U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales submits his resignation effective September 17, 2007.
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20070726_pat_tillman_murdered/
#90841 by Mike Mid-City on 7/30 at 9:39 am
(552 comments total)The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
Pat Tillman was a patriot and an apparently intelligent one too. He was the prefect propaganda. An successful man sacrifices career for country and looks dam good in uniform.
Once this intelligent, successful man who looked dam good in a uniform figured out what was up, he must have started to make waves.
Better a dead hero than a live squawking, intelligent, successful man pissing on the administration’s plans for invading Iraq.
The White House has it’s finger prints on this one. There is no way that some Generals are going to take one up the pooper for Bush. There will be some very loud noises from the men with Stars.
More information:
You can plausibly piss someone off
Newsday editorial
A lawsuit challenging the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program was dismissed last week by an appeals court that ruled that the plaintiffs can't sue because they can't prove their calls were among those tapped. If that logic prevails, the courts will have rendered themselves powerless to do anything about what could well be an ongoing violation of the law and the Constitution.
Congress needs to fill that shameful void. It should either explicitly bar the government's unauthorized eavesdropping or pass a bill sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) that would give citizens standing to sue without a showing of individual harm.
Consider the no-win situation the ruling has created for citizens who think they could be targets of the government's secret monitoring of phone calls and e-mail without probable cause or warrants. The plaintiffs in this case are lawyers, journalists and academics with clients and contacts in the Middle East, making their international communications just the sort that the NSA monitors. Still, the court said they can't sue unless they establish that the NSA in fact monitored their calls. But only the NSA knows whose calls it monitored, and it's not saying.
So the NSA won't talk and the court won't make it - the government invoked the state secrets doctrine, which allows officials to withhold evidence that they contend would compromise national security if it were exposed.
The plaintiffs and their American Civil Liberties Union lawyers should appeal. When an administration is arguably violating federal law and the Constitution, the courts should never go willingly to the sidelines. Someone has to step up here, and if the courts won't, then Congress must.
In a setback for foes of a controversial Bush administration wiretapping program, a federal appeals court on Friday threw out an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that alleged illicit snooping on Americans' calls and e-mails.
In a 2-1 decision (PDF), the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati dismissed a federal district court ruling from last August that found the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program violated the U.S. Constitution and ordered it to stop. The majority's ruling did not address the legality of the program; rather, it tossed out the case on narrow procedural grounds.
The move marked the first time an appeals court has weighed in on the numerous pending challenges to the spy program. Friday's decision isn't expected to have any direct impact on two related cases pending in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and more than 40 others that have been consolidated for consideration in a San Francisco district court.
ACLU Legal Director Steven Shapiro said his organization had not ruled out petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court for another look at the 6th Circuit's action.
"As a result of today's decision, the Bush administration has been left free to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress adopted almost 30 years ago to prevent the executive branch from engaging in precisely this kind of unchecked surveillance," Shapiro said in a statement. "It is important to emphasize that the court today did not uphold the legality of the government's warrantless surveillance activity."
The ACLU and the journalists, scholars, criminal defense attorneys and Islamic-Americans it represented had argued that the NSA program, which came to light in a November 2005 New York Times report, was trampling on federal laws and the plaintiffs' constitutional rights to free speech and privacy.
Their arguments rested on what they called a "well-founded belief" that the government was tapping their regular overseas communications--some of which, because of the nature of the plaintiffs' professions, they have an ethical duty to keep confidential--without the necessary court approval.
Judges Alice Batchelder and Julia Smith Gibbons, both appointed by President Ronald Reagan, concluded in separate opinions that the parties that sued the NSA didn't have standing to bring their case in the first place. They ordered that the suit be sent back to a lower court and roundly dismissed.
The two judges' reasoning, which differs at times, boils down to one general result: the parties that sued the NSA hadn't shown adequate evidence that they have been "personally" subject to the eavesdropping program. Even if the plaintiffs had wanted to supply evidence to back such a claim, they would have been stymied by the government's assertion of its "state secrets" privilege, which permits the derailing of lawsuits that might otherwise lead to the disclosure of military secrets.
Ruling on NSA Warrantless Wiretapping
Ronald Lee Gilman, the dissenting Judgehttp://thatslifeinthecity.blogspot.com/2007/07/ruling-on-nsa-warrantless-eavesdropping.html
While the two judges in the majority did not rule on the legality of the program, the third judge -- Judge Gilman -- agreed with Judge Taylor's finding that the President's program violated FISA. He thus wrote that he "would affirm its judgment," and he rejected the administration's standard two defenses for that behavior (i.e., (1) that Authorization For Use Of Military Force , (AUMF), implicitly authorized FISA violations and (2) the President has "inherent authority" under Article II to eavesdrop with no warrants). In fact, just as was true for Judge Taylor, Judge Gilman found that while the "standing" issue was a close one, the actual merits -- i.e., whether the President broke the law -- was not close:
The closest question in this case, in my opinion, is whether the plaintiffs have the standing to sue. Once past that hurdle, however, the rest gets progressively easier . . . .See previous related blog entries:
U.S. President G.W. Bush throwing the 1st ball of the baseball season
G.W. Bush, Pope John Paul II, and Laura Bush
U.S. President G.W. Bush, Cardinal Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts
Karl Rove, G.W. Bush, Pope Benedict
Nationals Baseball Stadium Blocks the South Capitol Mall
http://www.whitehouse.gov/baseball/2005/11.html
"The defendant was confrontational with the officers. He asked why they stopped him repeatedly. The defendant immediately requested a lawyer.
Originally the officers anticipated that the traffic stop would be video-taped. However, when they went to review the tape from the police cruiser, they discovered that it was not working properly and that it was just grey static."
COMMONWEALTH'S RESPONSE TO DEFENDANT"S REQUEST FOR DISCOVERY, page 1, COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA v. DOUGLAS WILLINGER CASE NO. FE2007-181Somehow I am not surprised for this apparently politically motivated illegal stop and search, with at least 5 police cars and 23 black suited police, including Federal.
