We know it simply isn't possible that Bush is only spying on Americans talking to Al Qaeda members. That he could have gotten a search warrant for, and we'd have supported him in it. No, Bush's illegal domestic wiretap program is far more extensive, far more intrusive, than that. So what is it? Who is he spying on, what is he doing, that he wouldn't even dare present the program to the court that is by law supposed to approve of it?
More from Mark Schmitt:
Given what we know about these previous episodes in which the executive branch created zones of extreme secrecy, I think it’s quite likely that we will soon learn that the NSA domestic surveillance program involved much more than just tracking people who received calls from known al Qaeda suspects, something that I certainly wouldn’t object to. I don’t know what it will be -- some have speculated that it involved monitoring journalists -- but whatever it is, it was something that couldn’t be justified even within the administration.Mark also raises an interesting observation:
Roughly speaking, there have been four great showdowns over abuse of executive power in modern U.S. history. The earliest has to do with domestic surveillance by the CIA, and other ill-conceived schemes, as revealed by the 1975 Church Committee hearings. The second, closely overlapping the first, involved all the excesses of the Nixon administration, including Watergate itself, the "Plumbers," the secret bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger"s wiretapping of staffers, etc. The third, the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan Administration, seems quaint compared to the fourth, the Bush administration"s NSA domestic surveillance program, and the broader assertion of executive authority to torture and otherwise ignore international law.
These episodes have certain themes in common. Yes, one of them is that they were all hatched in the first term of Republican presidencies and revealed only after reelection...
