August 02, 2007

IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


DOMESTIC SPYING ISN'T ABOUT TERRORISTS

The Bush administration has used the attacks on 9/11 as a carte blanche excuse to step all over the Constitution and civil liberties. The attacks on 9/11 were orchestrated by a few people with box cutters. They were mostly from Saudi Arabia. There is no evidence that anyone within the United States aided the terrorists, or that the operations were planned inside the United States. Yet, the Bush administration has greatly expanded spying on Americans who had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. You have to think the domestic spying is to identify the administration's political opponents. It's dangerously close to a totalitarian form of government that suppresses any and all dissent. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:

So what's the real explanation for all the secrecy about the overall structure of the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program?

The chief reason, especially for the excessive secrecy around the data-mining operations, appears to be Bush’s political need to prevent a full debate inside the United States about the security value of these Big Brother-type procedures when weighed against invasions of Americans' privacy.

Bush knows he could run into trouble if he doesn't keep the American people in the dark. In 2002, for instance, when the Bush administration launched a project seeking “total information awareness” on virtually everyone on earth involved in the modern economy, the disclosure was met with public alarm.

The administration cited the terrorist threat to justify the program which involved applying advanced computer technology to analyze trillions of bytes of data on electronic transactions and communications. The goal was to study the electronic footprints left by every person in the developed world during the course of their everyday lives – from the innocuous to the embarrassing to the potentially significant.

The government could cross-check books borrowed from a library, fertilizer bought at a farm-supply outlet, X-rated movies rented at a video store, prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets reserved for a plane, borders crossed while traveling, rooms rented at a motel, and countless other examples.

Bush’s aides argued that their access to this electronic data might help