Saturday, January 14, 2006

All Well, That Ends Well

OK. So now we find out that President Bush was behind NSA spying on Americans from the day he first came into office. Big deal. After all the Bush Team was able to pull together all the unexamined clues left behind by the weak and traitorous Clinton Administration and with the help of NSA data thwart an Al Queda plot to attack New York City. Wait that was a TV show. What really happened was that President Bush and his crew broke the law and have nothing to show for it. Unless you count thousands of dead Americans and the Constitution in tatters.

"But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.

James Risen, author of the book State of War and credited with first breaking the story about the NSA's domestic surveillance operations, said President Bush personally authorized a change in the agency's long-standing policies shortly after he was sworn in in 2001.

"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program, that almost certainly would never have been approved under normal circumstances and that raised serious legal or political questions," Risen wrote in the book. "Because of the fevered climate created throughout the government by the president and his senior advisers, Bush sent signals of what he wanted done, without explicit presidential orders" and "the most ambitious got the message."

We have a dictator in the White House, a subservent Congress and a Federal Judiciary that will blindly follow the emperor. Things have worked out well for Bush.