The Osterley Times: Wiretapping

Showing posts with label Wiretapping. Show all posts

Thursday, September 09, 2010

Phone hacking was rife at News of the World, claims new witness.

There's more trouble afoot for Andy Coulson and the Con-Dem alliance as yet another ex-News of the World journalist has gone public to claim that hacking into people's mobiles was "rife" at that newspaper and expressed his incredulity that Coulson wouldn't have known about it.

Paul McMullan, a former features executive and then member of the newspaper's investigations team, says that he personally commissioned private investigators to commit several hundred acts which could be regarded as unlawful, that use of illegal techniques was no secret at the paper, and that senior editors, including Coulson, were aware this was going on.

"How can Coulson possibly say he didn't know what was going on with the private investigators?" he asked.

Coulson has always said he had no knowledge of any such activity. News International has maintained that royal reporter Clive Goodman, jailed for hacking phones belonging to members of the royal household, was the only journalist involved in the practice.

This is becoming very dangerous for Cameron and his coalition. We know from the reporting of the New York Times that two other journalists made essentially the same point to that newspaper; that this practice was widespread at the News of The World and that is stretches belief for Coulson to continue to claim that he was ignorant of such a practice at his newspaper.

Cameron has repeatedly insisted that he has faith in Coulson, and implied that those who question Coulson's word on this subject have their own bitter reasons for doing so. (They were fired and are bitter. They had alcohol problems. They were on drugs.) That argument becomes harder and harder to insist upon the more people come forward to question Coulson's insistence that he had no knowledge of what was taking place in his own newsroom.

McMullan is one of six former News of the World journalists who have independently told the Guardian that Coulson, who was deputy editor from 2000 and editor from January 2003 to January 2007, knew that his reporters were engaging in unlawful acts.

McMullan's decision to speak publicly about illegal techniques at the paper came as the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, paved the way for a second, powerful committee of MPs to investigate the scandal.

Cameron's judgement is at question here. And he is loudly defending Coulson, whilst more and more of Coulson's employees come forward to state that Coulson was well aware of what was taking place on his own watch.

Moreover, Paul McMullan doesn't even believe now that it was wrong for reporters to behave in this way.

He believes Coulson was right to allow his reporters to invade privacy in order to nail wrongdoers: "Investigative journalism is a noble profession but we have to do ignoble things." He says that at the time, reporters did not believe it was illegal to hack voicemail and were quite open about it. "Most reporters did it themselves, sitting at their desk. It was something that people would do when they were bored sitting outside somebody's house. I don't think at the time senior editors at the paper thought it was an issue. Everybody was doing it.

"Coulson would certainly be well aware that the practice was pretty widespread. He is conceivably telling the truth when he says he didn't specifically know every time a reporter would do it. I wouldn't have told him. It wasn't of significance for me to say I just rang up David Beckham and listened to his messages. In general terms, he would have known that reporters were doing it."

McMullan argues that these techniques are essential to investigative work. "How can Coulson possibly say he didn't know what was going on with [private investigators]? He was the brains behind the investigations department [to which McMullan was transferred by Coulson]. How can he say he had no idea about how it works? It's just a shame that you are not awarded prizes for it. Instead, you are regulated so that wrongdoers can carry on with their corruption."

McMullan's argument, that they were essentially "the good guys" chasing "the corrupt" explains just how such a practice came to be justified within the News of the World.

And all of these investigators had to be paid for. How can it be possible that Coulson didn't know what they were doing to justify the amount of money his paper was paying them?

All six of the former journalists who worked for Coulson at the News of the World paint the same picture of a newsroom where private investigators were used routinely to gather information by illegal means and where some reporters did so themselves. They say senior editors knew about this, because reporters could not commission private investigators without going through their desk editor; because editors routinely demanded to know the source of information in stories; and because executives kept tight control of their budgets.

Cameron is tying his colours to what looks like an incredibly shaky mast. Coulson's position is beginning to look untenable.

Click here for full article.

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal.

At last someone officially says it:

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.
In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.

The judge ruled that the expansive use of the state secrets privilege amounted to "unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”

That position, he said, would enable government officials to flout the warrant law, even though Congress had enacted it “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”

The lawyers have had to jump through extraordinary hoops to get this far, in effect proving that their clients had been illegally spied upon by a government that cried, "State secrets" every time they attempted to prove their case.

The ruling is the second time a federal judge has declared the program of wiretapping without warrants to be illegal. But a 2006 decision by a federal judge in Detroit, Anna Diggs Taylor, was reversed on the grounds that those plaintiffs could not prove that they had been wiretapped and so lacked legal standing to sue.
Although the plaintiffs in the Haramain case were not allowed to use the document to prove that they had standing, Mr. Eisenberg and six other lawyers working on the case were able to use public information — including a 2007 speech by an F.B.I. official who acknowledged that Al Haramain had been placed under surveillance — to prove it had been wiretapped.

Judge Walker’s opinion cataloged other such evidence and declared that the plaintiffs had shown they were wiretapped in a manner that required a warrant. He said the government had failed to produce a warrant, so he granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs.

It's been an extraordinarily long journey, made more difficult every step of the way by the decision of the Bush regime to claim "state secrets" would be exposed if the lawyers were given any access to government files. A practice rather shamefully defended by the Obama administration.

The plaintiffs will now sue for damages. But, at last, a court has said what the Bush regime always denied was true. Their activities were illegal. In order to listen to suspected persons conversations, a warrant was required. And the Bush regime didn't even bother asking for one. And they didn't ask for one because of Dick Cheney's crazy ideas about executive power. The court has ruled that Cheney was flat out wrong. That's a victory for common sense.

Click here for full article.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Turley: "We Are Begining To Look Like The Countries We Despise."

Jonathan Turley gives the perfect reasoning for the utterly spineless behaviour of the Democratic party at the moment. They love to reveal the fact that the Bush administration committed crimes - because this is obviously politically helpful to them - but they do not want to prosecute those crimes, as all roads lead to Bush, and they desperately don't want to indict Bush.

But the US can't be the "nation of laws" which Obama describes until failure to obey the law is punished. At the moment, I'm finding it hard to keep up with just how many laws the Bush administration broke.

Friday, April 10, 2009

Holder Defends Bush on Wiretapping.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Keith Olbermann continues to talk about the disappointment many Obama supporters are feeling over the stance the Obama administration is taking vis-a-vis presidential power and state secrets.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Obama Sides with Bush on Wiretaps.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Olbermann on what is the greatest disappointment so far from the Obama administration: Obama is continuing - and in some ways expanding - Bush's claims of the president's extraordinary powers.

Obama ran for office promising the exact opposite of what he is doing here. I used to say that he needed more time, but it's becoming harder and harder to believe that he is ever going to prosecute these people if he is claiming for himself the same rights which he once condemned.

UPDATE:

And he's doing the same regarding Bagram airbase, one of the US's most notorious foreign prisons:

And just a month after the president—with some fanfare—ordered the Guantanamo closing, his administration embraced the Bush administration’s position that the Bagram detainees should properly be held in what is effectively a legal no man’s land, barred from having a court hear their cases.

That premise, which the Supreme Court in several cases involving terrorism detainees already has rejected, now has been cast off by a federal judge hearing the claims of a handful of prisoners who were captured outside of Afghanistan—in Dubai and Thailand, for example—and taken to Bagram for detention. These prisoners, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled last week, are “virtually identical” to the Guantanamo detainees in whose favor the Supreme Court already has ruled.

“They are noncitizens who were (as alleged here) apprehended in foreign lands far from the United States and brought to yet another country for detention,” Bates wrote. Yet the administration, he added, advocates different treatment depending on whether it “ship[s] otherwise identically situated detainees to Guantanamo or instead to Bagram.”

Arguing that Bagram detainees are different from those at Guantanamo because they are held in a “theater of war” seemed particularly galling to Bates. The U.S. government itself is responsible for taking these detainees into the combat zone. “Such rendition resurrects the same specter of limitless executive power” that the Supreme Court has rejected and reinvigorates the concern that the president can move detainees “physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely.”

This was a fundamental breach of justice and morality when the Bush administration did it. It is precisely the same breach—made worse by the stench of hypocrisy—when the Obama administration does it.

I've read commenter's on some left wing blogs argue that Obama has to give the intelligence agencies what they want or, as they did with Kennedy, they will simply kill him. I'm sorry but that's giving Obama an awful lot of leeway as far as I am concerned.

No-one forced him to campaign on any of this stuff, but he did, and that was what made him so refreshing and inspiring. Here was someone saying what we all knew to be right.

If Obama is allowed to keep these powers - "because if he does not the intelligence agencies will kill him" - then the principle will have been established that the US president, for whatever reason, can hold people beyond the range of any court and that he can establish legal black holes.

That was wrong when Bush tried it and it's wrong if Obama's trying it. My objection to this has always been to the principle, and I am astonished that some on the left seem to find a reasoning for this as long as it's Obama who is behaving as if he is a King, rather than George W.

In principle this is wrong and it doesn't matter which party the president represents. It doesn't matter if we think the president is a "good guy". There are no "good ways" to give a president powers over people which dispense with their habeas corpus rights.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Pelosi on Bush: "A Total Failure."

"God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States — a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject."

I happen to agree with her reading of Bush's record, but the inability of the Democratic Congress to stand up to such a failure has been an eye opener.

And, leaving aside the fact that he is a failure, he has also broken the law, but it was Pelosi who insisted that he must never pay the price for that.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Sen Feingold: "A Black Mark on the History of our Country".

Feingold states that this is, "one of the greatest assaults on our constitution in the history of our country".

He is optimistic that Obama will overturn this legislation, but Obama's vote is a deep, deep disappointment. I'm with Rachel Maddow on this one, I simply don't understand why the Democrats have collapsed on this issue.

And Obama has supplied John McCain with an open goal, as Hillary Clinton has voted against the bill:

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said the vote showed Clinton had more principle than Obama. "Charting Barack Obama's reversals on this issue reads like a road map to political expediency -- further demonstrating he uses his word as a political tool, not a principled commitment. However today, it appears the same cannot be said of Senator Clinton," he said.

It's very hard to mount a defence against the McCain team's attack. For this is the worst kind of political expediency.

Glenn Greenwald spells it out:

Obama's vote in favor of cloture, in particular, cemented the complete betrayal of the commitment he made back in October when seeking the Democratic nomination. Back then, Obama's spokesman -- in response to demands for a clear statement of Obama's views on the spying controversy after he had previously given a vague and noncommittal statement -- issued this emphatic vow:
To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.
But the bill today does include retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. Nonetheless, Obama voted for cloture on the bill -- the exact opposition of supporting a filibuster -- and then voted for the bill itself. A more complete abandonment of an unambiguous campaign promise is difficult to imagine.

Jonathan Turley yesterday laid out exactly what the Democrats were about to do: "They are trying to conceal a crime that is hiding in plain view. That everyone can see... Nobody wants to have a confrontation over the fact that the president committed a felony. Not once, but at least thirty times... The founders would have found this incomprehensible."

The best comment on all of this comes from a commenter at Daily Kos:

By the time the election rolls around...
the only people left supporting Bush will be the democrats in the House and Senate.

Why the Democrats feel the need to capitulate to the least popular - and possibly the worst ever - President of all time, simply baffles me.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Special Comment on FISA and Obama

Part 1.

Part 2.

According to John Dean the FISA amendments apparently only offer immunity in civil cases rather than criminal cases.

Olbermann here offers Obama a way out of the dead end street he appears to have boxed himself into.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Obama: Telecom Immunity Doesn't Override National Security

Okay, now I'm officially confused. Obama had originally promised to back the FISA bill but to work when president to remove the proposed Telecom immunity clause from the bill. I had always presumed that the Democratic leadership had been advised by Bush of what he was actually doing and that this was why the Democrats were so keen to push to give immunity.

But now the Democratic leadership are saying that they will support a filibuster while Obama is continuing to support the bill.

He has stated:

"The bill has changed. So I don't think the security threats have changed, I think the security threats are similar. My view on FISA has always been that the issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security interests of the American people."

However, Sens. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) have promised to do all that they can to remove retroactive immunity from the legislation and Harry Reid's office has issued a statement saying that he will do all that he can to help them:

Unfortunately, the FISA compromise bill establishes a process where the likely outcome is immunity to the telecommunications carriers who participated in the President’s warrantless wiretapping program. Sen. Reid remains opposed to retroactive immunity, which undermines efforts to hold the Bush Administration accountable for violating the law. Thus, he will cosponsor the amendment offered by Senators Dodd and Feingold to strip out the immunity provision, and support their efforts to strip immunity on the floor.

Even Nancy Pelosi has stated that it would be "healthy and wholesome" were the Senate to filibuster the bill.

Obama's position makes no sense. He now says that going after the phone companies was never more important than finding out what actually took place here, which completely misses the point I think. Going after the phone companies was the only way we were ever going to find out what had taken place here.

And I had always presumed that he was reversing his position on the filibuster due to pressure from other Democrats, but with Reid and Pelosi now appearing to favour the filibuster I am left wondering why Obama is taking the position that he is taking.

Perhaps he is suffering from that continual Democratic fear of being portrayed as weak on national security by the Republicans going into an election, which is a great shame. Up until now Obama has been great at redefining these issues in a way that does not play into this Republican game plan.

Perhaps he's playing the long game, publicly supporting a bill that he knows will be filibustered by Dodd and Feingold, thus denying McCain the ability to label him soft on national security during the run up to the election. But, I freely admit, I'm grasping at straws here.

I previously thought I could see what he was up to, I have to now admit to myself that I don't.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Phony conservatives.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does a very good job exposing just how far from Conservatism the modern Republican party has become. They're a sham, they're not even conservatives.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Congress Prepares to GUT the Fourth Amendment!

OLBERMANN: Have the Democrats blinked or Mr. Feingold and Mr. Leahy are going to kill this in the Senate?

TURLEY: Well, this is more like a one-man staring contest. I mean, the Democrats never really were engaged in this. In fact, they repeatedly tried to cave in to the White House, only be stopped by civil libertarians and bloggers. And each time they would put it on the shelf, wait a few months, they did this before, reintroduced it with Jay Rockefeller‘s support, and then there was another great, you know, dustup and they pulled it back.

I think they‘re simply waiting to see if the public‘s interest will wane and we‘ll see that tomorrow, because this bill has, quite literally, no public value for citizens or civil liberties. It is reverse engineering, though the type of thing that the Bush administration is famous for, and now the Democrats are doing—that is to change the law to conform to past conduct.

It‘s what any criminal would love to do. You rob a bank, go to the legislature, and change the law to say that robbing banks is lawful.

The Democrats have gone along with this because any investigation into this would also have to look into their own actions.

Israeli jet exercise is warning to Iran over nuclear facilities, Pentagon says

As news is leaked of an Israeli military exercise, which many are proclaiming was a warning of their intent to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said that any such attack would turn the region into "a fireball" and has warned that he would immediately resign were Israel to carry out this threat.

More than 100 Israeli F-16s and F-15s flew more than 900 miles, roughly the distance from Israel to Iran's Natanz nuclear plant. They were accompanied by refuelling planes and helicopters for rescuing any downed crews.

A source in Washington described the exercise as "sabre-rattling" and said he did not think an attack was imminent.

"If the Israelis were serious about it, no one would know about it until after it has happened," he said.

Nonetheless, the development sent oil prices higher after it was leaked to the New York Times by the Pentagon.

This really shouldn't be too surprising to anyone. After all, Olmert was said to have left the White House recently, after a meeting with Bush and Cheney, "quite satisfied" that the Iranian issue was not off the table and neo-conservative Daniel Pipes has gone as far as to say that Bush intends to carry out a "massive" attack in the window between the November elections and Bush's departure from office, particularly if Democratic Senator Barack Obama is his successor.

The notion that a president could launch an attack during the period between the election and the day he hands over to his successor is about as sick as it gets, but nothing would sum up Bush and Cheney's contempt for what ordinary Americans think better than that.

So, this recent Israeli show of power is another way of gearing the public up for a possible attack on Iran, despite the fact that no-one has to this day ever shown any proof that Iran are pursuing a nuclear weapon.

We are being asked to accept the hysterical estimations of the same people who told us that Iraq had WMD and, in a manner typical of neo-con disregard for international norms, we are being prepared for a breach of Iran's territorial integrity as if such a thing were routine. Mohamed ElBaradei, by threatening to resign, is trying to make us all aware that, not only is this far from routine, it is actually profoundly dangerous.

This week Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, repeated his warning that Iran remained the biggest threat in the region. "I don't think we deserve to live under the threat of a nuclear Iran," he said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald published on Thursday.

Shaul Mofaz, a deputy prime minister and former army chief, provoked criticism this month when he told an Israeli newspaper that an attack was unavoidable. "If Iran continues its programme to develop nuclear weapons we will attack it," said Mofaz, who is in charge of Israel's strategic dialogue with the US over such issues as Iran.

It is, of course, true that Israel does not deserve to live under the threat of a nuclear Iran. However, it is also true that Iran and the rest of the Middle East does not deserve to have to live under the threat of a nuclear Israel. But that's the problem with all nuclear powers, they all seem to think that the NNPT is there to prevent others from acquiring what they already possess and they ignore the parts of the NNPT which requires that they disarm. Israel, of course, has gone even further and simply refused to sign up to the NNPT at all. Indeed, we are all supposed to pretend that we don't even know that Israel is a nuclear power at all as she sticks to her ludicrous stance of "nuclear ambiguity".

But only in a world where George Bush and his ilk have presided for seven years would we be hearing threats of imminent attacks upon other sovereign nations and be asked to react as if the good guys were finally going in to clean up that violent saloon.

Bush has governed with a contempt for both international and US domestic law and - as we witnessed through the recent Democratic capitulation over wiretapping and immunity - he has gotten away with this largely due to the utter spinelessness of the Democratic party.

America is supposed to a nation governed by laws, but Bush has frequently dismissed laws and conventions which he found tedious and the Democratic party has never pushed to make him accountable. Indeed, Nancy Pelosi went out of her way to state that impeachment was off the table and to reassure Republicans that, if her party won the mid-term elections, that Bush and Cheney would never be held accountable for the crimes they had committed.

So, any of us appalled at the notion that Bush could take part in, or allow Israel to spearhead, an attack on Iran in the period between the election and the new president's inauguration, would have to hold Pelosi and the Democrats at least partially responsible for allowing Bush to operate so far outside of international norms - for such a long period of time - that he could even consider such an action in the first place.

The Democrats have, time and again, handed Bush a Get Out Of Jail Free card. He's behaving as if he's untouchable because the Democrats, and most especially Nancy Pelosi, have told him that he is.

Click title for full article.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

FISA passed, but there's NO immunity for Telecoms.

Astonishingly, the Democrats have not caved in under Republican pressure and a new FISA bill has just been passed which does not grant immunity to the Telecoms.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

One Democrat after the next -- of all stripes -- delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law, oversight on presidential eavesdropping, and safeguards on government spying. They swatted away the GOP's fear-mongering claims with the dismissive contempt such tactics deserve, rejecting the principle that has predominated political debate in this country since 9/11: that the threat of the Terrorists means we must live under the rule of an omnipotent President and a dismantled constitutional framework.

It is, of course, true that this bill will have a hard time passing the Senate (though if even most House Blue Dogs were persuaded to support this bill, why can't most Democratic Senators who previously voted for the Rockefeller bill be persuaded?). It's also true that even if it did pass the Senate, the President will veto it, and there won't be enough votes to override the veto. So this bill won't become law, but that doesn't matter.

The reality is that the best possible outcome here is nothing -- we lived quite well for 30 years under FISA and if no new bill is passed, we will continue to live under FISA. FISA grants extremely broad eavesdropping powers to the President and the FISA court virtually never interferes with any eavesdropping activities. And the only "fix" to FISA that is even arguably necessary -- allowing eavesdropping on foreign-to-foreign calls without warrants -- has the support of virtually everyone in Congress and could be easily passed as a stand-alone measure.

At last the Democrats can claim a victory over the Bush fear mongers. And, at last, the Democrats are using Congress to do the very thing that they were elected to do. Oppose Bush and stop him. So, despite all the hot air that Bush supporters have been blowing for the past few months, FISA is once again established as "the exclusive authority" for collecting intelligence within the United States.

So there we have it, FISA re-established in it's rightful place and no immunity for the lawbreakers. Excellent.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Olbermann: The Petulant President.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

President Bush: Holding telecoms accountable is “patently unfair”

Bush's argument is bizarre. "You can't expect phone companies to participate if they feel that they are going to be sued".

That's bollocks:

The claim that telecoms will cease to cooperate without retroactive immunity is deeply dishonest on multiple levels, but the dishonesty is most easily understood when one realizes that, under the law, telecoms are required to cooperate with legal requests from the government. They don't have the option to "refuse."

"The government said to those that are alleged to have helped us, 'It's in our national interests and it's legal.'"

The problem was the government got that wrong. It wasn't legal. It was outside of FISA, which is the "exclusive" means of authorising this kind of activity.

And then he claims that he doesn't want to get into Attorney's heads, but states that he thinks they see "a financial gravy train". No, they see a crime.

He then states that, "It's unfair, it's patently unfair" for telecoms to be prosecuted for this because, I assume, the government told them what they were doing was legal.

Whose fault is that? It was the government who lied to them. And I just love how he can state categorically what the government said and then say that they said this "to those that are alleged to have helped us". Right, so the government categorically said something... but don't read into that that Telecoms gave us what we want.... Just give them fucking immunity......

He continues throughout to make an illogical insistence that telecoms won't participate if they think they will be sued. They would have no choice other than to co-operate if a legal request were made and they will only be sued if they work outside of FISA. Which they did. And the people who wrongly told them this was legal were the Bush regime.

Which he why he now seeks immunity.

If the government got it wrong when they told the telecoms that their request was legal, and if the telecoms acted in good faith, then this is something that a court would take into account in any consideration that it made. So whose ass is Bush actually trying to save here?

Sunday, February 24, 2008

House Democrats Save America!

Here's a parody video that rebukes the fearmongering video that the House GOP just put out about the "destruction of the world" because the Telecoms didn't get immunity.

McConnell/Mukasey: Eavesdropping outside of FISA is "illegal"

Well, knock me down with a feather. When it was pointed out that the US Government is free to commence surveillance without a warrant when there is no time to obtain one, DNI Mike McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote back stating:

[You imply that the emergency authorization process under FISA is an adequate substitute for the legislative authorities that have elapsed. This assertion reflects a basic misunderstanding about FISA's emergency authorization provisions. Specifically, you assert that the National Security Agency (NSA) or Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "may begin surveillance immediately" in an emergency situation. FISA requires far more, and it would be illegal to proceed as you suggest].

It's illegal to wiretap without FISA authority after all. Haven't they spent the last seven years arguing precisely the opposite of that?

Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Stop The Spying

A petition has been launched to stop telecom immunity.

Americans are speaking out — thousands have taken action, hundreds have participated in our collaborative multimedia project with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and have sent us video testimonials and pictures expressing their opposition to telecom immunity and warrantless spying.

The House is thus far refusing to follow the Senate’s lead on telecom immunity. And last week, a majority in the House heeded the call of the nearly 45,000 PFAW petition signers and voted to hold White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress for their failure to honor congressional subpoenas.

The contempt vote showed that the House is ready to hold the administration accountable AND that petitions can make a real difference (in whipping votes, trying to move the contempt resolution, our allies on the Hill specifically cited the PFAW petition as part of the case that Americans wanted to see administration officials held accountable to the rule of law).

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

Friday, February 22, 2008

The Republican Fear Machine Kicks into Action

This is so typical of the Republicans. They have the audacity to attack Obama for campaigning on a slogan of hope and yet they dive straight in with another of their fear campaigns.

Glenn Greenwald:

Just by the way, the whole premise of the ad is that we're all about to be slaughtered because the Protect America Act expired. It expired because George Bush threatened to veto any extensions and House Republicans unanimously voted against any extension. Our blood, to be gushing shortly like a volcanic eruption, will be on their loving, protective hands.

Bush has chosen to let this expire as he thinks it's more important to give telecoms immunity than it is to protect Americans. And that's the long and short of it.

How did this guy ever become the most unpopular president in the history of the United States? Oh, that's right, because he thinks ordinary Americans are too stupid to see this crass political manoeuvring for what it is.

Click title for Greenwald's article.