From the January 13, 2006 edition of Truthout:
"The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document [declassified NSA document] contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups."
In my last post I mentioned Joseph Nacchio's testimony that his company Qwest had been asked for phone logs by the National Security Agency long before the September 11 terrorist attacks. I called it evidence of warrantless wiretapping, an allegation I retracted.
But were laws broken by the ambitious data mining project conceived by the NSA? According to Truthout, they were --with George W. Bush's approval:
"On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law."
James Risen, author of the book State of War and the man responsible for breaking the NSA story, implicates Bush directly in the NSA's illegal operation:
"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program... ."
Meanwhile Dennis Kucinich continues his crusade for impeachment of the president. Given the evidence of his flouting of the Constitution's 4th Amendment, impeachment may be the only remaining recourse for holding Bush accountable for his "high crimes and misdemeanors."
UPDATE: ( Dan Kennedy, writing for the UK's Guardian, provides a nice overview of the rising cry for justice in his piece "Should Bush be tried for war crimes?" He concludes that "... he - and we - nevertheless must be called to account for what we have allowed to happen to our country."
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