Playing to type, Dick Cheney just gave a speech at the well-funded conservative echo chamber The Heritage Foundation calling for making the Protect America First Act permanent. This act allows for the warrant-less wiretapping of Americans and others abroad. It would also allow for retroactive immunity for the telecoms who acted of their own accord in giving over to the President the records of their customers. Harry Reid, who is apparently no longer even playing at being a democrat, is ready to give both of these things to Cheney.
Cheney this afternoon, speaking at The Heritage Foundation on the Protect America First said:
“There is no sound reason to pass critical legislation like the Protect America Act and slap an expiration date on it,the challenge to the country has not expired over the last six months. It won’t expire any time soon, and we should not write laws that pretend otherwise.”
This is coming about because the Act will expire in nine days, and there isn’t anything coming down the pipeline within those nine days from Congress either for or against the Act. That said, they are working on it, and Harry Reid is doing his level best to give away the store and sell out the privacy of anyone that comes within the purview of the White House. He’s asked the White House to support a 30 day extension of the Act while he works to build something he can take to the President. The spin from the White House is, this is a necessary modernization of the FISA act. The sheer absurdity of that statement is amazing, given the well established record of the FISA courts on swift action and high rate of approvals for warrants. All this really boils down to is a White House that doesn’t want to have to get warrants because they can’t be bothered to disclose that they’ll look in the backyard of anyone they feel like. The speech today was beyond scary if you haven’t been nipping on the NeoCon Kool-aid. Some excerpts:
The best source of that information is, of course, the terrorists themselves. So our government has taken careful but urgent steps to monitor the communications of enemies at large, and to get information out of the ones that we’ve captured. The military has interrogated terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. In addition, a small number of terrorists, high-value targets held overseas, have gone through a tougher interrogation program run by the CIA. These include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11.
The basic problem was this. When FISA was passed 30 years ago, many domestic phone calls were transmitted by wire, and most international phone calls went by radio or satellite. Today, it’s the opposite. A lot of international communications are actually routed through computers and cables inside the United States. This would mean, under the original language of FISA, that the U.S. sometimes could not monitor, without a finding of probable cause and a court order, one foreign citizen abroad making a telephone call to another foreign citizen abroad about terrorism, because of changes in technology.
We’re dealing here with matters of the utmost sensitivity. It’s not even proper to confirm whether any given company provided assistance. But we can speak in general terms. The fact is, the intelligence community doesn’t have the facilities to carry out the kind of international surveillance needed to defend this country since 9/11.
It gets worse, but in the interests of brevity we’ll stop there. In these paragraphs, he’s basically admitted to torture, the lack of ability or will to find probable cause – a foundation of our Constitution, and that he’s ok with any corporation that feels like it wiretapping you without having to be held accountable or even having their name mentioned. Now we don’t know about you but this government and corporate America really haven’t done a whole lot to help us out lately, other than apparently wiretapping our phones and offering us predatory loans. And Harry Reid who pretends to be a Democrat is working as hard as he can to pass this without fail.
Exactly where is the difference between the two parties again?
Further:
Cheney Calls for Permanent Warrantless Wiretapping
Remarks by the Vice President to the Heritage Foundation
[...] the helm. Prompting Chris Dodd of Connecticut to threaten a filibuster if this goes farther. As we reported Wednesday, Reid’s stance on this issue falls in line with Dick Cheney’s. So much for [...]