Prometheus 6

The Truth About Bush's Warrantless Spying

On Saturday, President Bush acknowledged that he had personally authorized a secret warrantless domestic surveillance program more than three dozen times since October 2001. Bush's actions run contrary to the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids "unreasonable searches" and sets out specific requirements for warrants, including "probable cause." They demonstrate a dangerous disregard for the basic liberties that serve as our nation's guiding values. They are also in violation of federal law. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to conduct electronic surveillance, except as "authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order." Moreover, since 1978, 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2511(2)(f) has directed that Title III and FISA "shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance...and the interception of domestic wire and oral communications may be conducted." The President's actions were not necessary; if he had legitimate concerns about FISA, "the appropriate response would have been to go to Congress and expand it, not to blatantly violate the law." Below, we debunk the administration's attempts to justify Bush's actions.

It occurs to me that anyone that supports the textualist, originalist or strict construction legal philosophies AND supports George Bush's program of illegal domestic spying is a hypocrite.

It would be very interesting to find Justice Alito's position on all this. Just asking him wouldbe very enlightening...will he answer? Or will he say the possibility he would have to rule on it compels his silence?

Culled from newspaper clippings, government records, historical archives and interviews, some previously unexplored, the report explodes oft-repeated local claims that the insurrection was a frantic response to a corrupt and ineffective post-Reconstruction government.

"The ultimate goal was the resurgence of white rule of the city and state for a handful of men through whatever means necessary," the historian LeRae Umfleet wrote in the report's introduction.

The report concludes that the rioting and coup fully ended black participation in local government until the civil rights era, and was a catalyst for the development of Jim Crow laws in North Carolina.

"Because Wilmington rioters were able to murder blacks in daylight and overthrow Republican government without penalty or federal intervention, everyone in the state, regardless of race, knew that the white supremacy campaign was victorious on all fronts," the report said.

...Federal and state authorities did nothing in response to the racial rioting in Wilmington, and according to the report, the revolt became a model of sorts when violence later erupted in other cities.

A 1906 upheaval in Atlanta, the report said, "suggests that the lack of governmental response to the violence in Wilmington gave Southerners implicit license to suppress the black community under the right circumstances."

North Carolina City Confronts Its Past in Report on White Vigilantes
By JOHN DeSANTIS

WILMINGTON, N.C., Dec. 18 - Beneath canopies of moss-draped oaks, on sleepy streets graced by antebellum mansions, tour guides here spin stories of Cape Fear pirates and Civil War blockade-runners for eager tourists.

Only scant mention is made, however, of the bloody rioting more than a century ago during which black residents were killed and survivors banished by white supremacists, who seized control of the city government in what historians say is the only successful overthrow of a local government in United States history.

But last week, Wilmington revisited that painful history with the release of a draft of a 500-page report ordered by the state legislature that not only tells the story of the Nov. 10, 1898, upheaval, but also presents an analysis of its effects on black families that persist to this day.

Study Shows the Superrich Are Not the Most Generous
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

Working-age Americans who make $50,000 to $100,000 a year are two to six times more generous in the share of their investment assets that they give to charity than those Americans who make more than $10 million, a pioneering study of federal tax data shows.

The least generous of all working-age Americans in 2003, the latest year for which Internal Revenue Service data is available, were among the young and prosperous - the 285 taxpayers age 35 and under who made more than $10 million - and the 18,600 taxpayers making $500,000 to $1 million. The top group had on average $101 million of investment assets while the other group had on average $2.4 million of investment assets.

Quote of note:

"It's a recognition by both sides that for precompetitive research, 'It's the science, stupid.' It's not the intellectual property."

Guidelines Set on Software Property Rights
By STEVE LOHR

To remove obstacles to joint research, four leading technology companies and seven American universities have agreed on principles for making software developed in collaborative projects freely available.

The legal wrangling over intellectual property rights in research projects involving universities and companies, specialists say, can take months, sometimes more than a year. This legal maneuvering, they say, is not only slowing the pace of innovation, but is also prompting some companies to seek university research partners in other countries, where negotiations over intellectual property are less time-consuming.

Drug Changes Are Looming, and Providers Seek Answers
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 - Two weeks before the start of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, pharmacists and nursing homes are desperately trying to find out who will pay for the medicines taken by hundreds of thousands of their residents.

The new law relies on private insurers to deliver drug benefits to older Americans. About two-thirds of the 1.5 million residents of nursing homes are participants in both Medicare and Medicaid. The government has randomly assigned them to private drug plans, regardless of their needs.

In many cases, nursing home officials said, they do not know to which plans their patients have been assigned. As a result, they do not know who will pay the bills or what drugs will be covered. Each plan has its own list of approved drugs, known as a formulary.

Rice Defends Domestic Eavesdropping
By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday defended President Bush's decision to secretly authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without seeking warrants, saying the program was carefully controlled and necessary to close gaps in the nation's counterterrorism efforts.

In Sunday talk show appearances, Ms. Rice said the program was intended to eliminate the "seam" between American intelligence operations overseas and law enforcement agencies at home.

Quote of note:

Women for Aryan Unity is based in the most urban and international of places, Brooklyn, New York. The group itself is a testament to the ironic fact that, despite its disgust for multi-culturalism and diversity, the world of white supremacy is diverse. Racist activism crosses geographic, class and gender lines perhaps now more than ever before.

"The stereotype of racist groups all being like the Klan -- rural and southern -- is not true anymore," said Blee, noting that the largely urban Nazi and skinhead groups are the most active part of the white nationalist movement.

A Whiter Shade of Christmas
By Maria Luisa Tucker, AlterNet
Posted on December 19, 2005

Katrina Killed Across Class Lines
The well-to-do died along with the poor, an analysis of data shows. The findings counter common beliefs that disadvantaged blacks bore the brunt.
By Nicholas Riccardi, Doug Smith and David Zucchino
Times Staff Writers
December 18, 2005

The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city's poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.

You sure that analysis wasn't lifted from the blog network? 

The power that made Rosa Parks
The civil rights leader's act of resistance was not a spur-of-the-moment decision but nurtured in a faith community.
By Diane Winston
Diane Winston is Knight chair in media and religion at USC. She can be reached at [email protected].
December 18, 2005

EARLIER THIS month, every transit bus in New York City displayed this slogan: "It All Started on a Bus." The signs asked riders to leave the seat behind the bus driver vacant, as a tribute to the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala.

The lesson: One woman's courageous act changed the national tide.

Not exactly.

Rosa Parks' decision did help catalyze a revolution in race relations. But hers was not the action of a single individual. Rather, it was the culmination of a long-standing religious commitment nurtured in a community of faith. That commitment, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," inspired Parks and other civil rights pioneers to fight injustice in the same spirit of forgiveness with which Jesus met his fate.

Do you see the problem?

Quote of note:

"It's as if in the U.S., 80 percent of the heads of major corporations or top government officials came from Harvard Law School," said François Dubet, a sociologist at the University of Bordeaux.

"As if"? 

Elite French Schools Block the Poor's Path to Power
By CRAIG S. SMITH

PARIS, Dec. 17 - Even as the fires smoldered in France's working-class suburbs and paramilitary police officers patrolled Paris to guard against attacks by angry minority youths last month, dozens of young men and women dressed in elaborate, old-fashioned parade uniforms marched down the Champs-Élysées to commemorate Armistice Day.

Just switch parties and get it over with. 

Don't Be Fooled by Bush Polls, Democratic Council Warns
By John F. Harris and Chris Cillizza
Sunday, December 18, 2005; A04

Rising public frustration with the Iraq war and low approval ratings for President Bush look to many Democrats like an opportunity for big gains with voters in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

But two of the party's top strategists say this opportunity may be something else: a trap.

Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and pollster Mark Penn wrote a strategy memo to DLC supporters last week warning party leaders not to use Bush's problems as an invitation to call for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, or generally to steer a more liberal course that could alienate the middle-of-the-road voters the party needs.

The Bush regime's management techniques should be familiar to middle management types. The salesman lands a new account by making promises without checking with the operations staff to see if the mechanisms necessary for delivery are in place. A "procedure" is put into place which reds, "Get this done, get that done, get the other thing done," and day to day you just do what must be done.

It's called "firefighting," where you just leap from disaster to disaster.

This is appealing enough. But it goes against the styles of many managers. Their style is reactivity or as it is more commonly known, firefighting. The idea of firefighting is to let a problem fester until it becomes a crisis, and then swoop in and fix it. Firefighting is popular because it is exciting. Furthermore, it is a win-win situation for the firefighter. If the fix works out, the firefighter is a hero. If it doesn’t, the firefighter can’t be blamed, because the situation was virtually hopeless to begin with. Notice that it is to the firefighter’s advantage to actually let the problem become worse, because then there will be less blame if they fail or more praise if they succeed.

Most of us deplore the firefighting style, yet we tacitly perpetuate it by rewarding firefighters for the miraculous things they do. The methodical work of prevention done by others goes unnoticed. Consequently, the firefighting style can be difficult to eliminate, especially in cultures that thrive on action and excitement. In contrast, in Japan, a crisis is evidence of failure: Japanese culture favors a more proactive approach to problem solving.

Bush was a failed corporate manager. And his war management techniques, being exactly the same, has failed as well.

Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers
By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 18, 2005; A01

Yes, they make you feel good. But the fact is, if the wall is built it will have doors in it...not holes, mind you, but doors. And as long as employers don't want to pay Americans a living wage, enough "guest workers"...i.e., just as many as we have now...will be allowed through to fill the gap.

The major change will be folks getting jobs as border guards as well as prison guards. 

Analysts: Crackdown Won't Halt Immigration
House Bill Is Criticized for Not Factoring in the Effect of the U.S. Demand for Labor
By Michael A. Fletcher and Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 18, 2005; A11

Quote of note:

The University of Maryland study received a great deal of attention and should have been a call to action for state leaders, but no solutions have been implemented. The General Assembly, despite conducting hearings on the issue, never passed legislation to deal with the inequalities highlighted in the study.

Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who lifted my moratorium on executions after assuming office despite acknowledging that race "plays a part all the way through the process," named Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele as the new administration's point man on the issue. The lieutenant governor promised to conduct an assessment of our state's death penalty. To date, he has not.

Despite being ignored by the current administration, issues raised by the study remain.

The Value of Black Life in Maryland
By Parris Glendening
Sunday, December 18, 2005; B07

In the eight years I served as governor of Maryland, I found the power to decide which condemned prisoners would live and which would die the most awesome and emotionally grueling of all my duties. I faced this decision four times.

I believed in the death penalty when I became governor and took seriously my constitutional responsibility to uphold Maryland law. I presided over two executions, those of Flint Gregory Hunt and Tyrone Gilliam. Both were black men whose victims were white. I heard from many civil rights leaders who rightly pointed out that this racial combination dominated cases on our state's death row, even though African Americans were and continue to be the victims in nearly 80 percent of homicides.

So in 1999 I commissioned a study of race and death sentencing from the University of Maryland, believing it my responsibility to ensure that justice was truly blind when applying this ultimate punishment.

Powell raps Europe on CIA flights

A number of countries where flights allegedly stopped have said they were unaware of their land being used.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has indicated that Europeans are being disingenuous when they deny knowledge of the rendition of terror suspects.

Mr Powell said the recently highlighted practice of moving people to places where they are not covered by US law was neither "new or unknown" to Europe.

The Confusing Cost of Medicare's Drug Plan
Some seniors wrestling with the government's confusing new prescription plan now must also contend with misleading price quotes
By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

Signing up for Medicare's new prescription drug benefit has been challenging enough for the nation's 43 million eligible seniors. In most states they must wade through 40 different insurance plans, and the best way to compare prices and enroll is through the Internet — unfamiliar territory for many elderly. The government has also been so slow in confirming applicants' eligibility that some enrollees may not have their necessary ID cards when the program begins next month. Now, as the initial December 31 enrollment deadline fast approaches, comes another headache: Consumer groups say they're getting an increasing number of complaints from seniors that drug plan prices listed on Medicare's website differ from prices quoted by the private insurers running the plans. "There have been a lot of instances of huge discrepancies," says Hilary Dalin, counseling director for one of those consumer groups, Health Assistance Partnership.

Quote of note:

James Bamford, author of two books on the NSA, said the program could be problematic because it bypasses a special court set up by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize eavesdropping on suspected terrorists.

"I didn't hear him specify any legal right, except his right as president, which in a democracy doesn't make much sense," Bamford said in an interview. "Today, what Bush said is he went around the law, which is a violation of the law — which is illegal."

Facing angry criticism and challenges to his authority in Congress, President Bush on Saturday unapologetically defended his administration's right to conduct secret post-Sept. 11 spying in the United States as "critical to saving American lives."

Quote of note:

"Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Agents' visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior
By AARON NICODEMUS, Standard-Times staff writer

NEW BEDFORD -- A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

We like to think all citizens of the United States of America are guaranteed certain civil and human rights. Unfortunately, that guarantee is subject to the vagaries of human judgment. At times of national crisis this nation has always reduced the protections we are "guaranteed" by law. In fact Justice Scalia has said in wartime, "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum. I won't let it go beyond the constitutional minimum."

It is expected. There is historical precedent for it. Unfortunately, in every case the historic precedent has been that the impositions were deemed unnecessary and, in most cases, unconstitutional after the fact. The first such case was the Alien and Sedition Acts which passed in 1798. The threat was a French-backed navy of privateers operating in the area around the West Indies which was threatening the expanding U.S. merchant shipping force. The Act allowed the President to order