BushCo Caught In Yet Another PoliceStateGate Lie

From The Washington Post:

The congressional resolution of Sept. 18, 2001, formally titled "Authorization for the Use of Military Force," made no reference to surveillance or to the president's intelligence-gathering powers, and the Bush administration made no public claim of new authority until news accounts disclosed the secret NSA operation.

But [Assistant Attorney General William] Moschella argued yesterday that espionage is "a fundamental incident to the use of military force" and that its absence from the resolution "cannot be read to exclude this long-recognized and essential authority to conduct communications intelligence targeted at the enemy." Such eavesdropping, he wrote, necessarily included conversations in which one party is in the United States.

[Former Senate majority leader Tom] Daschle's article reveals an important new episode in the resolution's legislative history.

As drafted, and as finally passed, the resolution authorized the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons" who "planned, authorized, committed or aided" the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words 'in the United States and' after 'appropriate force' in the agreed-upon text," Daschle wrote. "This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused."

I have some advice for the gang of criminals currently running the executive branch -- you have the right to remain silent, and you really should exercise that right to the fullest when it comes to PoliceStateGate.

Opening your mouths on this issue just gets you into more trouble.

By the way, John Aravosis at AmericaBlog asks members of The Press to focus on the one PoliceStateGate-related question that the Bush Regime must answer but apparently cannot:

The Bush administration simply cannot answer this one question - if time was of the essence, why didn't they conduct the searches and get the warrants after the fact, something that is allowed under the FISA law? They conducted the searches alright, but they never once sought the retroactive warrants.

They have yet to answer this question, and this is the ONLY QUESTION you need to be immediately focusing on. There is no answer, short of the administration simply wanting to defy the law. It wasn't for expediency, because they could do the search immediately. And if they say it was because they were afraid the court would deny the warrant, that's absurd since the court has refused only 5 to 15 of 19,000 warrants that have been requested.