[Sosfbay-discuss] Obama's DOJ Claims Radical New Wiretap Immunities

[Brian Good]

    Last week the government filed a motion to dismiss in the NSA surveillance 
suit that reaffirmed Bush arguments that state secrets trumped the right
to sue.  Further analysis shows that the government goes far beyond that
to claim that the state's sovereign immunity ("divine right of kings") means
the citizen has no recourse to force the government to adhere to its
own wiretapping statutes.

   Jonathan Turley gives his usual cogent analysis on Olbermann tonight. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7uomucNU8E

   He says the Bush people have gotten Obama to
protect Bush and Cheney from 
any criminal investigation of torture,
but now Obama's even exceeded Bush's
extremist arguments in protecting
unlawful surveillance.

    The government is claiming sovereign
immunity--that they can not be sued 
for violating federal
surveillance statutes unless there is willful disclosure of

intelligence information.  Unless they use it, you have nothing to say about
it.

    This is a breathtaking claim.  The
original rule was that no one could sue the
king, but the government had waived elements of this sovereign
immunity 
through legislation and before this case it was assumed that
you could sue 
these agencies.

    The law Obama voted for last summer to
protect the telecom companies is 
now being claimed to   protect not
just the telecoms but the gov't as well.  This 
leaves citizens with a right with
no protection. It's impossible to have a 
constitutional right that
can never be enforced.

    We can no longer suggest that Obama is
advancing the civil liberties that 
he promised to advance.  The Obama people are arguing that Bush
was a bad 
person doing bad things, but it doesn't matter if you say
you're a good person 
doing bad things.   Our president is more
interested in programs than principles, 
and he never intended to
fight on issues like torture and electronic surveillance.

    The people need to tell Obama they will
not let him eviscerate privacy and 
fritter away our rights simply
because a cult of the personality permits him to 
do anything he
wants.


    There are further details in the following articles:



http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2009/04/dojs-brief-in-jewel-v-nsa.html



http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/index.html


http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/obama-doj-worse-than-bush





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