Bush has publicly admitted twice to a Felony in his MASSIVE DATA
MINING SPYING ON AMERICAN CITIZENS.

Russ Feingold's floor speech on NSA Wiretapping
by folkbum Tue Feb 07, 2006

Earlier today, Russ Feingold diaried on the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T.
Act. But this afternoon, he delivered a powerful condemnation of
Bush's wiretapping on the Senate floor. I thought I would bring it
to you.

Remember that Russ Feingold was the only Democrat to vote against a
bill in 1998 that would have dismissed the impeachment charges
against President Clinton, because he believed the case was close and
needed to be heard in full. I doubt he was doing it becuase he
thought it would provide cover eight years later to discuss flouting
of the law by a Republican president. It's because Russ Feingold
believes in the law, believes that we are a nation of laws, not men.

President Bush has admitted to breaking the plain language of the
FISA statute. If Clinton had stood during the State of the Union in
January 1998 and said that yes, he had lied to the grand jury, he may
well have been hung on the spot.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on the President's
Warrantless Wiretapping Program, February 7, 2006, as Prepared for
Delivery from the Senate Floor


Mr. President, last week the President of the United States gave his
State of the Union address, where he spoke of America's leadership in
the world, and called on all of us to "lead this world toward
freedom." Again and again, he invoked the principle of freedom, and
how it can transform nations, and empower people around the world.

But, almost in the same breath, the President openly acknowledged
that he has ordered the government to spy on Americans, on American
soil, without the warrants required by law.

The President issued a call to spread freedom throughout the world,
and then he admitted that he has deprived Americans of one of their
most basic freedoms under the Fourth Amendment -- to be free from
unjustified government intrusion.

The President was blunt. He said that he had authorized the NSA's
domestic spying program, and he made a number of misleading arguments
to defend himself. His words got rousing applause from Republicans,
and even some Democrats.

The President was blunt, so I will be blunt: This program is
breaking the law, and this President is breaking the law. Not only
that, he is misleading the American people in his efforts to justify
this program.

How is that worthy of applause? Since when do we celebrate our
commander in chief for violating our most basic freedoms, and
misleading the American people in the process? When did we start to
stand up and cheer for breaking the law? In that moment at the State
of the Union, I felt ashamed.

Congress has lost its way if we don't hold this President accountable
for his actions.

The President suggests that anyone who criticizes his illegal
wiretapping program doesn't understand the threat we face. But we
do. Every single one of us is committed to stopping the terrorists
who threaten us and our families.

Defeating the terrorists should be our top national priority, and we
all agree that we need to wiretap them to do it. In fact, it would
be irresponsible not to wiretap terrorists. But we have yet to see
any reason why we have to trample the laws of the United States to do
it. The President's decision that he can break the law says far more
about his attitude toward the rule of law than it does about the laws
themselves.

This goes way beyond party, and way beyond politics. What the
President has done here is to break faith with the American people.
In the State of the Union, he also said that "we must always be clear
in our principles" to get support from friends and allies that we
need to fight terrorism. So let's be clear about a basic American
principle: When someone breaks the law, when someone misleads the
public in an attempt to justify his actions, he needs to be held
accountable. The President of the United States has broken the law.
The President of the United States is trying to mislead the American
people. And he needs to be held accountable.

Unfortunately, the President refuses to provide any details about
this domestic spying program. Not even the full Intelligence
committees know the details, and they were specifically set up to
review classified information and oversee the intelligence activities
of our government. Instead, the President says - "Trust me."

This is not the first time we've heard that. In the lead-up to the
Iraq war, the Administration went on an offensive to get the American
public, the Congress, and the international community to believe its
theory that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass
destruction, and even that he had ties to Al Qaeda. The President
painted a dire - and inaccurate - picture of Saddam Hussein's
capability and intent, and we invaded Iraq on that basis. To make
matters worse, the Administration misled the country about what it
would take to stabilize and reconstruct Iraq after the conflict. We
were led to believe that this was going to be a short endeavor, and
that our troops would be home soon.

We all recall the President's "Mission Accomplished" banner on the
aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003. In fact, the mission was not even
close to being complete. More than 2100 total deaths have occurred
after the President declared an end to major combat operations in May
of 2003, and over 16,600 American troops have been wounded in Iraq.
The President misled the American people and grossly miscalculated
the true challenge of stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq.

In December, we found out that the President has authorized wiretaps
of Americans without the court orders required by law. He says he is
only wiretapping people with links to terrorists, but how do we
know? We don't. The President is unwilling to let a neutral judge
make sure that is the case. He will not submit this program to an
independent branch of government to make sure he's not violating the
rights of law-abiding Americans.

So I don't want to hear again that this Administration has shown it
can be trusted. It hasn't. And that is exactly why the law requires
a judge to review these wiretaps.

It is up to Congress to hold the President to account. We held a
hearing on the domestic spying program in the Judiciary Committee
yesterday, where Attorney General Gonzales was a witness. We expect
there will be other hearings. That is a start, but it will take more
than just hearings to get the job done.

We know that in part because the President's Attorney General has
already shown a willingness to mislead the Congress.

At the hearing yesterday, I reminded the Attorney General about his
testimony during his confirmation hearings in January 2005, when I
asked him whether the President had the power to authorize
warrantless wiretaps in violation of the criminal law. We didn't
know it then, but the President had authorized the NSA program three
years before, when the Attorney General was White House Counsel. At
his confirmation hearing, the Attorney General first tried to dismiss
my question as "hypothetical." He then testified that "it's not the
policy or the agenda of this President to authorize actions that
would be in contravention of our criminal statutes."

Well, Mr. President, wiretapping American citizens on American soil
without the required warrant is in direct contravention of our
criminal statutes. The Attorney General knew that, and he knew about
the NSA program when he sought the Senate's approval for his
nomination to be Attorney General. He wanted the Senate and the
American people to think that the President had not acted on the
extreme legal theory that the President has the power as Commander in
Chief to disobey the criminal laws of this country. But he had. The
Attorney General had some explaining to do, and he didn't do it
yesterday. Instead he parsed words, arguing that what he said was
truthful because he didn't believe that the President's actions
violated the law.

But he knew what I was asking, and he knew he was misleading the
Committee in his response. If he had been straightforward, he would
have told the committee that in his opinion, the President has the
authority to authorize warrantless wiretaps. My question wasn't
about whether such illegal wiretapping was going on - like almost
everyone in Congress, I didn't know about the program then. It was a
question about how the nominee to be Attorney General viewed the
law. This nominee wanted to be confirmed, and so he let a misleading
statement about one of the central issues of his confirmation - his
view of executive power - stay on the record until the New York Times
revealed the program.

The rest of the Attorney General's performance at yesterday's hearing
certainly did not give me any comfort, either. He continued to push
the Administration's weak legal arguments, continued to insinuate
that anyone who questions this program doesn't want to fight
terrorism, and refused to answer basic questions about what powers
this Administration is claiming. We still need a lot of answers from
this Administration.

But let's put aside the Attorney General for now. The burden is not
just on him to come clean -- the President has some explaining to
do. The President's defense of his actions is deeply cynical, deeply
misleading, and deeply troubling.

To find out that the President of the United States has violated the
basic rights of the American people is chilling. And then to see him
publicly embrace his actions - and to see so many Members of Congress
cheer him on - is appalling.

The President has broken the law, and he has made it clear that he
will continue to do so. But the President is not a king. And the
Congress is not a king's court. Our job is not to stand up and cheer
when the President breaks the law. Our job is to stand up and demand
accountability, to stand up and check the power of an out-of-control
executive branch.

That is one of the reasons that the framers put us here - to ensure
balance between the branches of government, not to act as a
professional cheering section.*

We need answers. Because no one, not the President, not the Attorney
General, and not any of their defenders in this body, has been able
to explain why it is necessary to break the law to defend against
terrorism. And I think that's because they can't explain it.

Instead, this administration reacts to anyone who questions this
illegal program by saying that those of us who demand the truth and
stand up for our rights and freedoms have a pre-9/11 view of the
world.

In fact, the President has a pre-1776 view of the world.

Our Founders lived in dangerous times, and they risked everything for
freedom. Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death."
The President's pre-1776 mentality is hurting America. It is
fracturing the foundation on which our country has stood for 230
years. The President can't just bypass two branches of government,
and obey only those laws he wants to obey. Deciding unilaterally
which of our freedoms still apply in the fight against terrorism is
unacceptable and needs to be stopped immediately.

Let's examine for a moment some of the President's attempts to defend
his actions. His arguments have changed over time, of course. They
have to - none of them hold up under even casual scrutiny, so he
can't rely on one single explanation. As each argument crumbles
beneath him, he moves on to a new one, until that, too, is debunked,
and on and on he goes.

In the State of the Union, the President referred to Presidents in
American history who cited executive authority to order warrantless
surveillance. But of course those past presidents - like Wilson and
Roosevelt - were acting before the Supreme Court decided in 1967 that
our communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment, and before
Congress decided in 1978 that the executive branch can no longer
unilaterally decide which Americans to wiretap. The Attorney General
yesterday was unable to give me one example of a President who, since
1978 when FISA was passed, has authorized warrantless wiretaps
outside of FISA.

So that argument is baseless, and it's deeply troubling that the
President of the United States would so obviously mislead the
Congress and American public. That hardly honors the founders' idea
that the President should address the Congress on the state of our
union.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 to
create a secret court, made up of judges who develop national
security expertise, to issue warrants for surveillance of terrorists
and spies. These are the judges from whom the Bush Administration
has obtained thousands of warrants since 9/11. The Administration
has almost never had a warrant request rejected by those judges.
They have used the FISA Court thousands of times, but at the same
time they assert that FISA is an "old law" or "out of date" and they
can't comply with it. Clearly they can and do comply with it -
except when they don't. Then they just arbitrarily decide to go
around these judges, and around the law.

The Administration has said that it ignored FISA because it takes too
long to get a warrant under that law. But we know that in an
emergency, where the Attorney General believes that surveillance must
begin before a court order can be obtained, FISA permits the wiretap
to be executed immediately as long as the government goes to the
court within 72 hours. The Attorney General has complained that the
emergency provision does not give him enough flexibility, he has
complained that getting a FISA application together or getting the
necessary approvals takes too long. But the problems he has cited
are bureaucratic barriers that the executive branch put in place, and
could easily remove if it wanted.

FISA also permits the Attorney General to authorize unlimited
warrantless electronic surveillance in the United States during the
15 days following a declaration of war, to allow time to consider any
amendments to FISA required by a wartime emergency. That is the time
period that Congress specified. Yet the President thinks that he can
do this indefinitely.

In the State of the Union, the President also argued that federal
courts had approved the use of presidential authority that he was
invoking. But that turned out to be misleading as well. When I
asked the Attorney General about this, he could point me to no court -
not the Supreme Court or any other court - that has considered
whether, after FISA was enacted, the President nonetheless had the
authority to bypass it and authorize warrantless wiretaps. Not one
court. The Administration's effort to find support for what it has
done in snippets of other court decisions would be laughable if this
issue were not so serious.

The President knows that FISA makes it a crime to wiretap Americans
in the United States without a warrant or a court order. Why else
would he have assured the public, over and over again, that he was
getting warrants before engaging in domestic surveillance?

Here's what the President said on April 20, 2004: "Now, by the way,
any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap,
it requires - a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed,
by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're
talking about getting a court order before we do so."

And again, on July 14, 2004: "The government can't move on wiretaps
or roving wiretaps without getting a court order."

The President was understandably eager in these speeches to make it
clear that under his administration, law enforcement was using the
FISA Court to obtain warrants before wiretapping. That is
understandable, since wiretapping Americans on American soil without
a warrant is against the law.

And listen to what the President said on June 9, 2005: "Law
enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a
foreign terrorist's phone, a federal judge's permission to track his
calls, or a federal judge's permission to search his property.
Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools. And
these standards are fully consistent with the Constitution of the
U.S."

Now that the public knows about the domestic spying program, he has
had to change course. He has looked around for arguments to cloak
his actions. And all of them are completely threadbare.

The President has argued that Congress gave him authority to wiretap
Americans on U.S. soil without a warrant when it passed the
Authorization for Use of Military Force after September 11, 2001.
Mr. President, that is ridiculous. Members of Congress did not think
this resolution gave the President blanket authority to order these
warrantless wiretaps. We all know that. Anyone in this body who
would tell you otherwise either wasn't here at the time or isn't
telling the truth.

We authorized the President to use military force in Afghanistan, a
necessary and justified response to September 11. We did not
authorize him to wiretap American citizens on American soil without
going through the process that was set up nearly three decades ago
precisely to facilitate the domestic surveillance of terrorists -
with the approval of a judge. That is why both Republicans and
Democrats have questioned this theory.

This particular claim is further undermined by congressional approval
of the Patriot Act just a few weeks after we passed the Authorization
for the Use of Military Force. The Patriot Act made it easier for
law enforcement to conduct surveillance on suspected terrorists and
spies, while maintaining FISA's baseline requirement of judicial
approval for wiretaps of Americans in the U.S. It is ridiculous to
think that Congress would have negotiated and enacted all the changes
to FISA in the Patriot Act if it thought it had just authorized the
President to ignore FISA in the AUMF.

In addition, in the intelligence authorization bill passed in
December 2001, we extended the emergency authority in FISA, at the
Administration's request, from 24 to 72 hours. Why do that if the
President has the power to ignore FISA? That makes no sense at all.

The President has also said that his inherent executive power gives
him the power to approve this program. But here the President is
acting in direct violation of a criminal statute. That means his
power is, as Justice Jackson said in the steel seizure cases half a
century ago, "at its lowest ebb." A recent letter from a group of
law professors and former executive branch officials points out
that "every time the Supreme Court has confronted a statute limiting
the Commander-in-Chief's authority, it has upheld the statute." The
Senate reports issued when FISA was enacted confirm the understanding
that FISA overrode any pre-existing inherent authority of the
President. As the 1978 Senate Judiciary Committee report stated,
FISA "recognizes no inherent power of the president in this area."
And "Congress has declared that this statute, not any claimed
presidential power, controls." Contrary to what the President told
the country in the State of the Union, no court has ever approved
warrantless surveillance in violation of FISA.

The President's claims of inherent executive authority, and his
assertions that the courts have approved this type of activity, are
baseless.

The President has argued that periodic internal executive branch
review provides an adequate check on the program. He has even
characterized this periodic review as a safeguard for civil
liberties. But we don't know what this check involves. And we do
know that Congress explicitly rejected this idea of unilateral
executive decision-making in this area when it passed FISA.

Finally, the president has tried to claim that informing a handful of
congressional leaders, the so-called Gang of Eight, somehow excuses
breaking the law. Of course, several of these members said they
weren't given the full story. And all of them were prohibited from
discussing what they were told. So the fact that they were informed
under these extraordinary circumstances does not constitute
congressional oversight, and it most certainly does not constitute
congressional approval of the program. Indeed, it doesn't even
comply with the National Security Act, which requires the entire
memberships of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee to
be "fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of
the United States."

In addition, we now know that some of these members expressed concern
about the program. The Administration ignored their protests. Just
last week, one of the eight members of Congress who has been briefed
about the program, Congresswoman Jane Harman, ranking member of the
House Intelligence Committee, said she sees no reason why the
Administration cannot accomplish its goals within the law as
currently written.

None of the President's arguments explains or excuses his conduct, or
the NSA's domestic spying program. Not one. It is hard to believe
that the President has the audacity to claim that they do. It is a
strategy that really hinges on the credibility of the office of the
Presidency itself. If you just insist that you didn't break the law,
you haven't broken the law. It reminds me of what Richard Nixon said
after he had left office: "Well, when the president does it that
means that it is not illegal." But that is not how our
constitutional democracy works. Making those kinds of arguments is
damaging the credibility of the Presidency.

And what's particularly disturbing is how many members of Congress
have responded. They stood up and cheered. They stood up and
cheered.

Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote: "Experience should teach us to be
most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes
are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel
invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest
dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding."

The President's actions are indefensible. Freedom is an enduring
principle. It is not something to celebrate in one breath, and
ignore the next. Freedom is at the heart of who we are as a nation,
and as a people. We cannot be a beacon of freedom for the world
unless we protect our own freedoms here at home.

The President was right about one thing. In his address, he said "We
love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it."

Yes, Mr. President. We do love our freedom, and we will fight to
keep it. We will fight to defeat the terrorists who threaten the
safety and security of our families and loved ones. And we will
fight to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans against
intrusive government power.

As the President said, we must always be clear in our principles. So
let us be clear: We cherish the great and noble principle of freedom,
we will fight to keep it, and we will hold this President - and
anyone who violates those freedoms - accountable for their actions.
In a nation built on freedom, the President is not a king, and no one
is above the law.

Tags: Russ Feingold, NSA, wiretapping, George W. Bush, FISA (all tags)

===I like the part about how we cannot trust them because they lied
about WMD.

Awesome.

How do we assist this guy? He is the only one putting it on the line.

We are creative here...how can we back him up on this and on the
Patriot Act? There must be a way to organize a show of support that
is meaningful and impactful.