Barron's editorial: Congress should consider impeaching Bush

This is big. I asked around about Barron's and found out that they're a BIG deal in the business community, every CEO reads them, and they're about as reputable in the eyes of America's top business leaders as the Wall Street Journal, if not more so. As for politics, Barron's doesn't it touch it, and no one thinks Barron's is even vaguely liberal. Now with that as background, we find Barron's editorializing (entire editorial here) that what Bush did is potentially an impeachable offense. And that Congress needs to review what happened and either pass legislation giving Bush full authority to spy on Americans at will without a search warrant or they should impeach him. Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment. I really appreciate the option Barron's has presented. Either you're with the Constitution or you're against it. If Congress thinks Bush has the power to do what he did, then pass legislation that explicitly lets him spy on us without any judicial check - stop playing games with this inferred and implied crap. Give him the power directly and let the American people know it (then see what happens). And if you don't want him to have the power, impeach him. But there's no in between. Either be man enough to give the man the power outright or charge him with high crimes against the Constitution.

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  thanks to Politics in the Zeros

The Pentagon Breaks the Law

The National Security Agency story has pushed military spying on anti-war groups off the front pages, and the Pentagon appears to have seized upon administrative error to explain away its slide into domestic spying. The Department of Defense now says that analysts may not have followed the law and its own guidelines that require the purging of information collected on U.S. persons after 90 days. The law states that if no connection is made between named persons and foreign governments or transnational terrorist organizations or illegal activity, U.S. persons have a right to their privacy and information about them must be deleted. Thanks to RL, I now know that the database of "suspicious incidents" in the United States first revealed by NBC Nightly News last Tuesday and subject of my blog last week is the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN) database, an intelligence and law enforcement sharing system managed by the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA). What is clear about JPEN is that the military is not inadvertently keeping information on U.S. persons. It is violating the law. And what is more, it even wants to do it more.

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