Where does USA slip? First CIA and FBI tapped common Americans’ lines and kept privately look-out after them. Now Pentagon watches secretly bank and credit histories of US citizens. They send letters to different finance companies and banks demanding to put data about military personnel and civilians at their disposal. And government covers such unlawful actions asserting that Pentagon doesn’t violate anyone’s rights. Huh! Of course it does! I would object much against someone listening to my phone conversations and rummaging in my finance accounts.
And I remember the time when USA was pattern of democracy for the whole world. Nowadays in increasing frequency I see in I-net comparisons of USA with Nazi Germany. :( And it turns out that they’re right. Special Services are implanting system of total shadowing in United States instead of correction of their mistakes. Pentagon had disgraced itself in Iraq and can’t establish any least order in Afghanistan. We pay taxes in order that authorities would keep stability in the country and would protect our rights by the way.

First CIA and FBI tapped common Americans’ lines and kept privately look-out after them. ... And government covers such unlawful actions asserting that Pentagon doesn’t violate anyone’s rights.

Apparently, BushCo has changed its mind about the supreme and Constitution-breaking need for illegal wiretapping...

Chastened Bush bows to new reality

When the White House announced its abrupt retreat this week from its five-year long programme of eavesdropping on potential terrorist suspects without court approval, Tony Snow, spokesman, lamented: "it's an example of a case where we take hits for doing what's right rather than getting credit for what seems to be expedient."

After six years of governing as a partisan president, it will be impossible for George W. Bush to get much credit for concessions. Yet Mr Snow's use of the word "expedient" is revealing. The decision to allow the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to oversee the surveillance programme is another example of a chastened White House, vulnerable to political and legal realities, forced to concede there are some fights not worth having.

The retreat on the spying issue comes after more than 14 months of intense criticism of administration policy from Democrats, civil rights groups, and Republicans such as Senator Arlen Specter, who had once suggested that "impeachment was the remedy," if the President had broken the law over the National Security Agency surveillance.

It marks a stark change on a year ago, when Alberto Gonzales, the attorney-general, boldly asserted that the policy was justified by the President's inherent constitutional authority as commander-in-chief and the "sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs," and issued a 42-page white paper in support. A year ago, the administration argued the intelligence surveillance court was too sluggish to target al-Qaeda communications. Now it says it can be effective. --MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16690691/)

I posit that this reversal of position (some would call this "flip-flopping," and rightly so) is due NOT to some sort of "improvement" in FISA court procedures, but rather to the fact that Mr. Bush's pals could be in trouble now that the Dems are in power in Congress.

From last night's Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

"The fact is that Gonzalez went to all these hearings and said, despite the overwhelming opinion of law professors, that their NSA domestic surveillance program was clearly constitutional. But what the public didn‘t see was that every time that question went before a real judge, the administration did everything they could to take the case away or keep the judge from ruling, because they knew that that was all ridiculous, that they never did have the authority. And so now they‘re doing what they should have done, but they‘re gaming the system.

"They keep on fighting this, pretending they have legal precedent on their side, and they pull out. They did that with Jose Padilla. You know, they insisted that they had every right to hold him, but when a judge finally got around to looking at what they were doing to Padilla, they just withdrew that case and charged him with something else. It‘s gaming the system. I‘ve had clients, petty criminals, that did that. They just gamed the system until the very point where they‘ll be held responsible, and then they change course." --Constitutional scholar, Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University