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As we’ve seen in his botched handling of everything from the Iraqi occupation to the Katrina disaster, George W is not much of a president. But, let’s give credit where it’s due – Bush has been a heck of a performer in two areas: spying and lying.
Both of these have come to the fore with the recent revelation that he has secretly and unilaterally been using the national security agency to spy on U.S. citizens. He has done so frequently and illegally, not bothering to get a judicial warrant for his eavesdropping on untold numbers of our phone calls and e-mails, as required by the Constitution and the law.
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Caught spying on us, George W then shifted to lying to us. His most dangerous whopper is the claim that only bad guys are spied on – i.e., those Americans who’ve been talking to al Qaeda operatives abroad. To the contrary, Bush’s spy program is nowhere near this focused or competent. Instead, NSA has been making wholesale sweeps of domestic communications, then using crude computer searches to finger thousands of “terrorist suspects.” The FBI now admits that virtually all of these secret taps have been on innocent Americans having nothing whatsoever to do with al Qaeda or terrorism.
One guy whom the Bushites claimed to have caught in their unconstitutional terrorist net turns out to be a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. We hardly need to undo the genius of our Constitution’s authors just to nab kooks like this. In fact, the FBI now concedes that the spy program had nothing to do with catching this guy.
This is Jim Hightower saying… George W essentially is saying that he’s above the law and that, well, folks just need to trust him to do the right thing. Well, no George, we don’t! You’ve certainly not earned our trust, but more importantly, ours is not a government based on trusting some officials, but on holding all officials accountable to the rule of the law.
Sources:
“Spies, Lies and Wiretaps,” The New York Times, January 29, 2006.
“Surveillance in a ‘Different World,'” The New York Times, January 31, 2006.