Why the NYT Went with the Story

"To us, the Swift story looks like part of an alarming pattern. Ever since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has taken the necessity of heightened vigilance against terrorism and turned it into a rationale for an extraordinarily powerful executive branch, exempt from the normal checks and balances of our system of government. It has created powerful new tools of surveillance and refused, almost as a matter of principle, to use normal procedures that would acknowledge that either Congress or the courts have an oversight role. The Swift program, like the wiretapping program, has been under way for years with no restrictions except those that the executive branch chooses to impose on itself - or, in the case of Swift, that the banks themselves are able to demand. This seems to us very much the sort of thing the other branches of government, and the public, should be nervously aware of."

Public docs and information on US Government monitoring international financial transactions is nothing new. "A search of public records -- government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 -- describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT. 'There have been public references to SWIFT before,' said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. 'The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before.'"

Free Press = Putting American Lives at Risk

And so the rhetoric keeps on coming from Republicans, reinforcing their message of reality: let the government do whatever it wants. It will all be ok, really. Controlling the media is one spoke in the wheel of this reality. Interestingly, this conservative pundit serves up a spirited debate on the subject and a frank assessment of the creep of presidential power… first phone records, then banking records, then medical records… and then?

"For me it comes down to double standards... During the Clinton administration when I was sitting on the Judiciary Committee, I tell you what would have happened, we would have raised hell. We would not have trusted Bill Clinton with this type of unlimited power and we never would have trusted Janet Reno as attorney general with this type of unlimited power.

I told you back in May it started with the phone records and then it would lead to the bank records... We will find out if it leads to medical records and the records of people who possess guns. Again, the concern—what Republicans believed in 1994 was this - that the government that governs least, governs best. We trust people, we trust individuals, we trust communities more than we trust the federal government.

Well, that‘s all changed in the past 12 years. This federal government is getting bigger and bigger and more powerful all the time. I understand we are in a post 9/11 world, but at what point do we stop sliding down that slippery slope?

I agree with Thomas Jefferson. If the choice is between a government or a newspaper telling us what’s going on, I want that newspaper to always keep the federal government on their toes. Because I just don‘t trust people that want to accumulate more and more power.

You know who wants to accumulate more and more power? People in Washington. Doesn‘t matter if they are Republicans and Democrats. All that matters is that they‘re elected leaders. I have seen it time and time again and we always have to guard against it."

Keeping Congress in His Back Pocket

Rather than give Congress the opportunity to override a veto with a two-thirds majority in each house, [the president] has issued hundreds of signing statements invoking his right to interpret the law on everything from whistleblower protections to how Congress oversees the USA Patriot Act.

Where Are Your Civil Liberties Going?

Two interview segments here from constitutional law expert Joanthan Turley, who lays it out plain and simple about how Bush and Co. regard the Constitution. Scary stuff, indeed.

(Segment #1 is from C&L 6/24/06)

"This raises the question… of the absence of congressional authorization. The president is allowed to enforce the laws, not to make them. He requires authorization from congress. Every week we have some new massive databank or surveillance program being revealed that has not been approved by congress…. in this case, all we know is that some members of the intelligence committees were informed. Under this law they are citing, IEPA, [the president] was only supposed to use his authority for a brief amount of time- in an emergency. He was then supposed to go back to congress to get real authority. Instead, he kept on mentioning it to the same oversight members… Secretary Snow and his associates have said, look- we did have oversight – it wasn’t congress, it wasn’t the court, we went out and hired a private company and they did the oversight. They protected your civil liberties. This is a type of outsourcing of the constitution- it is almost laughable that they believe oversight means that they looked at it themselves, felt good about it, and then hired a private company- and they felt pretty good about it, too."

Segment #2 aired in mid-May (scroll down on C&L 5/10/06) and is even more poignant. Please note the final comment.

"Bush reached out to people who had been convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes during the Reagan and Bush administrations. What emerged through the two terms was that people who seemed to be accused of violating the law had a rapid ascent in this administration, and one has to wonder whether this is suddenly a criteria- that the president likes people who are willing to go the edge of the law and beyond it to achieve what he believes is a worthy purpose.

The real check and balance for [presidential power] rests in Congress. Congress has done nothing- do you realize that congress has not even held a substantive investigation of the NSA operation? An operation that most of us believe was criminal- that the federal law defines quite clearly as a federal crime. Instead of investigating that, the congress gave the president a standing ovation during the State of the Union speech when he promised to continue to violate that law.

This president’s theory of his own power is now so extreme I think its unprecedented. He believes he has the inherent authority to violate federal law. He has said that- not only in the signing statements, but in the infamous torture memo that Alberto Gonzales signed, that he could in some circumstances order federal officials to violate federal law. And this is consistent across the board with this president. Frankly, I am not too sure what he thought he was swearing to when he took the oath of office to uphold the constitution…. I have never seen a president who is so uncomfortable in his constitutional skin.

Civil liberty is a very precious commodity; when you lose it- it tends to run out of your hand like sand and its hard to get it back... presidents, when they acquire power, rarely return it to the people. This country is changing in a very significant way, and its something that citizens have to think about. We’re really at a point where the president is arguing about his own presidential power in ways that are the antithesis of the Constitution and the values that it contains."