AT&T: Within Two Weeks of Taking Office, Bush Planned Domestic Spying

Posted by GottaLaff , Cliff Schecter's Blog at 5:01 AM on December 17, 2007.

What does it take to impeach this guy?!

Nearly 1,300 words into Sunday's New York Times article revealing new details of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, the lawyer for an AT&T engineer alleges that "within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans' phone usage."

Let's see...That was in January of 2001, maybe February. September 11 was...plus 8, carry the... yes, yes I'm sure of it. That was 8 months BEFORE 9/11. Before. In 2005 Bush said that...

...the authorizations have made it "more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time, and the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad."

So Bush is clairvoyant?

The whistleblower:

"There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said."

"At some point," he told the paper, "I started feeling something isn't right."

We're all more than a little queasy at this point.

Others at AT&T discounted it as merely an effort to improve the N.S.A.'s internal communications systems. Uh-uh.

"What he saw," Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told the Times, "was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans' phone usage."

More here.

Tagged as: bush administration, telecommunications, at&t, domestic spying, warrantless wiretapping

GottaLaff is a regular blogger for Cliff Schecter's Blog