Okay. So here’s why what President Bush and the Administration has been doing is simply and utterly wrong:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. It means that if the government wants to snoop through your papers, your houses, your body, and yes, your phone calls, they’ve got to have probable cause, and they’ve got to get a warrant- in other words, their actions and intentions are subject to review by a judge.

This is well-established law. One of the main points of law covering telephone conversations is “Katz vs United States”. In this decision, the Supreme Court basically said that your telephone conversations are private unless the government has a warrant to be listening in.

The Bush Administration’s actions are also going against a federal law which specifically covers intelligence actions (spying) on foreign telephone conversations, the Foreign Intelligence Service Act. This law, written in 1978, specifically provides procedures for getting judicially-issued warrants for wiretapping these types of conversations. It set up a special court for this purpose- a court which has, in 25 years of existence, denied the grand total of… just four warrants.

Just four times in 25 years- and in those instances two of the targets were later looked at anyway, as the government presented additional or amended information to the court. And it’s not like we’re talking just a few times the court was even asked; in 2003 alone, it issued 1,724 warrants for electronic surveillance or physical search.

Folks, the Bush Administration is simply making up new laws and writing themselves justification to do so. These rulings overturn existing laws, they overturn the Constitution, and they are wrong and illegal. This kind of thing went out with the Nixon Administration- or so we thought.

At one point, during President Bush’s bitch session on his weekly radio address today, he claimed:

The existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.

Ah. So he’s not angry that he’s violating the Constitution; he’s angry that someone told.

What have the enemies learned that they shouldn’t have known? That the US might be listening in on their phone conversations? Since all the government had to do, if they wanted to do that, was go before a special court set up to only hear those types of cases, I think the bad guys already pretty much knew that.

See, that’s the thing. The Bush Administration already HAD the power to do this; the only thing was that they had to be subject to judicial review. Since the judges pretty much rubber-stamp the process, it’s not like it’s any serious impediment; but it IS a way to check the power of the executive branch of the government. It’s the kind of thing that our Founding Fathers set up because they KNEW that power-crazed fuckwits like Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would come along, and simply ignore the laws of the United States.

They KNEW that these people would have what sounded like really great excuses. They always do. It’s always something terribly important, like “national security” or what have you.

The reality is that the guy who came up with the written justification is the same guy who was the primary author of the justification that allowed us to torture people, a guy named John Yoo.

You know- the same torture that the Bush Administration has been wanting to keep doing. The kind of thing that’s made more clear by John McCain’s bill, that Bush supposedly agreed to go along with just a couple of days ago after fighting it tooth and nail in the Senate for a long time. Bush claimed credit for that, as though it was his idea and his Administration hadn’t been fighting against it for a long time.

This is scary stuff. The rightwingers like to blather that liberals “hate America”; their Barbie-doll, Ann Coulter, likes to throw around accusations of “treason”.

But remember this, folks- it’s their guy, President Bush, whose Administration has guys writing their own justifications that basically say “the President can do what he wants, even if it’s against the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Who are the ones committing treason? Who’s going against what America believes and stands for?

I’m so disgusted I could just barf.