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Originally Posted by Shoonra
But the 2001 act did NOT authorize the Prez to order wiretaps on his own whim.
In a public statement on April 20, 2004, and it can be found on the White House website, Bush said that ALL the anti-terrorism wiretaps were done pursuant to the Constitution, and each of the taps - including the "roaming taps" that tried to follow a person from phone to phone instead of just sticking with one phone - REQUIRED and had obtained a court order.
In fact, the Washington Post reported that the Foreign Intelligence Security Board, the supersecret tribunal created to authorize anti-spy and anti-terrorist wiretaps, had gotten hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, requests to authorize wiretaps since Bush came into office in Jan. 2001, and had NEVER refused one.
Moreover, in the two or three months following the World Trade Center attack, it came out that the FBI, NSA, and other intel agencies had enormous backlogs of taped calls and e-mails to/from/between suspected terrorists ... but didn't know what was in them because the agencies didn't have enough Arabic translators.
Now, put all these facts together: Bush already announced that terrorist suspects were being wiretapped, that all wiretaps required court authorization, and that the govt has trouble finding Arabic translators, and maybe you reach the same conclusion that I do:
Bush is "concerned" about the newspapers printing the story of those unauthorized wiretaps, not because it warns terrorists, since Bush already warned them himself with his April 20, 2004 public statement, but because the wiretaps are not targeting terrorists at all; nor are they targeting any suspicious Arabs; they are targeting homegrown English-speaking Americans - primarily (I would guess) Democrats, and any sort of investigators working on cases involving Bush's buddies at Enron or Halliburton or etc.
At least that's what I think.
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