No surprise here really. The loyal Bushies were lying earlier this year. We were told the Bush team would follow the law and obtain warrants when spying on Americans. Wrong. Instead, they'll keep breaking the law if they want to. Lying lawbreakers, that's who is running our country:
Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.George Bush doesn't have the authority to break the law. He just thinks he does.
Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.
As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.
But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.
