Dec 16, 2007

Bush Began Spying on Americans Feb. '01--Why?

Note this is well before 9/11, yet the official story by the administration is that it received no notification of any national threat, while in stealth it began comprehensive spying on American citizens, to which the telecoms objected upon legal grounds as contrary to their obligations to protect consumer rights even from government demands.

Further consider that the government could have issued "warrants" for such if it indeed had any "probable cause" with specific evidence to justify it. The fact that Bush government did not issue warrants, or attempt to get them, proves it was trying to circumvent the law, and the Constitution, to spy on Americans secretly, in order to do so in stealth.

Such a secret pattern by government, before 9/11, could be regarded as evidence of secrecy and providing for its own security, not against foreign terrorists, but from the American people at large whom its surveillance plans desired to freely sift through. The question of MOTIVE must be answered.
clipped from www.nytimes.com

“What he saw,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs along with Carl Mayer, “was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans’ phone usage.”

N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.

Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.