Mukasey Signals He'll Be a Strong Bush Assett

The New York Times published an article on December 20, 2007 titled "Mukasey Signals He'll Be a Strong Bush Advocate"

(excerpts)

In what was billed as a major policy speech on Wednesday to a panel of the American Bar Association, Mr. Mukasey suggested that lawmakers who opposed legislation before Congress to broaden eavesdropping powers — and to offer legal protection for telephone utilities that cooperate — were undermining the ability to deal with terrorist threats.

“We’ve seen what happens when terrorists go undetected,” he said. “We have to do everything possible within the law to prevent terrorists from translating their warped beliefs into action. To stop them, we have to know their intentions, and one of the best ways to do that is by intercepting their communications.”

He used the speech to step up the call for telephone utilities to have legal immunity for their past cooperation with the eavesdropping without warrants by the National Security Agency.

In recent days, Mr. Mukasey has also upset Congressional Democrats by saying he would refuse to share information about the Justice Department’s investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of tapes of the interrogation of top figures of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Mukasey wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that he was only following tradition in declining to reveal “nonpublic” information to Congress about a potential criminal investigation. ...

The White House and Mr. Mukasey are pressing Congress to approve bills to make permanent a broad expansion of the National Security Agency’s wiretapping and eavesdropping and provide legal protection to phone utilities.

On Monday, Senate Democrats announced that they would put off any vote on the measures until next year, a setback for the administration.

Mr. Mukasey said it was crucial that the utilities have immunity from suits that accuse them of violating customers’ privacy rights and that ask them for billions of dollars in penalities.

“We simply cannot afford to discourage the private sector from helping us to detect and prevent the next terrorist attack,” he said. “Such companies deserve our gratitude, not litigation.”

Legalizing torture is a prime example of this nation going apostate no matter how the term is defined -- loosing its values and/or following the dictates of the entity that's history's biggest user of torture, the Roman Catholic Church.

Having been targeted by criminal law enforcement search and seizure with the police video "just grey static", I see Mukasey as a likely rubber stamp for a criminal apostate shadow government that criminally violates its 4th Amendment with the goal of violating its 1st Amendment.