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It's all well and good to say there's nothing new under the sun in the way of spying, but it's not simply a matter of accepting it cause it's always been done.
Using the NSA to spy on American citizens was last famously done by the Nixon Administration, which got clobbered for it in 1972. Nixon, like Bush, claimed an executive right to issue warrants for eavesdropping and wiretapping of Americans, but the Supreme Court flatly overruled him.
It is thus the law of the land that the president has no power to issue electronic monitoring warrants against American Citizens. It is also the law that the president does not have this power against international subjects either.
Specifically to curb any such wayward presidential ambitions, the FISA legislation was passed in 1978 - - establishing the FISA Court as the sole method for issuing of federal warrants for electronic monitoring of non-domestic subjects. The law makes it a felony for "any person" to go around the FISA Court for this purpose. It should be noted that the FISA Court is a rubber stamp, having denied just 8 warrant applications out of over 14,000. It is frankly amazing that the Bush Administration is essentially claiming they do not have to bother going thru FISA.
As Bush has just admitted that the non-FISA warrants were issued on his personal order, he has just confessed to committing a felony. I wonder whether scaeagles feels this is an impeachable offense.
Oh, and the recent NBC News story of Pentagon files being created on war-protesters smacks of another spying scandal of the Vietnam-era. The military had to foreswear all such domestic spying after it was uncovered in the early 70's ... eh, but what the hell - - that was 30 years ago! Who remembers? Time to start it all up again.
I hate that I have lived long enough to watch many of the horrors of the Vietnam era repeated in a corrupt military and a corrupt presidential administration. I agree with scaeagles that such corruption is nothing new. But it's alarming to me just how vigilent we must be to keep it at bay, for the same dirty tricks will be tried as soon as memory of the last round begins to fade.
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