Some Questions For Bush On NSA Spying Issue
by Steve
Georgia10 over at DailyKos does a nice job shredding the “Congress gave Bush the authority to wiretap” defense trotted out by Abu Gonzales this morning. Bush, at his press conference this morning said several times that he has kept Congress informed of what he was doing here, a statement that will be disputed all day by the Democrats. He specifically said, “We have briefed the United States Congress on this program over a dozen times.”
But I have a simple test: Bush says that the only people who were being monitored were Americans with suspected Al Qaeda links, who had emails or phone calls with suspects overseas. We are also told that there have been hundreds if not thousands of such taps since 2001. If this is true, and Bush has been listening in since 2001 on all this traffic, I have several questions:
Why haven’t we had more prosecutions here at home?
Why haven’t we had more arrests here at home?
If these are folks with known Al Qaeda links, then why haven’t you gone to the Foreign Intelligence Services Act court and received warrants on all these people? The current law allows you to do whatever you want for the first 72 hours and then get a warrant, yet you apparently haven’t even gotten warrants on many if not all of these folks even though you’ve been doing it for years.
If the current law was insufficient, why haven’t you tried to expand it in the last four years?
And if Bush has authorized NSA spying only on Americans suspected of having Al Qaeda links, then prove it. The list of names of who have been spied upon can be shared with the top four members of the intelligence committees, can’t it? I mean, you have been tracking these folks for years and haven’t pulled the trigger yet on many of them, right? If you had, lord knows this administration would have taken credit for it by now, like they already have for the “ten” plots that have been stopped that it turns out weren’t ten at all.
So why can’t you share this list of names with the top four members of the congressional intelligence committees, who are already bound to confidentiality now?