[Mb-civic] Gore vs. White House

[Michael Butler]

Also see below:    
White House Responds to Gore Speech    €

    Statement by Former Vice President Al Gore
    t r u t h o u t | Statement

    Tuesday 17 January 2006

    The Administration's response to my speech illustrates perfectly the
need for a special counsel to review the legality of the NSA wiretapping
program. The Attorney General is making a political defense of the President
without even addressing the substantive legal questions that have so
troubled millions of Americans in both political parties.

    There are two problems with the Attorney General's effort to focus
attention on the past instead of the present Administration's behavior.
First, as others have thoroughly documented, his charges are factually
wrong. Both before and after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was
amended in 1995, the Clinton/Gore Administration complied fully and
completely with the terms of the law.

    Second, the Attorney General's attempt to cite a previous
administration's activity as precedent for theirs - even though factually
wrong - ironically demonstrates another reason why we must be so vigilant
about their brazen disregard for the law. If unchecked, their behavior would
serve as a precedent to encourage future presidents to claim these same
powers, which many legal experts in both parties believe are clearly
illegal.

    The issue, simply put, is that for more than four years, the executive
branch has been wiretapping many thousands of American citizens without
warrants in direct contradiction of American law. It is clearly wrong and
disrespectful to the American people to allow a close political associate of
the president to be in charge of reviewing serious charges against him.

    The country needs a full and independent investigation into the facts
and legality of the present Administration's program.

 

    Go to Original

    White House Responds to Gore Speech
    By Nedra Pickler
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 17 January 2006

    Washington - The White House accused former Vice President Al Gore of
hypocrisy Tuesday for his assertion that President Bush broke the law by
eavesdropping on Americans without court approval.

    "If Al Gore is going to be the voice of the Democrats on national
security matters, we welcome it," White House press secretary Scott
McClellan said in a swipe at the Democrat, who lost the 2000 election to
Bush.

    Gore, in a speech Monday, called for an independent investigation of the
administration program that he says broke the law by listening in without
warrants on Americans suspected of talking with terrorists abroad.

    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.

    McClellan also said Sen. Hillary Clinton was "out of bounds" when she
said Monday that the Bush administration was "one of the worst" in US
history and compared the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to a
plantation where dissenting voices are squelched.

    Asked about the criticism coming from the two high-profile Democrats on
the same day, McClellan said, "Well, I think we know, one tends to like or
enjoy grabbing headlines; the other one sounds like the political season may
be starting early."

    Clinton is running for re-election to the Senate this year and is a
potential candidate for the 2008 presidential race.

    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.

    But at the time that of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick
testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required
warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not
cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in
1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

    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."

    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."