It’s deja vu all over again…or in this case, seeing as it has to do with things heard rather than seen, deja entendu. If you think the current crop of fascists in the White House only bulldozed the remnants of the Clinton Weimar Republic recently, you need to read this:
Senate Judiciary Committee hearings begin Monday over [George W.] Bush’s authority to approve such wiretaps by the ultra-secretive National Security Agency without a judge’s approval. A focus of the hearings is to determine whether the Bush administration’s eavesdropping program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law with origins during Ford’s presidency.
“We strongly believe it is unwise for the president to concede any lack of constitutional power to authorize electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes,” wrote Robert Ingersoll, then-deputy secretary of state, in a 1976 memorandum to President Ford about the proposed bill on electronic surveillance.
George H.W. Bush, then director of the CIA, wanted to ensure “no unnecessary diminution of collection of important foreign intelligence” under the proposal to require judges to approve terror wiretaps, according to a March 1976 memorandum he wrote to the Justice Department. Bush also complained that some major communications companies were unwilling to install government wiretaps without a judge’s approval. Such a refusal “seriously affects the capabilities of the intelligence community,” Bush wrote.
In another document, Jack Marsh, a White House adviser, outlined options for Ford over the wiretap legislation. Marsh alerted Ford to objections by Bush as CIA director and by Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft over the scope of a provision to require judicial oversight of wiretaps. At the time, Rumsfeld was defense secretary, Kissinger was secretary of state and Scowcroft was the White House national security adviser.
Some experts weren’t surprised the cast of characters in this national debate remained largely unchanged over 30 years.
“People don’t change their stripes,” said Kenneth C. Bass a former senior Justice Department lawyer who oversaw such wiretap requests during the Carter administration.
Or their carefully concealed swastikas, as the case may be.
This putsch has been a long time coming, and it only attests further to the premeditated nature of BushCo’s crimes against democracy. (Not that we hadn’t already guessed as much.)
The question now is, how much longer will the American Sheeple put up with these wolves in the White House?
