Editorial: Terrorist ties or not, we will wiretap you

Text Size: A | A | A

Back in July, more than 21⁄2 years after The New York Times exposed it, Congress legitimized the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping program. Would it have done so if it knew that personal calls between American citizens at home and abroad, having absolutely nothing to do with terrorists or terrorism, were being monitored at a National Security Agency (NSA) listening post in Georgia? That is what two former Arab linguists have alleged, both to ABC News and to author James Bamford, an expert on intelligence agencies, whose new book, “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” was released Tuesday.

During the long debate and negotiations over revamping the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the administration had brazenly violated by ordering wiretaps without the special FISA court’s permission, President Bush and his intelligence officials repeatedly assured the nation that only American citizens in this country with ties, or suspected ties, to al-Qaida were being targeted. Not so, say the two whistleblowers. Calls home to wives and girlfriends from military officers, aid workers, journalists, etc., in Iraq were routinely intercepted. These communications were not only listened to but recorded — and those involving pillow talk or phone sex were then played back for people’s amusement.

The whistleblowers say that when they questioned the legality of this with their superiors, they were told intelligence agency lawyers had approved it. That, presumably, was based on the same unconstitutional claim of executive power that Bush had used to justify defying Congress, ignoring FISA and conducting the warrantless wiretap program.

Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has opened an investigation; and Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, respectively, have done the same. If the claims turn out to be true, Congress shouldn’t cave, as it did with FISA, when it restored the authority of the FISA courts but also expanded executive authority in this area while granting retroactive immunity to everyone involved, including the telecom companies. Such abuses of civil liberties and the right to privacy are not even remotely connected to national security, and the Bush administration shouldn’t be allowed to conflate and politicize them, as it has so often in the past.

---

Get ALL of our news...Click here to subscribe to our online edition, a complete replica of our print edition.

---

comments

October 16, 2008 7:19 a.m. [ Suggest removal ]

Walter ( no real name given ) says... Stop dignifying the Bush "regime" by referring to it as an administration. Messrs Bush and Cheney didn't administer our government -- they violated it. They took it upon themselves to repudiate the Bill of Rights and they did it with the blessings of the Republican Party and -- to their ever-lasting shame --the cowards and collaborators in the Democratic Party.