President George Bush’s illegal wiretapping program was challenged this week when Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced a resolution calling for the president’s censure.
Feingold’s resolution condemns Bush’s use of the National Security Agency for the illegal wiretapping of international phone calls and e-mails made by U.S. residents.
Feingold asks the Senate to publicly condemn Bush’s failure to use court-ordered warrants, and to declare that the president’s illegal wiretaps are a violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Various groups, as well as Representative John Conyers (D-MI), have asked the Republican-controlled Congress to hold hearings and investigations into whether Bush should be impeached for his actions.
“The facts are straightforward,” Feingold said during his introduction of the resolution on the Senate floor. “Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as ‘FISA,’ nearly 30 years ago to ensure that as we wiretap suspected terrorists and spies, we also protect innocent Americans from unjustified government intrusion. Foreign Intelligence Service Act makes it a crime to wiretap Americans on U.S. soil without the requisite warrants, and the president has ordered warrant-less wiretaps of residents on U.S. soil. The president has broken that law, and that alone is unacceptable.”
National Lawyers Guild President Michael Avery has stated: “The president simply has no power under our Constitution to conduct this surveillance and his actions violate the constitutional guarantee of separation of powers. What he has admitted to doing constitutes a criminal offense – a felony under federal law.”
Part of the reason for the establishment of Foreign Intelligence Service Act was to combat illegal wiretap programs like the J. Edgar Hoover-created counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) that kept Black activists and left-leaning organizations under surveillance during the late 1960s.
COINTELPRO not only shadowed activists, but also actively worked to disrupt their lives – and often led to the long-term imprisonment, exile and death of many of its subjects. In one instance, a COINTELPRO-orchestrated dispute led to the deaths of Chicago Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
Most recently, since 2003, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (www.centropr.org) has been posting information about the secret surveillance the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted on Puerto Rican nationalists, community workers and even politicians. The FBI’s COINTELPRO on Puerto Ricans only ended in the 1990s.
In his call for censure, Feingold pointed to the dangers of allowing the Bush illegal wiretapping program to continue without any formal reprimand from Congress.
“The president’s wrongdoing demands a response. And not just a response that prevents wrongdoing in the future, but a response that passes judgment on what has happened,” Feingold said.
“We in the Congress bear the responsibility to check a president who has violated the law, who continues to violate the law, and who has not been held accountable for his actions.
“Passing a resolution to censure the president is a way to hold this president accountable. A resolution of censure is a time-honored means for the Congress to express the most serious disapproval possible, short of impeachment, of the Executive’s conduct. (When) the President acts illegally, he should be formally rebuked. He should be censured.”
