Imperialism at its Finest

Is there any aspect of President Bush’s deplorable record regarding intelligence that Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is not willing to excuse and help to cover up?

For over a year, Senator Roberts has been dragging out the investigation into why the Bush administration presented farfetched and just plain wrong intelligence on Iraq and its now bogus WMD program and the claim that Sadaam was in bed with Al Qaeda. The investigation was supposed to begin after the 2004 election, and has finally resurfaced due to Democrats’ protest, forcing the Senate into a closed session late last year.

Now Senator Roberts is trying to stop an investigation into the Bush administration’s decision to allow the NSA to spy on Americans without obtaining warrants required by a 27-year-old federal law enacted to stop that sort of abuse.

Senator Roberts promised to hold a committee vote yesterday on whether to investigate. But he canceled the vote, and then made two astonishing announcements to the press. He claimed he was working with the White House on amending the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to permit warrantless spying. And to make matters worse, he then stated that such an amendment would eliminate the need for an inquiry.

Preventing his own committee from performing an investigation into the wiretapping debacle without even bothering to get the all of the facts surrounding the scandal is the epitome of corruption itself. As the vice chairman of the panel, Senator John Rockefeller IV, denoted that supervising intelligence gathering is in fact the purpose of the intelligence committee.

HELLO!

Senator Rockefeller said the White House had not offered enough information to make an informed judgment possible regarding the NSA’s wiretapping program. The White House is withholding, for instance, such minute details as how the program works, how it is reviewed, how much and what kind of information is collected, and how the information is stored and used.

Senator Roberts said the White House had agreed to provide more briefings to the Senate Intelligence Committee — hardly an enormous concession since it is already required to do so. And he said he and the White House were working out “a fix” for the law. UNBELIEVABLE
FISA was written to prevent the president from violating Americans’ constitutional rights and civil liberties.

CHECKS AND BALANCES.

However, the Bush administration took the opportunity after 9/11 to amend the FISA law—so that President Bush’s cronies had an easier time of eavesdropping on America’s private citizens.

FISA, as it is written, does not in any way prevent Mr. Bush from spying on Al Qaeda members or other terrorists. The last thing America needs is to amend the law to institutionalize the imperial powers Mr. Bush seized after 9/11.