Power Grabs

"The NSA's terrorist surveillance program is targeted at al-Qaida communications coming into or going out of the United States," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. "It is a limited, hot pursuit effort by our intelligence community to detect and prevent attacks."

Scotty the Mouthpiece was attempting to rationalize the President's illegal behavior in authorizing wiretaps on American soil without a warrant. The sad joke of the matter is that the President had such authority provided he requested the warrant up to 72 hours after starting the tap. I don't know what part of hot pursuit that meaningless restriction interfered with. The FISE court, the secret court that issues warrants in such cases, has approved all but a very few such requests and has modified not many more. It's telling, however, that most of the rejections and modifications have come under Bush's administration. So there are two reasons for Bush attempting to usurp authority. Either the requests were so far off-base that even the FISE court wouldn't approve them or Bush wanted a blatant power grab.

Add to the evidence the subpoena against Google, probably the hero of the week for standing up to the Justice Department and attempting to protect our privacy where Yahoo and Microsoft have not. The Administration wants a week's worth of Google's search records, it says, to provide evidence that an anti-pornography law struck down as unconstitutional indeed provides better protection against minors surfing porno sites than parental controls. Innocent enough until one realizes what could be done with search engine records. The Government could literally mine everything from it and use it, well, the Bush administration has declared itself in favor of the so-called "Unitary Executive." Another word for this is dictator.

This is an administration that has advocated torture, deprived American citizens of due process and held them without access to a lawyer, lied about intelligence to start a war, refused to police itself in the wake of scandal after scandal, defied Supreme Court edicts, manipulated terror alerts and stifled all attempts at reasoned debate. I for one don't trust him with the power to spy on me at will or, as he seems to think, absolute power.