Congress, Constitutional Law, Free Speech, Justice, Politics

Double Secret Probation

Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty-Guest Blogger

I guess I am a little naïve, but I was shocked to read that the Obama Administration has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that is so large in its scope that some Senators consider it a whole new law!  “Two Senators have been warning for months that the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law — one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the snooping.

“There is a significant discrepancy between what most Americans – including many members of Congress – think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and how government officials interpret that same law,” wrote the Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. “We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret.”  The Senators tried to get the government to reveal some of the law’s contents, by forcing the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to produce a report outlining when this secret surveillance has gone overboard. Yesterday, the effort failed. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said no to the report by rejecting Wyden and Udall’s amendment to the FY2012 Intelligence Authorization Act.”  Crooks and Liars

If two Democratic Senators cannot convince a Democratically controlled Select Committee to accept their amendment, all hell has broken loose and pigs can now fly.  If you think about it, as long as any government agency can keep their interpretation of a law secret, it amounts to a completely independent legislature that does not answer to the American people.   Senator Wyden gave an interview in May of this year and he addressed this very subject.

“Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. Wyden (D-Oregon) says that powers they grant the government on their face, the government applies a far broader legal interpretation — an interpretation that the government has conveniently classified, so it cannot be publicly assessed or challenged. But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.  “We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”  Wired.com

Kudos are in order for Senators Udall and Wyden for bringing this discussion into the open.  However it amazes me that Democrats in the Senate would allow an interpretation of a law be kept as a secret.  Especially when that double secret interpretation hides the true meaning of how the government is allowed to spy on us all. In these times of severe fracture within the Legislature, it seems that one of the few agreements that made it out of Washington is one that holds the American people in the dark and prevents the truth from reaching our ears. It is time for Congress to understand that Americans want to know how this Administration and any Administration is interpreting the law.  We are not asking them to disclose State Secrets,  just the definitions of how the public law is interpreted by the Obama Administration.

Happy Birthday Mr. President, but it is time to come clean on this double secret probation that you have us under!

Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty-Guest Blogger

76 thoughts on “Double Secret Probation”

  1. anon nurse and Bud, Our shot at a quick, regular and bloodless revolution comes every two years at the ballot box and I have always advocated that as the pinnacle of civilization, no more heads on sticks, no more storming the castles and keeps. The problem now (as I keep carping, endlessly) is that no election is credible anymore due to the means by which votes are recorded. Some Mississippi elections are still in chaos even as I type this:

    http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8645

    “Mississippi E-Vote Failure Update: ‘There Is No Election At This Point; Everyone Is Baffled’ ” 8-4-11

    http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8638

    “Voting Machine Failures In Mississippi Primary. DOJ Deploying Election Monitors In 11 Counties Today” 8-2-11

    How can any abuse of the citizenry be stopped when the most basic and fundamental tools for doing so are completely compromised? That the government not is openly thumbing its nose at citizens rights and has re-written the Constitution to allow the abuse tells me that a bogus voting mechanism is just part of the plan. You can’t do the one without the other.

  2. anon nurse,

    Here’s paranoia for you … I was sitting on the veranda the other night talking to my daughter on the phone when I noticed a flying object darting here, there, here, there … it was twilight so I could only see the bulk of the thing without distinct definition and I remarked on it to my daughter calling it a giant dragonfly … maybe a drone. My daughter burst into laughter, “Mom, nobody needs to spy on you ’cause you tell the whole world everything you’re doing!” (smartass kids)

    This morning my drone reappeared in the full light of day … yep, it was a hummingbird.

  3. Tootie, I find the state’s rights’s advocacy movement to be a logical but often times misguided approach to repudiating Washington politics. If one could make a rule that only more liberty from government intrusion could be implemented on the State level then I’d go for it. Instead what I have seen way too many states lately is a drive to turn workers into slaves (in that they have no right to negotiate with heir employer collectively), women into vessels for incubating fetus’ with no rights to determine their own health and voter suppression aimed at certain, historically abused and powerless distinguishable groups. That’s not a model for liberty in my opinion.

  6. Bud,

    And it goes way beyond surveillance in the community…

    Law-abiding American citizens are definitely being harmed — no question about it. And it goes way beyond surveillance in the community…

    I don’t recognize this country anymore…

  8. anon nurse,

    I would bet that it goes a little further than “dragnets” for massive information.
    It seems like it would be funnels for all information.

    Yesterday, I wrote that I believed that the Patriot Act makes us all terrorists.

    I meant that in the most serious of contexts. Our government is watching us, the taxpayers more closely than they are watching the terrorists. I can only conclude that the taxpayers/citizens are of a real and present threat to the government powers. Therefore we have to be watched… They must know when we bank, when we make a phone call, when we go on the internet, and yeah they are probably watching us in the washrooms of the nation.

    This Patriot Act is there to harm us the citizens not protect us…

  9. “But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens…” -from the article

    This goes way beyond the collection of information. That no one is willing to expose it is what I find most astounding.

  10. “It is going to take something huge to get the pendulum to change directions,
    if it isn’t too late.” -Bud

    Bud,

    My demented mother (said with love and affection) has a cheerful response for that:

    “Honey, it’s never too late.” (said with some emphasis on the word “never”) 🙂

    But all kidding aside…, as you rightly say, it’s “going to take something huge” to turn this around…

  11. anon nurse 1, August 5, 2011 at 8:51 am

    Absolutely correct.

    It is going to take something huge to get the pendulum to change directions,
    if it isn’t too late.

  13. Land of the free? It’s merely an illusion.

    We’re in a world of trouble.

    lottakatz has it right.

  15. lottakatz

    America is not a democracy; it is a Constitutional Republic. A democracy is basically 2 wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner and our founders and framers did not want that sort of government for us but it is the one the Democratic Party supports.

    It is the left who have stripped the people of their rights and power by demonizing the 10th amendment (which guarantees our rights and limits the power of the federal government). The left has promoted the idea of centralized power (nationalism) by demanding that every aspect of our lives be directed from Washington–from what kind of light bulbs and toilets we MUST use to what kind of food and chemicals we shall be forced to take or abandon. This is totalitarian and the Democrats are four-square behind it.

    Friedrich Hayek long ago said that good people on the left would not like what the world looks like when their ideas are applied to government. And you folks here at this blog are exactly what he was talking about. The problem with you folks is that you forget that every fine wish, dream, and idea you have to make the world a perfect place (which is impossible) and that you want government to perform is accomplished at the end of a gun. You have a Disney World image of government given you by government schools and government media, but the real image of government is the 20th century: hundreds of millions slaughtered in wars and genocide and as many plunged into slavery and subjugation.

    I am not suggesting there be no government. But I am suggesting that it is more dangerous than the incandescent light bulb or flush toilets. Or the combustion engine. Or a lone gunman. Or a right-winger clinging to religion and a gun. Yet, the left is the biggest promoter of an all powerful government–the most brutal institution on earth.

    The hypocrisy is shocking.

    The only people moving genuinely forward on state sovereignty issues or issues of liberty and freedom are those “awful” right wingers. Yet on the pages of this blog the right wing is continually demonized. I will agree right wingers are stupid and go off half-cocked about everything, but at least they are headed in the correct direction.

    Left-wingers, for all their vaunted brains, are not even making an effort to preserve liberty. There is one half-hearted outpost: on the left, Glenn Greenwald. And for all his expertise, he gets a lot wrong.

    Outside of that leftists are devoted to training the public in envy, hate, and class warfare. They pump them up daily to join in civilization-wide criminal activity (Marxism/plunder). So I’ll take stupid right-wingers over evil left-wingers any day. At least a stupid person has a chance to get some smarts. Evil people are generally impossible to reach and a whole civilization bent on creating more of them is a dangerous one in peril of collapse and being overrun.

    So it would be nice if the brainy leftists in America would join in the fight for liberty and help the dumb right-wingers out with restoring the Constitution.

    The left wants the10th amendment for marijuana but it doesn’t want it for things they disagree with. The left needs to grow up and let the people of the various states decide things the left does not like. They are malcontents and cry babies who simply cannot stand it that people disagree with them. And they will destroy the10th amendment, even if it limits their own freedoms, on the outside chance it might give equal freedoms to people they disagree with. Talk about stupid.

    They need get out of the way and let the right wingers revive the 10th amendment, even if they do so stupidly. That way the left will get its wish for marijauna decriminalization and more (including their devoted obsessions with regard to sexual matters–deviance, perversion, and fetus slaughter, etc.)

    Fascism is here and now. Join the fight against it by upholding the 10th Amendment and the right of the states to nullify.

    Check out the results from the reluctant, tepid, and incomplete audit of the Federal Reserve and see what big crooks like Obama and congress need secrets. They lent 16 trillion dollars of your grand-kids money to rich bankers worldwide. Obama and congress has enslaved generations of Americans not even born yet to this debt. That’s is because he and they are not only stupid, but evil. And anyone voting for Obama in 2012 would be as well.

    Follow along and support the 10th Amendment Center (amendment dot com), the Campaign for Liberty (campaignforliberty dot org), Oath Keepers, and Sheriff Richard Mack (sheriffmack dot com)

    http://www.campaignforliberty.org/profile/7788/blog/2011/08/02/look-what-ben-bernanke-hiding

  16. The Greenwald link is DEAD!!!

    Was Greenwald / Salon threatened?

    I guess we’ll never know!…..

    (See post above.)

  17. Thank you, Tootie, for that well-reasoned, measured, and insightful comment devoid of ideology. We needed some comic relief. How do you feel about puppies?

  18. Naive? No! Get out! Leftists naive? Ha!

    The writer says “However it amazes me that Democrats in the Senate would allow an interpretation of a law be kept as a secret. ”

    Only a person unable to grasp virtue and wisdom would be amazed.

    All Democrats are evil and criminal types and the senate is run by these dirt bags and the kind of evil coming from the White House ought to be expected. Marxists are always evil.

    Obama is a dangerous, extremist, subversive. He is a despot and tyrant. He is a Marxist. And if people didn’t know this from day one of his presidency they are not as smart as they think nor as wise.

    They lack any semblance of genuine virtue. It’s likely they don’t know what it is. It was understood from the beginning that Obama was a usurper and over-thrower of our government. He fancies himself dictator for four years. He is a liar and a punk. He hates white Americans and is conducting a genocide against them.

    He is the ultimate communist bully and tin-horn third-world low-life thug.

    In other words, the perfect Democratic Party president.

  20. Elaine,
    Thanks for the Greenwald link. It is good to see he agrees!
    Lotta,
    I hope you are wrong, but I fear your concerns are not too far off reality!

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