The Watch

The Watch is concerned about the increasing pressure towards feudalism in the United States from corporations, social regressives, warmongers, and the media. We also are concerned with future history concerning our current times, as non-truths which are “widely reported” become the basis for completely false narratives.

Sunday, January 01, 2006

Spying Watch

The corruption in the Bush Administration is unbelievable.

It is unbelievable that Bush has been lying about how he authorized spying on American citizens without a warrant since 2004. In 2004 (an election year if I recall) while he was promoting the Patriot Act, Bush claimed that any wiretapping required a court order and that nothing had changed. Bush lied about this more than two years after he approved the NSA spying program.

It is unbelievable that Bush has corrupted the Internet, encouraging telecommunication companies to route international traffic through the US so that the NSA can spy on the information. Now, countries will be forced to route information AWAY from the US because, for some strange reason, they don't trust us. No sane country would want their communications routed through the US because we will spy on them.

It is unbelievable that Bush is continuing to defend the practice of spying and that he is willing to lie about it. Bush claimed this morning that we only spied on calls from Al Queda members to people in the US. The white house then issued a "correction" stating that what he really meant was any calls to or from people who may or may not be suspected of being somehow related to Al Queda. The only problem is that "Al Queda"-type people is clearly undefined. We have been unable to prove whether people are in Al Queda or just happen to have the same name as someone in Al Queda. Imagine tapping the phone lines of all people who happen to call someone named John Smith. Imagine that some Republicans are evil people. Just because there is an evil Republican named John Smith doesn't mean that the person you are calling (i.e. John Smith) is a Republican, much less evil. In the same way, the reason why the Bush Administration is unwilling to charge or prosecute all the people in Guantanamo is because we're not really sure whether they are John Smith the terrorist or John Smith the farmer or John Smith the mechanic or John Smith the unemployed. So we hold them without charges and without legal representation and we abuse them. Similarly, we spy on the John Smiths of the Muslim world and we spy on the American citizens they call.

The amazing thing is that there was a procedure set up in 1978 for the tapping of phone lines in the name of national security. All you have to do is have minimal evidence that the tap will provide information. The government can even go to the court AFTER they commit the wiretap and ask for retroactive permission. There's a court specifically set up for such requests. The Bush Administration apparently feels that its evidence of wrongdoing is so tenuous and so nebulous that it wouldn't even satisfy the rubberstamp court.

Note that the New York Times delayed reporting of these abuses of power for a year at the request of the administration... It's funny how the administration, in an election year, would ask a newspaper to refrain from publishing such an upsetting and clearly important article on the abuse of power by those in power. NOT.

Last week, we also learned that the federal government has also been spying on Muslim places of work and Muslim places of worship. This is called profiling and is unethical as well as illegal. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

Our country is going down the tubes, our civil liberties are being infringed upon on a daily basis, the executive branch is trying to seize power and become the ONLY branch, and the Bush Administration is driving the train down into this cesspool.

Unbelievable. It is time to impeach President Bush.

Ask not what thy government will do unto you. Ask not what thy government will do unto others.

-John Locke

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