Let's Be Clear, say Legal Experts, What NSA Is Doing Is 'Criminal'

[questionseverything]

93. excerpt from the ohio free press follows

The most massive spying program the world has ever seen came into existence as a temporary legal fiction conjured by David Addington, a man Colin Powell reportedly described like this: “He doesn’t care about the Constitution.”

The never-read memos the NSA's report refers to are both privileged and classified. They may also have been destroyed when a fire broke out in the office of the Vice President in late 2007. What is known is that when constitutional scholar Obama speaks of the legality and congressional oversight of these programs, he does not do so from a position of knowledge.

The last 11 and a half years have seen a parallel expansion of surveillance programs and a papering over of their never tested legal justifications. We now know that those justifications are themselves secret and quite possibly destroyed. They can however be reduced to the simple phrase “Because Dick Cheney said so."

Somewhere, perhaps in the charred remants of an office fire now long discarded, is the justification for the Chief Executive of the United States to violate his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. The Constitution is not only has been murdered, the charred remains of the instrument of it's demise are burried in an secret unmarked grave.