G.O.P. Plan Would Allow Spying Without Warrants 




G.O.P. Plan Would Allow Spying Without Warrants
The plan by Senate Republicans to step up oversight of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program would also give legislative sanction for the first time to long-term eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant, legal experts said on Wednesday.

Welcome to 1984, Orwell style.

  • The Death of the Intelligence Panel
    The wrenching debate in the 1970's over the abuse of presidential power produced two groundbreaking reforms aimed at preventing a president from using war or broader claims of national security to trample Americans' rights.

    One was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which struck the proper balance between national security and bedrock civil liberties, and the other was the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a symbol of bipartisan leadership. They endured for a quarter of a century — until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left FISA in tatters and the Senate Select Committee on its deathbed in just five years.

  • New report alleges Bush, Abramoff are friends
    Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff says President Bush knew him well enough to joke with him about weightlifting. “What are you benching, buff guy?” Abramoff said Bush asked him.

    The president has said he doesn’t know Abramoff.

    Abramoff said he finds it hard to believe Bush doesn’t remember the 10 or so photos he and members of his family had snapped with the president and first lady.

  • Official Says Shiite Party Suppressed Body Count
    Days after the bombing of a Shiite shrine unleashed a wave of retaliatory killings of Sunnis, the leading Shiite party in Iraq's governing coalition directed the Health Ministry to stop tabulating execution-style shootings, according to a ministry official familiar with the recording of deaths.

    The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings.

  • Names of the Dead
    The Department of Defense has identified 2,296 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the death of the following American yesterday:

    LEWIS, Dwayne P. R., 26, Staff Sgt., Army; New York City; 10th Mountain Division.
 

Posted: Thu - March 9, 2006 at 10:04 AM           |

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