Amerika

Fascism comes quietly in the night, and knocks at your door, when you answer you are swept away never to be heard from again. Your neighbours murmur and shut their curtains, thanking their god that it was not them.

Others are heard to say, 'they must have done something wrong' or perhaps 'you have nothing to worry about if you are innocent'.

Is this the 1930's? Or 1948? Or even the dreaded 1984? Nope its 2006 and you should be afraid, very afraid if you live in Amerika today.

Fascism the police state, the security state is invoked because of a mythical enemy, in Germany it was the Jews in Amerika it is Terrorists.

Daschle: Congress Denied Bush War Powers in U.S.

By Barton Gellman

Washington Post Staff Writer

The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in today's Washington Post.

Daschle's disclosure challenges a central legal argument offered by the White House in defense of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. It suggests that Congress refused explicitly to grant authority that the Bush administration now asserts is implicit in the resolution.

The Justice Department acknowledged yesterday, in a letter to Congress, that the president's October 2001 eavesdropping order did not comply with "the 'procedures' of" the law that has regulated domestic espionage since 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, established a secret intelligence court and made it a criminal offense to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant from that court, "except as authorized by statute."

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.

Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest

Jurist Concerned Bush Order Tainted Work of Secret Pane

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.


According to One Blog, The New York Times, quoting unnamed government sources: "The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged....As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications...."

Wiretaps said to sift all overseas contacts

Vast US effort seen on eavesdropping

''Long before 9/11, the NSA gathered from the ether mountains of [overseas] phone calls and e-mail messages on a daily basis," said Columbia Law School professor Deborah Livingston. ''If you have such an extensive foreign operation, you'll gather a large amount of phone traffic and e-mails involving Americans. That's something we've lived with for a long time."

But Bush's order cleared the way for the NSA computers to sift through Americans' phone calls and e-mails.

According to a New York Times report last week, Bush authorized the NSA's human analysts to look at the international messages of up to 500 Americans at a time, with a changing list of targets.

Hayden, now the deputy director of national intelligence, told reporters this week that under Bush's order, a ''shift supervisor" instead of a judge signs off on deciding whether or not to search for an American's messages.

The general conceded that without the burden of obtaining warrants, the NSA has used ''a quicker trigger" and ''a subtly softer trigger" when deciding to track someone.

Justice Dept. to probe leak of spy program

Bush had called disclosure a ‘shameful act’; N.Y. Times reported NSA story

Bush Presses Editors on Security

President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.

The efforts have failed, but the rare White House sessions with the executive editors of The Washington Post and New York Times are an indication of how seriously the president takes the recent reporting that has raised questions about the administration's anti-terror tactics.

And the Right Wing is all indignant not over the authoritarian illegal actions of Bush but by their expose. So much for Freedom that these whingnutters proclaim they believe in.

FBI and Justice Department Finally Investigate a Real Leak

Jim Kouri, CPP

The US Department of Justice has directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct an in-depth investigation in order to determine who disclosed a secret National Security Agency intelligence operation to a reporter from the New York Times.

"We are opening an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified materials related to the NSA," said DOJ spokesperson Trent Duffy during a press conference earlier today.

When the New York Times suddenly broke the story about the NSA top secret operation Bush conceded that he indeed authorized the program. He called its disclosure to The New York Times "a shameful act." He said he expected a Justice Department leak investigation into who disclosed the National Security Agency eavesdropping operation would be conducted.

According to the Bush White House, the DOJ and FBI began the investigation without consulting with White House staff, but the President approved of their investigation to find the leaker whose actions are believed to have caused severe damage to national security and homeland security. Now with Republican and Democrat liberals poking their noses into the NSA program, some intelligence and law enforcement officials fear there will be even more leaks of classified information -- including information on methods and sources.

tags
anti-war
NSA
USA
spying
terrorism
George Bush
President
war