Operation Flabbergasted

[Guest guest]

http://dailykos.com/story/2005/12/17/233929/95

 

Operation Flabbergasted: Let's Watergate Bush (UPDATE 1) by smintheus

 

Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 09:39:29 PM PDT This cannot stand. In ordering the NSA to

spy secretly on America, George Bush has: overturned United States Signals

Intelligence Directive 18, which prohibits domestic spying by the NSA; violated

the federal act which created the FISA court to oversee covert domestic

investigations; and trampled upon the Fourth Amendment guarantee against

warrantless searches. It cannot stand for a day, much less a month while

Congress is in recess.

 

On Friday, when Sen. Specter said he'd make investigating the allegations a

top priority in January, it was barely possible to pretend that they might be

false. But by Saturday's radio address, when Bush defended his policy and

insisted it would continue, we had entered a full-blown constitutional crisis.

George Bush would love for Congress to back down from a fight next week, to go

home grumbling " Wait until next year. "

 

Operation Flabbergasted We cannot let that happen. We have to ensure that by

Monday, all hell has broken loose in D.C.

 

 

 

smintheus's diary :: ::

 

 

Every Senator needs to know there'll be jolly hell back home if they don't

demand Bush stop it now. The MSM needs to be discussing the `constitutional

crisis.' There has to be a plan immediately to make this happen. I've got one.

 

We know that domestic spying by the NSA is Orwellian. We don't need to wait

for panels of experts to declare the obvious, that Bush's policies violate the

Fourth Amendment in the most fundamental way. Further, it is clear that the

White House is panicking over the implications of this leak, very much as the

Reagan White House panicked when the Iran Contra story broke and they thought

impeachment might be looming. Bush's radio address manages to be both offensive

and defensive at one and the same time (it reminds one of the cornered Richard

Nixon).

 

We also know that significant numbers of Senators and journalists are utterly

fed up with the Bush administration's record on civil liberties. Some are

positively spoiling for a fight (if you don't believe me, check out the grilling

Terry Moran gave Alberto Gonzales about torture on Nightline Thursday). So we

also know that it's entirely possible for us, at this moment, to drive this

issue home once and for all, if we can mount a worthy campaign.

 

The only campaign that would be worthy of this issue, in my opinion, will be

one that produces the biggest fire-storm that Washington has ever seen. If we do

not attempt to take back our country now, then when?

We need both coherent goals and effective methods to make this happen. There

is little time to lose. Fortunately, as we've shown in the past with

internet-based campaigns, things can be organized extremely quickly if people

are willing to do their part.

 

GOALS

 

As far as possible, our declared goals must be as clear, straightforward,

plausible, and uncontroversial as possible. I have no illusions that it will be

easy to achieve these goals; George Bush and friends stonewall almost as a

matter of course. But our declared goals must throw into stark relief the

illegality of the administration's policies and the nature of the constitutional

crisis.

 

I propose that we ask each U.S. Senator to demand that President Bush:

* immediately reverse this directive on domestic spying

* promise to desist in the future from warrantless spying on Americans

* cooperate fully with a bi-partisan investigation of the policy

* release the texts of the directives along with the legal opinions they

were based on

* identify to the Senate all residents of the US who were targets of

unconstitutional spying

METHODS

The most important things that need to be done are to

* build an ad hoc network to promote this campaign, to include blogs,

activist groups, grassroot organizations, local and state Democratic Party

organizations, and some media darlings like Randi Rhodes

* contact Senators to make the above requests

* contact journalists covering Washington to alert them to the campaign and

to request full coverage of the constitutional crisis that the President has

provoked

 

I've arranged them in the order that they need to be addressed. We will want

to have the main outlines of a network in place by late Sunday, if we are to get

the word out far and wide on Monday to inundate Senate offices with calls,

emails, and faxes demanding action. We can easily wait until Sunday to begin

advancing along the second and third prongs of this strategy. I'll post another

diary Sunday afternoon on those subjects (and a third on Monday morning), once

this one gets off the ground.

 

I'm dedicating this first diary to the issue of developing an internet-based

network of support for this campaign. When I conceived my " Awaken the Mainstream

Media " campaign back in May, it took me days of writing emails and phoning

around to create such a network. It worked, but it took more time than we have

in this instance. If Kosmopolitans want to see this work, then they'll have to

step forward to volunteer to post about this on their own blogs, and to help to

contact others who can be roped in to support us.

 

To reiterate: In this first diary, I'm asking people to step forward to take

charge of some part of the bigger problem of getting the word out quickly and

connecting people into the effort. You can do that in many ways. For example,

start a thread (or a separate diary, linked in a thread) asking people to

identify which blogs they'll contact; or which radio hosts; or local grassroots

organizations; etc. Identify something that nobody has spoken for, and take

charge of it. Above all, we need to make the jump beyond the internet to

organized groups with their own membership lists.

 

I'll have a lot more to say in the second and third diaries about what kinds

of arguments and evidence would be useful in calling/writing Senators and

journalists.

 

So who do you know? Who do you read, or listen to? Whose email lists are you

on? What local mailing/phone lists can you enlist to get the word out to put

pressure on the Senate? What part of this can you help to organize by Sunday

afternoon?

 

Seem like a lot of work? It is. Now keep your eye on the prize.

UPDATE: Read this editorial at the NYT on Bush and the Fourth Amendment

 

{President Bush] secretly and recklessly expanded the government's powers in

dangerous and unnecessary ways that eroded civil liberties and may also have

violated the law. In Friday's Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported

that sometime in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order scrapping

a painfully reached, 25-year-old national consensus: spying on Americans by

their government should generally be prohibited, and when it is allowed, it

should be regulated and supervised by the courts. The laws and executive orders

governing electronic eavesdropping by the intelligence agency were specifically

devised to uphold the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches

and seizures.

 

But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to spy on

American citizens without obtaining a warrant - just as he had earlier decided

to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army regulations when it came

to handling prisoners in the war on terror....

 

Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a

violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not.

Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have

difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was

written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it

considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty

points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they

are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.

 

This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The

intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail

and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a

warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for

obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks

the court hardly ever rejected requests.

 

The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say that they

sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers even

faster than that, and that those numbers might include some of American

citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush's order, and that is nonsense.

The existing law already recognizes that American citizens' communications may

be intercepted by chance. It says that those records may be retained and used if

they amount to actual foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material.

Otherwise, they must be thrown out.

 

President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives,

hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and

denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's existence. We don't know if he

was right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on

the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But

we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the

boundaries of the law, much less respect them.

 

Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the illegal

spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it. Perhaps the

Congressional leaders who were told about the program could get the ball

rolling.

 

This is fairly tough, coming from the NYT: " cannot be trusted to find the

boundaries of the law, much less respect them. " This is going to get rougher.

 

 

" When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have

peace. "

Jimi Hendrix