It didn’t take long for non-partisans to see that most of the the 2006 Democratic congressional candidates had no intention of acting strongly to confront the criminal behavior of George W. Bush. Many Democratic congressional candidates were just using anti-Bush, anti-war anger for their personal gain. Since the 2006 congressional election, we’ve seen the cost of the Democrats’ dedcation to self-interest above the good of the nation. Time and time again, the Democrats in Congress have caved in and given the Bush Republicans exactly what they wanted.
The Iraq War goes on and on. Our civil liberties are being hacked apart by laws like the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act and the Protect America Act. Alberto Gonzales remains in office, with more power than ever. Impeachment is off the table.
I found this video of Cindy Sheehan, talking in January, 2007, to be prescient. In the video, she predicts that the American people will need to push the Democrats to get anything done, and that the Democrats will begin to waffle and wimp out. It’s well worth a watch.
From Cindy Sheehan‘s speech announcing her independent campaign for Congress, challenging Nancy Pelosi in 2008:
“A great majority of citizens in California’s 8th congressional district want the Bush regime impeached and want our troops home from the Middle East. I believe Ms. Pelosi has lost touch with the people of this district and America and it’s time for our reps that aren’t doing their jobs by upholding their sworn oaths to the Constitution to receive a wakeup call!”
Nancy Pelosi’s best response to this criticism is that she would be for impeachment if only she were not Speaker of the House. How convenient for Representative Pelosi. She’s only for doing something that matters when she doesn’t have the power accomplish much. What a useful excuse for submitting to the corrupt power of the Bush Administration.
If I were living in the 8th congressional district of California, I’d vote for Sheehan.
When presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich heard the news last week that government spy satellites will now be used by domestic law enforcement to track American citizens, he did not wait to express his outrage. Kucinich made a strong statement denouncing the plan by John Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, that federal, state, and local law enforcement officials will now be able to gain access to U.S. military spy satellites in order to track the movements of American citizens.
The government acknowledges that, as part of the program, police will be able to use special government spy aircraft that can scan at wavelengths that allow the aircraft to actually see people inside of buildings, and even in underground bunkers. This is like the American government using U2 spy planes over the Soviet Union, only against American citizens on American soil, and using technology generations ahead of what U2 had available.
Dennis Kucinich was right on in his condemnation of this new program to expand the government’s programs to spy against American citizens far beyond the Constitution’s restriction of reasonable search and seizure. Kucinich points out that the program clearly violates the Posse Comitatus Act by using the might of the military, which is supposed to be aimed against foreign countries, as a law enforcement weapon against American civilians.
It’s a frightening thought that we now cannot even count on being free from the snooping eyes of our own government, not even when we’re out in the middle of nature. There will always be an eye in the sky, watching us. Kucinich said of this new government spying program, “Not only are they ramping up their attempts to lie and deceive this nation into another war, they are also using those lies and deceptions to justify creating a police state right here where everyone is under suspicion and everyone is secretly under surveillance from Big Brother in the sky.”
Kucinich is right. America is turning into a Big Brother police state.
Jim over at Irregular Times points out a huge coincidence between the legislation of the Protect America Act, as crafted by the Bush White House in cooperation with Congress, and the language being used by the White House legal team that is fighting efforts by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and by the governments of Vermont, Missouri, Connecticut, Maine and New Jersey to make public the extent to which the federal government is using the National Security Agency to spy on Americans’ online activities.
Both the Protect America Act and the Bush legal effort to block exposure of its giant Internet espionage database are focused on the effort to redefine the meaning of “electronic surveillance” in order to legally protect people in the Bush White House.
Why is the Protect America Act so strikingly parallel with the effort to block the lawsuits from the state governments and EFF, if there is not a relationship?
The combination of the chronological coincidence and the strategic coincidence of these two efforts to push electronic spy programs is quite odd… unless the Protect America Act is really about an attempt to keep the American people from finding out about the new equivalent of a fully operational Total Information Awareness program.
One thing is for sure – the more I look at the Protect America Act, the more clear it becomes that there’s something truly dark and rotten lying underneath it – and it isn’t terrorism.
The more you take a look at the Protect America Act, the less it makes sense. There is no impending threat of terrorist attack. The Bush White House admits that. Yet, George W. Bush all of a sudden says that he needs huge new spy powers to be legalized, and he needs these spy powers now, not a month from now.
Well, if there is no impending terrorist threat of attack this summer, what are these new spy powers for, and why did he need them within less than a month?
The mystery of the Protect America Act is this: What is happening during the scheduled recess of Congress that George W. Bush needed extraordinary newly legalized spy powers for?
One possible answer: The new law is about a resurrection of Total Information Awareness, a program that was supposed to have been stopped years ago, designed to bring private electronic information from multiple resources, including intercepted Internet traffic, into one gigantic computer database.
Originally, that database was to be housed at DARPA, in an office run by John Poindexter, of Iran Contra infamy. However, when the Total Information Awareness project was discovered, it was moved over to the National Security Agency.
Put one and one together, now. Who has been doing the warrantless “wiretapping” partially exposed within the Bush Administration? The National Security Agency.
What kind of information was going through that center? Web traffic, email, telephone calls, and a lot of it. Klein explained in an interview with Frontline: “…billions of bits of data going in and out every second every day. So all the Web surfing you’re doing, whatever you’re doing on the Internet — the pictures, the video, the Voice over Internet — all that stuff’s going in and out of there. And then of course there’s also the traditional phone switch, which is doing what it’s been doing since before the Internet.”
This web page you’re reading now is likely routed through that center, or another one like it, possibly with another National Security Agency splitter like the one that Mark Klein saw. Welcome to the NSA.
It just so happens that about two dozen lawsuits are going through the courts trying to force the Bush Administration to reveal the extent to which it is using the National Security Agency to spy on Americans’ Internet use.
Right before George W. Bush started his desperate push to force Congress to pass the Protect America Act, the government’s effort to block one of those cases was denied. That was July 24. There is no mention of a need to revise the FISA regulations on electronic spying against Americans until the day after that.
Search Google News on July 22 or 23rd for FISA. You’ll come up with news about the FISA World Rowing Competition. It’s around noontime on July 25th, the day after the case brought by 5 state governments’ to get information about the NSA supercomputer Internet spy network was advanced a vital step forward in the courts, that we see the start of the push to pass the Protect America Act.
The headline on July 25th from United Press International: Boehner backs bill to beef up FISA. The article refers to the first draft of the Protect America Act, introduced by Heather Wilson… on July 24th, the same day that the court judgment against the Bush Administration came down.
The timing is too coincidental to avoid suspicion. We don’t know what goes on in secrecy. That’s why it’s called secrecy. However, what we can see is enough to judge that there’s a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to the passage of the Protect America Act.
