Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter has a great article this week about “Snoopgate” and
how Bush called the editor of the New York Times to the Oval Office last year to
try and kill the story. He ended up with only a 1 year delay.

Dec. 19, 2005 – Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond
sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus
liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came
out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with
him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re
seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a
dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the
Civil War.

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its
story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens
without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear
violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this
week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and
executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk
them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting,
but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

View complete article
here.

Nearly every legal expert coming out is condemning this act, including Fox’s
own legal analysis – Judge Andrew Napolitano. This is a rough transcript via
This Modern World from Fox’s
Dayside program:

Napolitano: When Congress enacted the FISA act in ‘77, it also made it
criminal for anyone in this country to use the power of the government to
wiretap without a search warrant. It made it easy to get the search warrant
with the FISA law, but it said you have to get the search warrant.

Host: So what the president’s done is a criminal act?

Napolitano: The president has violated the law in the name of national
security, not wanting to violate the law, believing he’s doing the right
thing, but he violated it nonetheless. He can’t pick and choose which laws
to obey and not to obey any more than the rest of us can.

View complete article here.

Even John
has a clip up at
Crooks and Liars of Alan Dershowitz calling the actions illegal. This is one
of the most respected legal minds in the country. View the clip
here.

The jury may be out on the legalities of the tapping of phones but it is not
looking good for Bush and Co. this time around. Former CIA agent

Larry Johnson even has a great post up talking about how FISA does work and
gives an example of it. Further he has the best explanation of the reasoning for
Bush to break the law in order to tap phones:

So, President Bush is wrong. You don’t have to break a law to get quick
action. Not only can you catch terrorists using FISA, we have caught
terrorists. The real story behind the unauthorized wiretaps authorized by
President Bush probably concerns the source of the info. It appears the most
likely explanation is that the Bush Administration did not want to have to
tell a Federal judge that they were using information obtained from
interrogations that violated the spirit and the letter of the Geneva
Conventions. Instead of protecting the nation the President may be covering
his derrier.

View complete article

here.

Seems like the only ones supporting this action is the typical Bush
apologists. I don’t know what country they live in, but I live in the United
States of America and in this country we have a system of checks and balances to
insure one branch of government does not overstep their bounds. Bush has done
this and its time for the balance to kick in and that balance comes from
Congress.