Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say
The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.
The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation’s largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.
If you have moments when you are tempted, as I occasionally am, to believe that the claims of the Administration that their outrageous overstepping of Presidential authority is really some kind of attempt at increased security for the country – remember this article.
If anything, a more legitimate speculation is that they started this war, in part, to gain the powers they wanted in the first place. The New Yorker Article mentioned below, The Hidden Power, adds David Addington to the list of monomaniacal idealogogues that have conspired to turn America into a Fascist Regime in Democratic clothing.
While they have been called Neoconservatives, the recent articles make it clear that this Presidential Power thing goes back to Nixon and the Watergate days. Paleoconservatives would be a better term for Mr. Cheney’s Cabal from the A.E.I. and P.N.A.C..
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0703nj1.htm WAAS
[…And Libby “testified that he spoke to David Addington, then Counsel to the Vice President, whom [Libby] considered to be an expert in national security law, and Mr. Addington opined that presidential Authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of a document.”] …