I posted yesterday regarding Senator Leahy's proposed resolution which clarifies that the AUMF did not authorize the administration's wiretapping program. Although I linked to the text of the resolution, I did not notice the Senator's statement regarding the resolution posted on his website.
I think portions of this statement show the degree to which not only did Congress fail to explicitly authorize the wiretapping, they explicitly and purposefully chose not to authorize such a program.
During those days the Bush Administration never asked us for this surveillance authority or to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to accommodate such a program.
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When I worked with Senator Wyden and others in 2003 to stop Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program, an effort designed to datamine information on Americans – and we meant it. And when I added a reporting requirement on Carnivore, the FBI’s email monitoring program, to the Department of Justice Authorizations law in 2002, we meant it.
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I chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2001 and 2002, when the President’s secret eavesdropping program apparently began. I was not informed of the program. I learned about it for the first time in the press last month.
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Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who helped negotiate the use of force resolution with the White House, has confirmed that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up, that he did not and never would have supported giving authority to the President for such wiretaps, and that he is “confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.”
Senator Daschle also noted that the Bush Administration sought to add language to the resolution that would have explicitly authorized the use of force “in the United States,” but Congress refused to grant the President such sweeping power. Maybe that was this Administration’s covert way to seek the authority to spy on Americans, but Congress did not grant any such authority.
In addition, there's another factor I did not think about in my previous post on this issue. The administration admits that they did not approach Congress for authorization because they did not think Congress would grant it. However, they had earlier claimed that the reason they did not approach Congress was the need for secrecy. Again, the administration is in a position that their claims are at odds. If the secrecy was paramount, then they wouldn't have approached Congress no matter what. However, they claim they would have approached Congress if they thought they would get the authorization. So secrecy must not have actually been the issue.
This is getting ridiculous. Someone needs to rein this President in. He's completely out of control.
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