Nick Langewis and David Edwards
Raw Story
June 20, 2008

“Never appease political bullies, President Bush admonished at the Israeli Knesset,” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann opened. “Oddly, House Democrats chose to ignore him on the subject of dealing with him.”

Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley sees a “very frightening bill” in a proposed “compromise,” currently in the House, that would update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to effectively grant immunity from civil lawsuits to telecommunications companies that agreed to spy on their customers as part of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, starting shortly before the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. If the White House asked a phone company to spy with its assurance that it was legal, the measure says, that’s enough to dismiss a case.

Congressional Democrats, Turley went on, knew about surveillance and torture programs, but were politically unable to oppose them at the same time they were touting themselves to the public as defenders of civil liberties. The bill, he said, is part of a campaign of collusion between Congress and the Bush administration, immunizing not only the telecommunications companies, but the administration and any members of Congress, on either side of the aisle, that may have been involved.

“The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise it is a capitulation,” Senator Russ Feingold said today. “The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home. Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity. And under this bill, the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power. Instead of cutting bad deals on both FISA and funding for the war in Iraq, Democrats should be standing up to the flawed and dangerous policies of this administration.”

“The Democrats never really were engaged in this,” said Turley. “In fact, they repeatedly tried to cave in to the White House, only to be stopped by civil libertarians and bloggers.”

“I think they’re simply waiting to see if the public’s interest will wane,” he went on, referring to repeated attempts to float said legislation past the public. “This bill has quite literally no public value for citizens or civil liberties. It is reverse engineering, though the type of thing the Bush Administration’s famous for, and now the Democrats are doing–that is, to change the law to conform to past conduct.”

“It’s what any criminal would love to do,” Turley continued. “You rob a bank, go to the legislature, and change the law to say that robbing banks is lawful.”

“People need to be very, very much aware of this bill,” he charged. “What you’re seeing in this bill is an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It is something that allows the President and the government to go into law-abiding homes, on their word alone–their suspicion alone–and to engage in warrantless surveillance.

“That’s what the framers who drafted the Fourth Amendment wanted to prevent.”

The House could vote on the bill as soon as Friday. A full copy of the bill, in PDF format, is available at this link.

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, broadcast June 19, 2008.

Kurt Nimmo
Truth News
April 22, 2008

A gaggle of neocons are targeting Ron Paul and a handful of Democrats who are opposed to “a White House-backed surveillance bill,” that is to say they oppose the destruction of the Fourth Amendment.

Defense of Democracies is running ads in Ron Paul’s district as well as in those of the Democrats. “The organization is urging the House to pass a Bush-approved update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that would provide legal immunity to phone companies that may have violated the law in facilitating the warrantless wiretapping of Americans after 9/11,” reports Nick Juliano for Raw Story.

Defense of Democracies is running ads in a dozen districts across the country, targeting 11 Democrats and Paul who voted for an alternative FISA bill that passed the House last month.

“This refusal to oppose the bogus House bill ensures that vital intelligence is being lost and that America’s intelligence community does not have the tools needed to detect and prevent terrorist attacks,” the group’s president Clifford May, said in a news release posted to its Web site.

The group claims to be bipartisan, but its earlier effort caused several Democrats to jump ship, and May told the Washington Post he has discussed conservatives’ lagging fundraising efforts with former Bush strategist Karl Rove.

In fact, the so-called Defense of Democracies gang consists of the same old neocons and their fellow travelers, including former CIA boss James Woolsey, faux conservative Newt Gingrich, and key neocons such as the unabashed Israel partisan Joe Lieberman, Frank Gaffney, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, and others not so obviously neocon, such as Steve Forbes and Louis J. Freeh.

All of these people are enemies of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Immediate arrest and perp walk in orange jumpsuits is most definitely in order.

“The Defense of Democracies ad also claims that vital intelligence was lost because of the delay in passing a new law, citing claims from administration officials,” writes Juliano. “The Los Angeles Times reported the administration backtracked from this claim soon after it was made.”

Of course they backtracked — because there are no al-Qaeda terrorists in the United States and the neocon plan to conduct massive snooping is not aimed at al-Qaeda but rather all opposition to a century or more of war, torture, sadism, and misery.

In short, the necons are monitoring blond hair and blue eye al-Qaeda members, numbering in the millions, who want to bring the troops home now and put an end to bombing small defenseless countries. Naturally, for the neocons, anybody who opposes their diabolical plan is with al-Qaeda. In fact, al-Qaeda is nothing more than shorthand for those who stand in their way.

The so-called FISA bill, itself a violation of the Fourth Amendment, is simply one of several tools the neocons use to go after the opposition. As we have known for some time now, the neocons habitually use the FBI, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency to do their dirty work. For the FBI, it is the issuance of “national Security letters” as a pretext to snoop, while for the Pentagon it is the Counterintelligence Field Activity office, said to now be defunct.

Sure, and I have an ice sculpture for sale in the Mojave desert. Military intelligence never closes down successful operations, and the CIFA is swimmingly successful. In December, 2005, NBC reported it had “obtained a secret Pentagon database that indicates the U.S. military is collecting information on American peace activists and monitoring protests against the Iraq war.”

A document stamped “secret” reports, “We have noted increased communication between protest groups using the Internet,” but not a “significant connection” between incidents, such as “recurring instigators” or “vehicle descriptions,” which suggests the Pentagon has been monitoring e-mail and tracking anti-war activists by the cars they drive. The document is 400 pages long and lists 1,500 “suspicious incidents across the country over a 10-month period,” including “four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including one in Hollywood.” Other groups targeted included The Truth Project, a Quaker group in Lake Worth, Fla., concerned about military recruitment in high schools, and a group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, protesting recruiters on campus.

All al-Qaeda, if we use neocon shorthand.

Christopher Plye, a former Army intelligence officer who exposed Pentagon infiltration of the anti-war and civil rights movements during the Vietnam War, told NBC, “This is the J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner. They’re collecting everything.”

James Risen, New York Times scribe, was allowed to reveal the severity of NSA snooping back in 2006. “For the first time since the Watergate-era abuses, the NSA is spying on Americans again, and on a large scale,” Risen writes in his book, State of War. “The Bush administration has swept aside nearly 30 years of rules and regulations and has secretly brought the NSA back into the business of domestic espionage.”

Espionage? More like trashing the Fourth Amendment.

It would be espionage if Quakers and antiwar students were covertly working for al-Qaeda and selling out their country. Instead they are exercising their right to petition the government, or that should be former right.

But then, again, al-Qaeda is shorthand for anybody who dares oppose the neocons. Increasingly, this massive demographic includes not only Quakers and antiwar activists but people — like Ron Paul — who demand the restoration of a constitutionally limited republic. Ditto folks who understand 9/11 was an inside job and demand a new investigation. All are al-Qaeda. All will face the “J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner.”

The so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracies is simply another neocon contrivance cut out of the same cloth that brought us the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, the Hudson Institute, the Committee on the Present Danger, and Freedom House — all premier neocon criminal organizations dedicated to endless fear, mass murder, rendition, internment camps, and human suffering on a near-Nazi scale.