In Martin Luther King Day address, Gore compares wiretapping of Americans to sur

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In Martin Luther King Day address, Gore compares wiretapping

of Americans to surveillance of King

 

 

 

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Text_of_Gore_speech_0116.html

 

In Martin Luther King Day address, Gore compares wiretapping of

Americans to surveillance of King

 

 

01/16/2006 @ 12:08 pm

Filed by RAW STORY

 

In an address delivered in Washington to multiple standing ovations,

Vice President Al Gore repeatedly attacked the Bush Administration for

the expansion of executive power -- the ability of the government to

wiretap its own citizens without legal authority and kidnap Americans

abroad.

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His speech -- which compares the wiretapping of Martin Luther King to

the broad surveillance now imposed on Americans by President Bush --

called on Congress to resume its oversight responsibilities, and

enjoined Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to appoint a special

prosecutor. Gore was to be introduced by former Rep. Bob Barr, a

Georgia Republican who has advocated for the constitutional right to

privacy. The full text of his speech follows. Reuters summarizes the

speech in an article here.

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Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but

we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow

citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern

that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

 

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in

strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been

placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the

Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

 

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has

been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has

brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without

regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

 

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

 

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm

and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences

and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and

preserved.

 

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has

set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,

who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by

extending its promise to all our people.

 

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important

to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was

illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose

private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during

this period.

 

The FBI privately called King the " most dangerous and effective negro

leader in the country " and vowed to " take him off his pedestal. " The

government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him

into committing suicide.

 

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that

the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret

electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of

the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most

intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to

enact restrictions on wiretapping.

 

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA),

which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence

surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that

there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law

during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the

system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of

protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance

to continue.

 

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in

spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly

spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and

eavesdropping on " large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages,

and other Internet traffic inside the United States. " The New York

Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive

eavesdropping program " without search warrants or any new laws that

would permit such domestic intelligence collection. "

 

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the

President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more

than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for

any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these

constitutional safeguards were still in place.

 

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be

false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was

uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the

story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing

these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

 

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic

surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping

virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United

States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

 

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of

our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had

established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized

that the structure of government they had enshrined in our

Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a

central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of

law. As John Adams said: " The executive shall never exercise the

legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it

may be a government of laws and not of men. "

 

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the

legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of

the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the

Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful

executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free.

In the words of James Madison, " the accumulation of all powers,

legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of

one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or

elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. "

 

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, " On Common Sense " ignited the American

Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said,

we intended to make certain that " the law is king. "

 

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and

strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate

within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic

institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and

determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of

this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive

officials operating in secret without constraint.

 

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be

tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of

government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that

they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion

of power.

 

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps

our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we

learned from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf

of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was

actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by

Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on

false information. America would have been better off knowing the

truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history.

Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

 

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is

all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new

challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we

must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

 

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our

system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact,

doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

 

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped,

lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the

more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their

constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its

constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to

information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly

difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is

lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men

and not laws.

 

The President's men have minced words about America's laws. The

Attorney General openly conceded that the " kind of surveillance " we

now know they have been conducting requires a court order unless

authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no

one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does.

Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance

was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against

those who attacked us on September 11th.

 

This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the

legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First,

another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the

Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing

law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about

changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably

would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the

Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly

authorized it all along? Second, when the Authorization was being

debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted

in it that would have authorized them to use military force

domestically - and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and

Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during the

Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not

operate domestically.

 

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the

power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that

power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother.

But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: " To find authority so

explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular

instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole

legislative process and the constitutional division of authority

between President and Congress. "

 

This is precisely the " disrespect " for the law that the Supreme Court

struck down in the steel seizure case.

 

It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now

brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric

of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent

mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming

indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions

of Americans in both political parties.

 

For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore

unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen

that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that,

notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no

right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his

appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

 

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens

indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant,

without notifying them about what charges have been filed against

them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

 

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously

unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways

that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been

documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the

world.

 

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured

by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and

humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who

documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent

of the victims were innocent of any charges.

 

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our

nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them

during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president

since then - until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions

and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our

own laws against torture.

 

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap

individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and

interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are

infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

 

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new

practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to

Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst reputations for

torture in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home office

about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: " This

material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in

fact positively harmful. "

 

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our

Constitution? If the answer is " yes " then under the theory by which

these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be

prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop,

imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then

what can't he do?

 

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the

Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: " If

the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has

the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote

apartheid, to license summary execution. "

 

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain

this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling.

This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has

followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding

information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and

dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and

judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.

 

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John

McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in

the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply

with it.

 

Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally

imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any

tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in

legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing

meaningful content to the rights of its citizens.

 

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote

that the Executive Branch's handling of one such case seemed to

involve the sudden abandonment of principle " at substantial cost to

the government's credibility before the courts. "

 

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the

Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk.

The stakes for America's representative democracy are far higher than

has been generally recognized.

 

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored

to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy

may well undergo a radical transformation.

 

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been preserved in

part by our founders' wise decision to separate the aggregate power of

our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to

check and balance the power of the other two.

 

On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three

branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create

what are invariably labeled " constitutional crises. " These crises have

often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each

such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing

our common agreement to live under the rule of law.

 

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the

consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single

strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the

informed consent of the governed.

 

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America

was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis

that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was " whether

that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long

endure, " he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the

fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did

Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew

heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime.

 

There have of course been other periods of American history when the

Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive

and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous

Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and

political opponents.

 

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said:

" [The essential principles of our Government] form the bright

constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an

age of revolution and reformation... hould we wander from them in

moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and

to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety. "

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus

during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the

current administration were committed by President Wilson during and

after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The

internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for

the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And,

during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and

parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided,

the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned

in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be

changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we

have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of

presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and

cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever

enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence

and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military

forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an

instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands,

it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and

leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case,

" The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does

come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard

of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested

assertion of authority. "

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is

that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which

he has tried to place the country is going to " last for the rest of

our lives. " So we are told that the conditions of national threat that

have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power

will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and

surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze

enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence.

This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of

enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential

power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for

shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and

the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all

too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass

destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of

the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in

fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the

President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a

sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to

precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is

appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a

gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a

serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the

other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something

more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This

Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that

aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential

authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary

executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral

executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the

contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become

obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's

authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign

policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress.

President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum

by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it

has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic

and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual

state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally

as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional

design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful

Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary

is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to

rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on

U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and

self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate

and control.

This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting

views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be

inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand

conformity from all Executive Branch employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House

assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found

themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing

promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the

1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view that Dr. King was

closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI's domestic

intelligence division said that his effort to tell the truth about

King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues

becoming isolated and pressured. " It was evident that we had to change

our ways or we would all be out on the street.... The men and I

discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover

was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on

homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred,

losing money on their homes, as they usually did. ... so they wanted

another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in. "

The Constitution's framers understood this dilemma as well, as

Alexander Hamilton put it, " a power over a man's support is a power

over his will. " (Federalist No. 73)

Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The

false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way,

George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false

view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: " We are all capable of believing things

which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved

wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an

indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false

belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. "

Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably

leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous

accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and

rewarded.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the

Administration's eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if

it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out

the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration

did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before

9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led

to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because

of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used

to protect the American people.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit

of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively

proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself

it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it

already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is

not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American

system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked

power to this President means that the next President will have

unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose

values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as

well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has

done. If this President's attempt to dramatically expand executive

power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and

balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President

will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our

liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance

characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the

courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as

the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government

observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties

and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral

executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to

call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands -

notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without

legal process -- by appointing judges who will be deferential to its

exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence

of the third branch.

The President's decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the

power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the

FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet,

to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive

power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let

the court know that it was being bypassed.

The President's judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure

that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive

power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of

a powerful executive - a supporter of the so-called unitary executive,

which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you

support his confirmation or not - and I do not - we must all agree

that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of

executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his

deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of

judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial

independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault

includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to

permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to

engage in extended debate of the President's judicial nominees. The

assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the

jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the

pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated

its contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review

of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch.

The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years

has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to

attain a massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house,

8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice

President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of

a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before

I was born, and left the Senate in 1971.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in

which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and

Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in

this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current

leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the

Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled

to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the

issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't

really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the

oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the

feet of the Executive Branch to the fire - no matter which party was

in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance.

The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed

anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not

even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from

conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during

floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the

" greatest deliberative body in the world, " meaningful debate is now a

rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion

of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: " Why is this chamber empty? "

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely

competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a

dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued

access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of

those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority

party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent

president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is

further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the

Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress' role, and

often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its

own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in " overseeing " this

massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so

clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed

Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman

and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and

the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn,

claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one

of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to

VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and

women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when

it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must

share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent

what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole-both House and Senate-the

enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the

sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has

produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized

corruption.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens

the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily

explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the

dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a

radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to

uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going

along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal

branch of government you're supposed to be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be

taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the

dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive

Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival of

America's democracy. We-as Lincoln put it, " [e]ven we here " -must

examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the

shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: " An informed citizenry is the only true

repository of the public will. "

The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was

the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly

exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight

proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the

Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: " All just power is derived from

the consent of the governed. "

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now

in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation

of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the

day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of

twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of

ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that

played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in

their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at

their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document

sent forward for ratification.

And it is " We the people " who must now find once again the ability we

once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of

printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by

television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined

to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new

way to our dilemma today: " We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we

shall save our country. "

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted

television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has

become so extensive that virtually all significant political

communication now takes place within the confines of flickering

30-second television advertisements.

And the political economy supported by these short but expensive

television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America's

first century as those politics were different from the feudalism

which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today

has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of

information as a means of controlling the outcome of important

decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the

secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches can't check

an abuse of power if they don't know it is happening.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade

Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the

House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the

program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of

factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the

Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal

administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance

of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than

the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to

it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire

initiative is now collapsing- all over the country- with the

Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance

companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic

consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political

appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today

one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has

been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful

log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor

and control his discussions of global warming.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow

of information is by consistently resorting to the language and

politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its

agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest.

As President Eisenhower said, " Any who act as if freedom's defenses

are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a

doctrine that is alien to America. "

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and

opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once

wrote: " Men feared witches and burnt women. "

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in

their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very

existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the

Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when

the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more

dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of

thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate

our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than

when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought

and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so

much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than

they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to

us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to

life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore

vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to

safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the

intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the

President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, " The President has

dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of

the Constitution, I hope they will. "

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney

General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him

from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by

the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent

investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild

confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all

accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that

the Executive Branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support

the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a

special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless

wiretapping of Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be

established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of

wrongdoing -- especially where it involves the abuse of Executive

Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive-and not just

superficial-hearings into these serious allegations of criminal

behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the

evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in

its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no

circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and

enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of

the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently

been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government

with access to private information concerning the communications of

Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist

their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of

American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the

restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be

protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts

at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy

depends on it.

I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for

hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is

on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will

be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I

can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, " Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it

is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may

be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way

beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. "

[Guest guest]

Heres the Video of Gore....The text doesnt do this speech justice!

 

http://interface.audiovideoweb.com/lnk/avwebnjwin9536/ptv/dspan/gore.wmv/play.as\

x

 

 

Donna

 

 

On 1/16/06, califpacific <califpacific wrote:

>

> A

> Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:30:37 -0500

> In Martin Luther King Day address, Gore compares wiretapping

> of Americans to surveillance of King

>

>

>

> http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Text_of_Gore_speech_0116.html

>

> In Martin Luther King Day address, Gore compares wiretapping of

> Americans to surveillance of King

>

>

> 01/16/2006 @ 12:08 pm

> Filed by RAW STORY

>

> In an address delivered in Washington to multiple standing ovations,

> Vice President Al Gore repeatedly attacked the Bush Administration for

> the expansion of executive power -- the ability of the government to

> wiretap its own citizens without legal authority and kidnap Americans

> abroad.