Bush Expands His War on The Constitution

In an editorial in today's P-G, we can read:

Continuing the Bush administration's disgraceful romp across Americans' privacy and civil liberties, we now learn that the Pentagon and the CIA are collecting the banking and credit records of thousands of Americans to compile in a database.

Last week we learned that President Bush had ruled that his administration has the right to open Americans' mail without a court-approved warrant. Earlier we had learned that Mr. Bush had decided that the National Security Agency did not need to respect the measures of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act requiring a court order before intercepting Americans' telephone conversations and reading their e-mails.

The latest outrage, described by The New York Times over the weekend, has the Pentagon and the CIA, both barred expressly by law from domestic law enforcement, collecting banking and credit information from banks and credit agencies on thousands of American citizens whom the Department of Defense or the CIA suspect of terrorism or espionage.

Here is the article from The Times. The editorial touches on something in the article that needs to be expanded upon. From the editorial:

Apart from specific legal prohibitions on Defense and the CIA involving themselves in domestic law enforcement, they sometimes apparently step on the toes of the FBI -- which is legally charged with that responsibility -- in their independent collection efforts.

And from The Times:

In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has complained about military officials dealing directly with local police — rather than through the bureau — for assistance in responding to possible terrorist threats against a military base.

F.B.I. officials say the threats have often turned out to be uncorroborated and, at times, have stirred needless anxiety.

The military’s frequent use of national security letters has sometimes caused concerns from the businesses receiving them, a counterterrorism official said. Lawyers at financial institutions, which routinely provide records to the F.B.I. in law enforcement investigations, have contacted bureau officials to say they were confused by the scope of the military’s requests and whether they were obligated to turn the records over, the official said.

Companies are not eager to turn over sensitive financial data about customers to the government, the official said, “so the more this is done, and the more poorly it’s done, the more pushback there is for the F.B.I.”

So it looks as though dubya's latest assault on the law might make actually things more difficult for the FBI to pursue real leads in investigating terror in the US.

And while the FBI's hands are not sqeaky-clean either,

Some Democrats have accused the F.B.I. of using the letters for fishing expeditions, and the American Civil Liberties Union won court challenges in two cases, one for library records in Connecticut and the other for Internet records in Manhattan. Concerned about possible abuses, Congress imposed new safeguards in extending the Patriot Act last year, in part by making clear that recipients of national security letters could contact a lawyer and seek court review. Congress also directed the Justice Department inspector general to study the F.B.I.’s use of the letters, a review that is continuing.

Even they don't like the new program:

Some F.B.I. officials said they were surprised by the Pentagon’s interpretation of the law when military officials first informed them of it. “It was a very broad reading of the law,” a former counterterrorism official said.

I'll give the P-G the last word:

Given that Vice President Dick Cheney has already endorsed these Defense and CIA activities on Fox News Sunday, it will take some effort on the part of the Congress to shut them down. One effective way to do so would be by holding hostage upcoming Pentagon requests to the Congress for $100 billion and for authorization to add 92,000 troops.

Tell the Pentagon in the legislation to start by taking the people currently working on its domestic surveillance program and put them instead to some legal purpose. Such specific action is clearly necessary if this further step toward an American police state, carried out by the U.S. military and the country's external intelligence service, is to be headed off. [emphasis added]