Surrender Monkey Friday: NY Times Hates Terrorist Wiretaps

 surrender monkey wiretaps

The Surrender Monkey is thrilled that the NY Timesis taking not only the disingenuous stance that McCain is in agreement with the “domestic surveillance” program, but also that the McCain = Bush meme is being pushed. This kind of thing gives Surrendie a thrilling up his leg!

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Mr. McCain believes that “neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote.

And if Mr. McCain is elected president, Mr. Holtz-Eakin added, he would do everything he could to prevent terrorist attacks, “including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.”

Perhaps the NY Times would care to ask the presumptive Democratic Party nominee how he would treat calls originating from suspected terrorists who are not U.S. citizens and either originating or ending in foreign countries, particularly those who have ties to or large groups of Islamic terrorists. Or, is that yet another one of those questions we cannot ask Obama?

Mr. McCain was asked whether he believed that the president had constitutional power to conduct surveillance on American soil for national security purposes without a warrant, regardless of federal statutes.

He replied: “There are some areas where the statutes don’t apply, such as in the surveillance of overseas communications. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.”

Woops! After all the bloviating in this article, and all the myriad ones in the past, it was simply that Chimpy McHitlerburton was wiretapping all Americans, which, as we all know, couldn’t be farther from the truth, and Senator McCain just told the NY Times what the truth is.

Side thought: if Obama wins, and starts shoving all his policies down the throats of Congress and the American people, will the TImes complain about him taking executive authority? I don’t remember the Times complaining about Clinton’s use of Echelon. Do you?

More: Don Surber comments on this story as it relates to the Times, with handwringingly breathlessness, opinionates on the “Truth About The War

The bigger question is why did our intelligence experts fail on 9/11 and WMD in Iraq? Perhaps they can get better information by intercepting messages from Osama bin laden to his minions in Iraq, even if the messages are routed through the USA. 

Hell of a good question. The answer from the Times will surely be in the form of a pie throwing contest.

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