Shades of Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover

The revelations continue.

The President authorizes the National Security Agency to snoop on American citizens and monitor their telephone conversations without getting the required legal authority from a court, either before or after the wiretaps.

The FBI is discovered to be monitoring and even using informants in organizations like Greenpeace, PETA, Catholic Workers, Quakers, and others in a frenzy of domestic spying that this nation has not experienced since the Nixon years. Even a Madison antiwar protest made the FBI list of activities to watch.

It is reminiscent of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the government spied on antiwar groups, using warrantless wiretaps, preventive detention of suspects without trial, no-knock entry into private property, mass arrests, use of illegally obtained evidence against accused parties, and widespread surveillance of people not engaged in illegal activities. The late J. Edgar Hoover, at the direction of the Nixon White House, even spied on Earth Day rallies.

Now, our government is again up to its neck in domestic surveillance -- and worse.

Our government is abducting terrorism suspects and spiriting them off to secret prisons in other countries, where they are interrogated and, in all likelihood, tortured.

Bush apologists say we are at war since 9/11, which apparently gives the President the authority to do anything he wants to in the name of national security, no matter what the law says.

Does anyone really believe that?

Some voices of sanity are beginning to speak out.

Conservative columnist George Will says Nixon, I mean Bush, clearly broke the law by eavesdropping and wonders why he didn't ask Congress to give him the authority he needed to do what he did.

Bush knew it was wrong. He was so desperate to stop a New York Times story, Newsweek reports, that he invited the newspaper's editor and publisher to the Oval Office to try to persuade them to spike the story.

And Sen. Harry Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who is known as the conscience of the Senate, had this to say:

These astounding revelations about the bending and contorting of the Constitution to justify a grasping, irresponsible Administration under the banner of "national security" are an outrage. Congress can no longer sit on the sidelines. It is time to ask hard questions of the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the CIA. The White House should not be allowed to exempt itself from answering the same questions simply because it might assert some kind of "executive privilege" in order to avoid further embarrassment.

The practice of domestic spying on citizens should halt immediately. Oversight hearings need to be conducted. Judicial action may be in order. We need to finally be given answers to our questions: where is the constitutional and statutory authority for spying on American citizens, what is the content of these classified legal opinions asserting there is a legality in this criminal usurpation of rights, who is responsible for this dangerous and unconstitutional policy, and how many American citizens' lives have been unknowingly affected?

Byrd asks some excellent questions. They should be answered now.