The warrantless domestic spying scandal

Glenn Greenwald on the stakes in the debate over Bush's unilateral Executive theory of Presidential power and the illegal practices based on it:

At its core, this scandal is not and has never been about the scope of eavesdropping powers which the Government ought to have. It is much more significant than that. We face a genuine and profound crisis as a country because we have a President who has continuously exploited the threat of terrorism and engaged in rank fear-mongering in order to expressly claim the power to act without any checks or limits at all - including, literally, the power to break the law. And he has been exercising that law-breaking power aggressively and enthusiastically in numerous ways, all of which are radically changing our national political character and the system of government that we have had since our founding.

It is that belief in his own monarchical power that led the President to eavesdrop on Americans in precisely the way that our country, thirty years ago, made it a criminal offense to engage in. And the President's illegal warrantless eavesdropping is but one example which arises out of these truly radical and decisively un-American theories of power which this Administration has adopted and put into practice. The Administration's ideology of lawlessness, in every respect, is contrary to the most basic and fundamental values on which our country was founded and which have defined who we are as a nation for the last 225 years.

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