional FISA law which gutted this amendment in the name of protecting it back in 1978 says that they can just go ahead and eavesdrop on you, as long as they let the judges know (rather than asking) within three days:

“(f) Emergency orders

Notwithstanding any other provision of this subchapter, when the Attorney General reasonably determines that—

(1) an emergency situation exists with respect to the employment of electronic surveillance to obtain foreign intelligence information before an order authorizing such surveillance can with due diligence be obtained; and

(2) the factual basis for issuance of an order under this subchapter to approve such surveillance exists;

he may authorize the emergency employment of electronic surveillance if a judge having jurisdiction under section 1803 of this title is informed by the Attorney General or his designee at the time of such authorization that the decision has been made to employ emergency electronic surveillance and if an application in accordance with this subchapter is made to that judge as soon as practicable, but not more than 72 hours after the Attorney General authorizes such surveillance.”

There, you see, FISA is already unconstitutional on its face, but at least it makes going beyond it a serious offense.

Prohibited activities

A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally—

(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or

(2) discloses or uses information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized by statute. …

Penalties

An offense described in this section is punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both.

So when George Bush gets up there in front of the microphone in defense of this spying and claims,

“As president and commander in chief, I have the constitutional responsibility and the constitutional authority to protect our country. Article 2 of the constitution gives me that responsibility and the authority necessary to fulfil it.”

He is doing nothing more than confess to multiple counts of a serious felony. His argument is as preposterous as the Federalist Society goofballs who told him to go out there to say it.

Nowhere in the Constitution is the president charged with “protecting the country.” Read Article Two. It’s not long. The President is the boss of departments created by congress. That’s it. His job is to enforce the laws they pass, and carry out the policies they create, not do anything he imagines might “protect” people.

Besides that, the amendments to the Constitution were just that: amendments: “Declaratory and Restrictive Clauses,” by the people, against the new government, “to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers.” This plainly means that the fourth amendment trumps all of Articles I-VII, no matter what they say.

And if the whole thing is okay the way it is, why does Senator Roberts want to change the law to make it legal?

Because it’s not.

Then again, if John “enemy combatant” Roberts and his pals on the Supreme Court disagree, then I guess the constitution just says whatever they say it does.

The old rule of law, which purportedly bound the powers of this government, is being crushed by the force of unlimited budgets, technology and secrecy – during “wartime.” Despite all this, largely due to overwhelming political illiteracy and gerrymandered districts, it seems likely that more than 90% of the House and Senators up for reelection this year are safe in their seats as America’s careening slide into tyranny continues.

Update: Make that 98, Harkin has signed on too. Thanks S.F.

Update II: Okay, Boxer has signed on too, but I still can’t stand her.

This comes from Antiwar.com columnist Aaron Glantz:

Dear Friends,

I’m proud to report that my book, How America Lost Iraq, is now available in paperback!

How America Lost Iraq a first person account of an unembedded journalist that shows how the United States went from being seen as liberators when we first got rid of Saddam to brutal occupiers just a year later. The book was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller when it came out in hardback last year. The Seattle Times review called the book “an important first-person document historians will look to in the future as they draw a more complete picture of America’s catastrophic victory in Iraq.”

How America Lost Iraq is the story of how the Bush Administration turned victory into defeat in Iraq. More than that, though, it is a book about what it’s like to be a regular Iraqi person under U.S. occupation. The story isn’t pretty and, unfortunately, it remains as current as ever.

Peace,
Aaron Glantz

Even though it’s really all the State’s fault that they did not go to the FISA court and get permission to search Zacharias Moussaoui’s computer until after the 9/11 attacks, it is true that he was in custody, had knowlege of at least some of the hijackers, and failed to give warning. For this the man should hang, but some stupid lawyer for the TSA had to screw all that up by sending detailed notes on how to testify to all the government witnesses in the sentencing.

She is now getting a paid vacation, at your expense, at the rate of $120,000 a year.

Don’t worry, thanks to the wonderful power of the Commander in Chief to “determine” in a “finding” that someone is an enemy combatant outside the protection of the law, Moussaoui can still be kidnapped by the military and executed in a secret ghost prison in the former Soviet Union.

While President Bush was threatening Iran on Monday, he blamed the Iraqi Shiites and Iran for the insurgency. According to the AFP, Bush said that:

“Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq.”

I know what you’re thinking: President Bush is so stupid that giant mistakes like this should just be taken with a grain of salt. Even if he’s lashing out at Iran for intervening in the affairs of the Iraqi Shia, surely he’s not blaming the “improvised explosive devices” that are killing American soldiers and Marines in Iraq on the Shia. … Wrong. That’s exactly what he was doing.

“Asked about the linkage to Shiite forces, two US officials who declined to be named pointed to previously reported ties between the government of Iran and radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.”

The first problem is that the next day General Pace said he had no evidence whatsoever to back up the president’s false assertions and Secretary Rumsfeld just dissembled. The second is that the last time al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army was in violent conflict with the US was back in August of 2004 and the roadside bomb was not their tactic, those have been the tool of the home-grown Sunni insurgency which is led by the ex-Ba’athists and the recently under fire foreign fighter jihadist types.

Though al-Sadr has openly threatened war if America were to bomb Iran, he had been known as the leader of the least Iran-loyal faction among the Iraqi Shia, denouncing the federalism in the new constitution, and insisting on Iraqi nationalism regardless of religion and ethnicity. Recently, his political fortunes have been said to be on the rise, and though that may be in conflict with some genius’s plan to spread the war, a leader of the Iraqi insurgency he is not.

Is it possible that Iran is supplying bomb material to the Sunnis, seeing advantage in keeping America bogged down in its fight against the insurgency and forced to allow for expanded Iranian influence in Iraq? Sure, as far as I know, but I’ve seen no evidence of that, and it wasn’t the accusation in this case.

So why is Bush trying to pin this three year old war on Iran? – besides the fact that the liar Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was working for them of course, but Bush was shopping for their bill of goods, so that doesn’t count. It was Bush who sent the US Army into Iraq with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq on their heels and pushed this democracy crap, resulting in the election to power of the SCIRI-Da’wa-Iran dominated United Iraqi Alliance in January of 2004 and December 2005.

Remember the Salvador option? That was the US bringing the sickest killers of the SCIRI’s Badr Brigades into the “interior ministry” of the new Iraqi government, and setting them loose on the Sunni. They have been US allies. Now our government is doing what it does to all its loyal servants, it’s betraying them.

Justin Raimondo nailed it last week in his article “Biddle’s Pivot.” After quoting the article “The Grand Delusion” by Stephen Biddle (Any relation to the Chairman of the second Bank of the United States?) in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, advising a rethinking of the direction of America’s Iraq policy, Raimondo says:

“What this means, in effect, is that it is time to start tilting toward the Sunnis. If the Shi’ites continue to defy U.S. efforts to shape the political landscape of postwar Iraq, then we must play the Sunni card, employing force if necessary”

Now here comes Time magazine explaining the details,

“The ongoing dialogue between the U.S. and the Sunni insurgency is based on a shared wariness about the influence of Iran and its supporters in Iraq. U.S. officials are now saying bluntly that it’s time to bring back the Baath Party, excluding only those that are guilty of specific crimes. That reflects a growing acceptance among U.S. officials that the military and bureaucratic know-how in the Sunni community is badly needed, even to help run the security forces that the U.S. is standing up.”

The real change took place last April when Da’wa leader and Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and Kurdish Democratic Party leader and Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani offered their militias, the Badr Brigades and the peshmergas in the service of the US Army to annihilate the Sunni insurgency. The American response was a nervous “thanks but no thanks.” At that point, America became the protectors of the very Sunni insurgency our army had been, and has continued, fighting. While Badr/Iraqi Army death squads have flourished, the full scale invasion of the Sunni triangle hasn’t been allowed to happen – so far.

Were full scale war to break out between factions, the administration, based on the flimsy lies they’ve already started to toss out there, could blame it all on the Shi’ites and Iran, turn on a dime and start the war again – the war to reinstall the Sunni minority and the Ba’ath Party.

Who benefits from an Iraq civil war? The Kurds got theirs, and look as though they’ll be able to keep it. Same for the Shia in the South. These two regions hold the oil wealth, and the federalism described in the constitution guarantees they won’t have to share it with the Sunnis. The Iraqi Sunni don’t want civil war either. They would be crushed by the Badr/Kurd Army (if they can hold their alliance together).

That only leave two forces left to benefit: The foreign religious jihadists types whose holy war is threatened by cross-religious/cross-ethnic lines Iraqi nationalism, and the United States of America which needs an excuse to bomb Iran since nobody believes their stupid lies about Iranian nuclear weapons anymore.

It always seemed to me that the empowering of Iran was accidental, as the US completely underestimated the power of Ayatollah Sistani to demand direct elections, and that Bush/Cheney would never let them get away with it. It is just another reason to bomb Iran, though I wondered how our government thought they could get away with bombing Iran while the US army is surrounded by Iran-loyal Shi’ite militias who have tolerated the US presence so far and been the major recipients of American training and weapons.

Getting our attention deficit brains ready for the switch seems to be part of the plan. Soon will come the purge of the Iraqi Army.

Oh, and you’ll like this from Time too:

“One senior Baathist talking about the Americans said to me, recently, ‘In the 1980s we were allies, how did we end up on opposite sides?’ The Baathists are secular nationalists, they never allied with al-Qaeda or hardline Islamists when they were in power, and they’ve always been the sworn enemy of the soon-to-be-nuclear-armed regime in Iran. They share two of America’s main enemies, al-Qaeda and Iran. The Baathists and al-Qaeda elements who have worked together in the insurgency have always been uncomfortable bedfellows. And they’ve left little doubt in each other’s minds that once the Americans leave, they’ll have to fight each other.”

We ended up on opposite sides because the President’s father had the head of the new bipartisan Iraq Study Committee, his secretary of state, James Baker III, “emphasize” instructions to America’s ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, in July of 1990, that she should tell Saddam Hussein that the US government didn’t care one way or another if Iraq invaded Kuwait. (I once met the son of a Kuwaiti muky-muck, who said he didn’t appreciate it very much.) The US then invaded and imposed 12 years of blockade and no-fly zone bombing. Is depleted uranium bad for the memory centers of the brain or what?

As myself, everyone at Antiwar.com and on this side of reason has said all along, contrary to the claims of the administration, Saddam Hussein was a natural enemy of the jihadist radical types that are our enemy.

And of course the foreign terrorist presence in Iraq was only tolerated by the local Sunnis as a temporary measure against the US, I debunked the President’s pathetic scare tactic of a Osama bin Laden dominated Iraq on the radio last November, and on the blog in December.

Anyway, the point is that it seems to this armchair analyst that the administration does indeed plan to bomb Iran, and that this recent spout of lies and changing sides by our “servants” is just part of the setup.

More visionary brilliance from the neolibertarians at TechCentralStation:

For the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans should propose an idea so big that it stretches to the stars. Republicans should commit the government to building a space elevator by 2020. …

Space elevators could make going into orbit as cheap as flying across the Pacific. They could make space vacations financially feasible for many Americans.

Bitchin’! Dude, I cannot wait to take a spacecation – probably in my new capacity as a slave, mining helium-3 on the moon to pay off my share of the quadrillion-dollar national debt the project will incur, but still. Space!

But wait, it gets better:

Space elevators would also give the U.S. the high-ground in any future military conflict. With the elevators we could easily launch or destroy spy satellites. They would also help the U.S. set up a “Star Wars” missile defense system. Finally, space elevators would allow the military to deploy inexpensive non-explosive kinetic weapons that could be dropped from orbit on our enemies.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Matt, this is the raddest idea I have ever heard of in my pitiful, Earth-bound life! Thanks for giving me a reason to go on! And I couldn’t agree more: the welfare-warfare state has outgrown this tiny orb. But why wait until 2020? I want this thing up while I’m still young, dammit! That’s why I urge you to please write your congressional representatives and demand a space elevator (hell, make that two space elevators – think of the lines) by the end of President Bush’s second term.

(Via Gene Healy.)

Niall Ferguson reminds us that when a president’s got nothin’, he’s got nothin’ to lose.