The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names President Bush, the head of the National Security Agency, and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA's surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization.

It seeks an injunction that would prohibit the government from conducting surveillance of communications in the United States without warrants.

The Detroit suit, which also names the NSA, was filed with the ACLU along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Greenpeace and several individuals.

Messages seeking comment were left Tuesday morning with the National Security Agency and the Justice Department.

Bush, who said the wiretapping is legal and necessary, has pointed to a congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that authorized him to use force in the fight against terrorism as allowing him to order the program.

The program authorized eavesdropping of international phone calls and e-mails of people deemed a terror risk.

The Detroit lawsuit says the plaintiffs, who frequently communicate by telephone and e-mail with people in the Middle East and Asia, have a "well-founded belief" that their communications are being intercepted by the government.

"By seriously compromising the free speech and privacy rights of the plaintiffs and others, the program violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution," the lawsuit states.

Gore, the Democrat defeated by Bush in the 2000 presidential election, said the eavesdropping operation threatened the foundation of U.S. democracy, and he recalled the FBI's secret surveillance of Martin Luther King, on the U.S. holiday commemorating the civil rights leader.

Gore's comments also come at the start of a congressional election year in which Democrats are seeking to seize majority control from Republicans.

He accused Bush of breaking the law for not getting court approval for the National Security Agency eavesdropping operation on communications such as phone calls and e-mail coming into and going out of the United States of people suspected of terrorism ties.

"We still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently," Gore said.

"A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government," he said.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes it illegal to spy on U.S. citizens in the United States without the approval of a special, secret court.

Bush has steadfastly said his actions were within the law and that he ordered the domestic eavesdropping operation to fight terrorism after the September 11 attacks.

"Al Gore's incessant need to insert himself in the headline of the day is almost as glaring as his lack of understanding of the threats facing America," Tracey Schmitt, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said in a statement.

"While the president works to protect Americans from terrorists, Democrats deliver no solutions of their own, only diatribes laden with inaccuracies and anger," she said.

Gore called the program, authorized by President Bush, “a threat to the very structure of our government” and charged that the administration acted without congressional authority and made a “direct assault” on a federal court set up to authorize requests to eavesdrop on Americans.

Two new legal challenges

Meanwhile, two civil liberties groups — the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights — filed federal lawsuits Tuesday seeking to block the eavesdropping program, which they called unconstitutional electronic surveillance of American citizens.

McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.

“I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds,” McClellan said of Gore.

Attorney general weighs in
Gore said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should name a special counsel to investigate the program, saying Gonzales had an “obvious conflict of interest” as a member of the Bush Cabinet as well as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

Gonzales, who has agreed to testify publicly at a Senate hearing on the program, defended the surveillance on cable news talk shows Monday night.

“This program has been reviewed carefully by lawyers at the Department of Justice and other agencies,” Gonzales said on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes.” “We firmly believe that this program is perfectly lawful. The president has the legal authority to authorize these kinds of programs.”

On CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Gonzales said Gore’s comments were inconsistent with Clinton administration policy.

“It’s my understanding that during the Clinton administration there was activity regarding physical searches without warrants,” Gonzales said. “I can also say it’s my understanding that the deputy attorney general testified before Congress that the president does have the inherent authority under the Constitution to engage in physical searches without a warrant. And so, those would certainly seem to be inconsistent with what the former vice president was saying today.”

‘Breaking the law’
Gore said there is still much to learn about the domestic surveillance program, but that he already has drawn a conclusion about its legality.

“What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently,” he said.

Bush has pointed to a congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that authorized him to use force in the fight against terrorism as allowing him to order the program.

Gore, however, contended that Bush failed to convince Congress to support a domestic spying program, so he “secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother.”

He said the spying program must be considered along with other administration actions as a constitutional power grab by the president. Gore cited imprisoning American citizens without charges in terrorism cases, mistreatment of prisoners — including torture — and seizure of individuals in foreign countries and delivering them to autocratic regimes “infamous for the cruelty of their techniques.”
© 2006 The Associated Press.

The presidential oath of office states: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Thus the core of his job is expressed in terms of defending, not our standard of living, nor even the general welfare, but our Constitution itself.

So why was Monica more deserving of attention? None of the possible “explanations” can stand as justifications.

1) The grounds for suspecting President Bush of violating both the letter and the spirit of his oath of office are not weaker than were the grounds for suspecting President Clinton of hanky-panky with an intern.

2) The possible wrong-doing by the current president would in no way be less important for Americans to confront than the wrong-doing of his predecessor; indeed, the present suspicion against the president is precisely the kind of thing that most worried our Founding Fathers.

3) The media may assume that the American people are less interested in protecting the Constitution than in sex scandals, but they haven’t bothered to test that proposition. And even if it were true, that would not justify the failure of the press to fulfill its duty as watchdog and protector of our democracy.

Grounds for Suspicion

The president has admitted to ordering wiretaps to be conducted without getting the court warrants required by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. To justify his actions, he and his people have made two claims: first, that they had the legal authority to do so; and second, that their actions were required for the sake of national security in a time of war.

It is hardly reassuring about the moral and intellectual integrity of this administration that the legal justifications offered thus far are regarded as almost laughably flimsy by the independent legal authorities who have commented on them.

First, they’ve claimed that the congressional authorization to fight the terrorists abroad, passed in the aftermath of 9/11, also authorized domestic surveillance. But the language of the enabling legislation supports no such claim, and the record of the debate at the time suggests that the Bush administration fully understood that such authorization would require additional provisions that Congress expressly declined to enact. In addition, why would President Bush have given his subsequent (false) public reassurance that his administration abides by the requirement to get warrants before conducting searches if he felt he’d been authorized by Congress to do otherwise?

Second, the Bush administration claims that the powers constitutionally given to the president as commander-in-chief permits him to do whatever he pleases in waging war, regardless of the law or of the prerogatives of the other branches of the government. Such a claim has been widely regarded by legal scholars as baseless as a reading of the Constitution, and as antithetical to the whole spirit of our constitutional system.

Still, there could be important national security reasons for a president to violate the law. And it’s possible that the American people –whether wisely or not—would be willing to allow the president to take illegal measures if they were required to defend the nation. But here, too, there are also reasons to doubt the presidential claims that his apparently illegal actions have been required by the demands of national security.

FISA created a court especially for the purpose of issuing such warrants, and it has issued many thousands of such warrants, while refusing only four. The law even makes provision for those situations in which urgency makes it impractical to go first to court: the executive has three whole days after emergency surveillance to come to the court for its actions to be scrutinized and validated.

So what legitimate national security reason there might be that would have prevented the president from both protecting the nation and obeying the law and the Constitution?

There remain strong grounds for suspicion that the president was serving no national good, but only hijacking power that the Framers of the Constitution expressly sought to deny him. And it does not help allay our concerns that this conducting of warrantless searches fits into “a pattern of disregard” for legal restraints, both domestic and international. But if the president has a good justification, let us hear it.

In any event, why isn’t President Bush being pressed to provide justification, and why isn’t the evidence being explored publicly with the same intensity that was devoted to the Lewinsky affair?

The Most Vital of National Interests

The moral character of the president in his private life does matter. As the most prominent personal embodiment of the nation, the president inevitably is a kind of role model. So President Clinton’s dalliance was not altogether irrelevant to his fulfillment of his job as president.

But the suspicions about President Bush’s violating his oath to protect the Constitution relate to the very core of his presidential responsibilities.

As the oath makes clear, the Constitution is the heart and soul of America. It is the inner sanctum that our public servants swear to protect; the great gift that our soldiers have fought and died for, the very foundation of our national identity. Even while we Americans divide on many issues, the sanctity of the Constitution is what unites us. It is our core assertion to the world that “we are a nation of laws, not of men.”

In this context, what could matter more than whether the President of the United States is honoring his oath of office, or whether he is treating the Constitution as an obstacle to be casually, needlessly swept aside?

Our Founding Fathers certainly would have known that this is an absolutely major story. The system of checks and balances was not a casual thing. It was a profound vision they had into meeting the challenge of how to avoid tyranny. And, as human history shows, the avoidance of tyranny is no small accomplishment. Free and decent societies have been few.

The fourth amendment protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” represented the Founding Fathers’ understanding, based on the millennia of human history in which they were schooled, of the tools of tyranny. If the King does not need the approval of the Judge to invade the privacy of the citizen, freedom is imperiled. So “We the People” determined that the court would serve as a check and a balance against the potentially tyrannical power of the executive.

If there was no imperative need for President Bush to conduct searches without first getting a warrant, then why did he do it? Would he grab a tyrant’s powers if he didn’t have a tyrant’s intentions?

We urgently need an independent investigation to discover just what purposes were being served by these warrantless wiretaps. Was this monitoring confined to those people who might reasonably be suspected of being a terrorist threat to America? Or were people perhaps chosen as targets for surveillance simply because they were political opponents of this president and his policies?

What could be more important than to know whether the great achievement of our Founding Fathers is being dismantled? But one would hardly know anything of such vital importance was at stake from watching how our mainstream media are dealing with this possible constitutional crisis.

What Master Are the Media Serving?

Is the reason for the media’s casualness in treating this administration’s possible running roughshod over the Constitution that the media don’t think this story will grab an audience the way, say, stains on a blue dress did?

But how would they know?

Watergate certainly transfixed the nation thirty-some years ago.

If Linda Tripp’s disclosures had been given no more play than those of the NSA’s warrantless spying on Americans, would people have gotten so swept up in the that affair? And if the present suspicions of presidential usurpation of powers were getting the kind of wall-to-wall coverage that Clinton’s extramarital dalliance received, might the American people be just as engaged in this story?

Recall that the upshot of the Lewinsky affair was that the American people, while repelled by Clinton’s conduct, mostly rallied to his defense. Though the House impeached him, and the Senate tried him, the president’s approval ratings climbed to levels exceeding those preceding the scandal—presumably because the American people decided that the assault on Clinton was an even bigger scandal than the president’s inability to control his sexual impulses. This was not, a majority of the American people decided, a matter that warranted bringing to bear the heaviest of constitutional machinery to bear to remove a president.

When the Congress investigated Watergate, however, President Nixon benefited from no such rallying of popular support. The public recognized that the abuse of presidential power was a vital national concern. There is simply no evidence from the Watergate story that the defense of our political system has no “sex appeal” to the American public.

So why then do the mainstream media not treat this with the urgency that they gave to Monicagate? Is the difference perhaps not in the nature of the possible offense, but in the nature of the media’s relationship to the respective presidents? Just what master are these media serving?

Even if the American people did prove to be slow to care, is it not the job of the media not just to pander to public interests but also to direct public attention to the important public business of the times? Is it not the ultimate job of the press not just to get ratings and make a profit but also to serve the public interest?

The danger of a tyrant arising in the executive and abusing his power was far more compelling to our Founding Fathers than the danger of our being unable to defend ourselves against foreign threats. Would our Founders have accepted, without stringent proof, that America has had to adopt the police-state tactics of this commander-in-chief to protect ourselves against outside enemies?

James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, in promoting our Constitution: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

And then there is the line widely attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

If Jefferson and Madison were alive now to see the lack of vigilance of the mainstream America media in the face of these suspected threats to our constitutional protections against tyranny, they’d turn over in their graves.

If tyranny is not stopped in its earliest stages, it only grows stronger and becomes still more difficult and dangerous to stop.

http://nonesoblind.org/

Andrew Bard Schmookler has just launched his website –www.nonesoblind.org —devoted to understanding the roots of America’s present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states. Schmookler can be reached at andythebard@comcast.net

Someone in the agency had to know that firing missiles from an unmanned drone into a village was more than likely to bring collateral damage that would stir up a new hornet's nest of protest in an area where the image of a brutal, uncaring America is becoming increasingly cemented in the minds of many, even those who also have suffered from Muslim radicalism. From that aspect alone, the mission had failure written all over it.

If, as has been reported, the CIA had Ayman al-Zawahiri in its sights for several days waiting for the proper time to nail him with firepower from the Predator drone, then why did it miss? The answer seems simple enough. The actual on-the-ground tracking of his movements was faulty or non-existent, a condition that has plagued U.S. intelligence since the days when a misguided Sen. Frank Church, hoping to boost his presidential aspirations, nearly ruined the agency's effectiveness by emasculating its covert operations.

This, of course, leads one to ask: Whatever happened to the old commando concept of doing business? Despite not knowing all the facts of the "classified" debacle and the political requirements imposed by the Pakistan government, it would be reasonable to assume that a quick strike force could have hit the village hideout of al-Zawahiri far more surgically and effectively than an indiscriminate missile that takes out everything and everyone but the right person. Obviously some militants went down in the raid and that is a plus, but it is hardly enough to offset the damage done by the death of children.

This should not be read as a bleeding-heart defense of the murderous thugs and fanatics along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Al-Zawahiri is an important cog in the terrorist machine that needs to be eliminated and that often requires measures that strain the national dedication to civilized warfare, if there is such a thing. Collateral damage is a fact of life in these matters, but one looks for ways to lessen its scope. With that objective, the launching of missiles into village compounds is not a prudent way to proceed.

Every investigation of the activities leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has emphasized the need for the improvement of on-ground intelligence by the CIA. That requires rebuilding the vast foreign, in-country networks that the agency began dismantling during the 1970s in favor of spy satellites, which were supposed to be more efficient. The real reason, of course, was the political dust kicked up in a series of sensational revelations in committee hearings led by Church about Cold War CIA operations, including assassination plots. But the satellites proved highly inefficient when it came to finding hostages and receiving information in advance of anti-U.S. projects, especially in the Middle East.

The CIA has developed the kind of commando teams that the British know how to operate better than anyone else. There also are Delta Force and other special-ops teams available from the U.S. Army. Why not use one of them? During World War II, Robert S. Allen, a key U.S. Army officer assigned as chief of intelligence for Gen. George Patton, was blown out of his jeep and captured by the Germans. His identity was initially unknown and he was taken to a German hospital, where his shattered arm was amputated. The Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA, knew instantly where he was located from its network of informants. If the Germans identified him, he would have been tortured for his vast knowledge of U.S. plans.

For two days, U.S. planes skip-bombed on either side of the hospital. On the third day a group of British commandos went in under the most perilous circumstances and rescued him. There are lessons to be learned from this. All the James Bond gadgetry in the world, including drones, frequently can't match the effectiveness of human endeavor. Certainly there is risk of failure and the potential loss of American lives in such an operation. But it is far more acceptable than what occurred, which actually is little better than the bombs launched by terrorists on innocent populations.

(Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.)

The monitoring of international telephone calls and computer messages placed by Americans to suspected terrorists abroad, and vice versa, produced such a huge amount of unfiltered information that it overwhelmed the Federal Bureau of Information, current and former officials told the daily.

FBI officials checking up on post-September 11 NSA information, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, said the checks were "pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy," said the daily paraphrasing its sources.

The stream of data led to few potential terrorists inside the United States not already known to authorities and diverted attention from counterterrorism work FBI officials viewed as more productive.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former FBI official. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration," he added.

FBI director Robert Mueller, one official said, questioned the legality of a program of eavesdroppoing without warrants, but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions.

The revelation in December by The New York Times that Bush had authorized monitoring of overseas communications by people in the US without court approval, has extended a debate over presidential powers and whether civil liberties have been sacrificed in the administration's "war on terror".

President George W. Bush has insisted repeatedly that he has the authority to order domestic spying without warrants to protect Americans, and Vice President Dick Chenes maintains the program has saved "thousands of lives."

In response to FBI complaints it was being swamped with unfiltered information, the NSA began ranking its tips on a three point scale of priority, but FBI agents said the new tips were still unproductive.

The disagreement between the two agencies, the daily said, was partly due to bureaucratic rivalry and their different approaches to intelligence gathering.

The NSA collects huge amounts of data across the world that may only yield tiny nuggets of useful information, while the FBI, although tasked with fighting terrorism, retains the traditions of a law enforcement agence more focused on solving crimes.

Some lawmakers have been calling for an independent investigation into the president's legal authority to order domestic spying without a court order, while the Bush administration is probing who leaked the secret eavesdropping program to the media.

Former vice president Al Gore late Monday backed an independent probe of the wiretapping program, which he said "compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and consistently."

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, asked by CNN to comment on Gore's statement, said the eavesdropping program "has been reviewed carefully by lawyers at the Department of Justice and other agencies within the administration.

"We firmly believe that this program is perfectly lawful. The president has a legal authority to authorize these kinds of activities."