In case you missed it amid the flurry of activity around the White House this week, this tidbit from Wired.com:
The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
In a filing in San Francisco federal court, President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor.
While the new president has taken a few positive steps to reverse some Bush doctrines since his inauguration on Tuesday, in this case Obama shows that he defends and agrees with the previous administration’s illegal wiretapping. We should also assume that he will continue it.
From Wired again:
The legal brouhaha concerns Walker’s decision to admit as evidence a classified document allegedly showing that two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration in 2004.
The lawyers — Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoo — sued the Bush administration after the U.S. Treasury Department accidentally released the Top Secret memo to them. At one point, the courts had ordered the document, which has never been made public, returned and removed from the case.
The document’s admission to the case is central for the two former lawyers of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation charity to acquire legal standing so they may challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless-eavesdropping program Bush publicly acknowledged in 2005.
Obama has sided with Bush on domestic espionage before. After promising to filibuster the FISA bill that granted immunity to the telecom giants who illegally enabled Bush’s warrantless wiretaps, Senator Barack Obama reversed course and voted in favor of the bill.
Originally the flip-flop could have been connected to telecom contributions to Congressional Democrats, but this latest move could signal that an Obama administration will assume the mantle of Big Brother passed on by Bush. Stay tuned…
Nadir: This eavesdropping applies only to INTERNATIONAL calls, correct? If indeed the US military is fighting a war, then I don’t see how the conduct of that war can exclude tapping of international calls. And,for that matter, how it can include applying Geneva Convention rules to an enemy that disregards the Geneva Convention and which the Geneva Convention doesn’t even cover.
No, Paul.
According to NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, the NSA had the monitored ALL communications of all citizens – phone calls (international and domestic), faxes, emails, and more – especially targeting journalists. This program was more far-reaching than previously revealed.
Check out:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/nsa-whistleblow.html