Time to call Bush on lawbreaking

JESSE JACKSON

_The National Security Agency
______has created ''the largest data-
_____base ever'' with the phone
_____records of millions of Amer-
_____icans provided to the NSA by
AT&T,Verizon and Bell South for
a price. The NSA says it used the
records to trace patterns -- data
mining -- in the hunt for terrorists.
The agency got neither warrants nor
permission from the secret Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court. As
Republican Judiciary Committee
Chairman Arlen Specter admitted,
the FISA law ''has been violated.''
But that's not all that is violated.
The Fourth Amendment of the
Constitution protects the privacy
and liberty of Americans. It says the
government can't search or seize you
without a warrant issued on proba-
ble cause to believe you are involved
in a crime. This right is the line be-
tween a democracy and a police
state, where the state can search or
seize at will. That is the line that the
NSA program erased.
President Bush authorized the
program and defends it. ''We are
not trolling through the personal
lives of millions of innocent Ameri-
cans,'' he said last week. How do we
know? The court set up to provide
warrants has been ignored. The law
set up to regulate the system has
been trampled. How do we know
the president is telling the truth?

Trust us, he says.
   Trust the president who led us
into Iraq on the basis of disinforma-
tion and misinformation? Trust the
president who just weeks ago told us
the NSA program involved only in-
ternational calls with al-Qaida? The
same president who said he'd fire
anyone in the White House who
helped leak the identity of Valerie
Plame, the undercover CIA em-
ployee whose husband helped ex-
pose Bush's lies about Iraq's nuclear
capacity? Now, with Karl Rove in
the center of the effort to discredit
Wilson and out Plame, the president
says he has no comment on a contin-
uing criminal investigation.
   This isn't a routine Washington
dustup. This concerns the trampling
of the Fourth Amendment by the
government and the sale of our pri-
vacy by the phone companies. And
it isn't an isolated case. Bush, along
__________
It is time for
accountability.

with Vice President Dick Cheney,
who is the major force behind this
thing, believes the president acts
above the law in the war on terror.
He claims the right to make war
without a congressional declaration;
to surveil Americans without war-
rant; to arrest us without probable
cause; to hold us without a hearing;
to deny us the right to counsel or
even to hear the charges against us if
the government decides, on the basis
of evidence they need not produce,
to tag us as accomplices in the war
on terror.
   Now most Americans would
gladly sacrifice some of our liberties
if it would increase our security

against another Sept. 11. Bush
counts on that feeling when he acts
above the law. But the entire fabric
of our freedom is woven into a sys-
tem of checks and balances.
   Here, all the checks and balances
have been tossed aside. Qwest, the
only honorable phone company, re-
fused to cooperate with the NSA in
this program without a warrant or
permission from the FISA Court.
NSA refused to produce either; the
FISA court was ignored. The NSA
and the administration have simply
refused to supply information to
Congress, and the lame Republican
Congress has refused to hold them
accountable. When the Justice De-
partment's independent Office of
Professional Responsibility opened
an investigation on the lawyers who
signed off the program, the White
House refused to provide the secrecy
clearances needed to have the inves-
tigation go forward. ''Trust us,'' the
president says, and then he en-
sures that we have no choice but to
trust him, since every legal check
and balance is locked out.
   It is time for accountability. Two
public-interest lawyers have sued
Verizon for $5 billion for violating
the law, which should force the ad-
ministration to defend the program
before an independent court. Don't
hold your breath for this Congress to
hold hearings. But Democrats
should stand up and promise an in-
depth series of investigations of this
administration and its lawlessness
-- from Halliburton's making off
with billions in sole-source contracts
to the cesspool of hidden prisons to
the trampling of liberties at home.
   We wage the war on al-Qaida ter-
rorists in defense of our freedoms.
We'd better make certain this ad-
ministration isn't shredding those
freedoms along the way.