Dear Sen. ________:
I called your office yesterday to encourage you to support Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s resolution to censure President Bush for conducting warrantless wiretaps on American citizens.
I would like to reiterate that encouragement due to recently-released information about how the FBI and other intelligence agencies have been wasting resources investigating peace activists from the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice and others who disagreed with the administration for more than three years. In an era when there are real, serious threats to the safety of this country, it’s an incredible waste of scarce intelligence resources.
What’s worse is that it’s exactly the same kind of misdirected effort that has been seen before in this country when secret police and intelligence forces are conducted without oversight. From the “red squads” of the 1920s to wiretapping civil rights leaders in the 1960s to the attempt to short-circuit the democratic process (i.e. spying on political opponents and creation of a blacklist) that led to President Nixon’s resignation, unchecked policing powers have always led to a constitutional abuse, That’s precisely why restrictions like the FISA law were set in place in the late 1970s.
Some of your Senate colleagues have speculated that the current NSA spying program could be made legal, but that program has been going on for four years in an extra-legal framework. Without oversight, we have nothing but trust in an administration that did an incredibly poor job of knowing what was going on in Iraq (while the NSA program was operational, no less) to go on that there have been no abuses. That’s from the people who brought us Abu Ghraib, the Pat Tillman death cover-up, and the Brandon Mayfield incident. It’s not a particularly good record.