Popular Demand

Yes, friends, Spiraglio has yielded to unrelenting pressure from his readers--all six of you--and reopened for business after a lengthy hiatus. Now, let's see ... where was I?

Oh yes, the Cheney-Bush administration. What are they up to? Well, for one thing, they're busily firing all the competent US Attorneys, and replacing them with legal hacks loyal to themselves. By doing this, they hope to avoid inconvenient federal criminal investigations into such practices as illegal eavesdropping against American citizens. James Bamford wrote about the NSA's four-year unauthorized monitoring of our phone calls and e-mails in a New York Times op-ed piece today, "Bush Is Not Above the Law":

Last August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought. But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

The ruling was the result of a suit, in which I am one of the plaintiffs, brought against the National Security Agency by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was a response to revelations by this newspaper in December 2005 that the agency had been monitoring the phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans for more than four years without first obtaining warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.