Snoops pouring out of the barn

I'm happy to see that this article is showing up in more places than one. It's "home base" is 'The Biggest Secret' by Thomas Powers New York Review of Books 02/023/06.

The New York Review puts its articles behind subscription after a few weeks. So this article can also be found at Thomas Powers on Spying, Lying, and Saying No TomDispatch.com 02/01/06 and The biggest secret WorkingforChange.com 02/09/06.

It deals with the Bush administration's spying and it general undermining of the Constitution:

The President's carefully worded statement [on 12/09/05] casts a troubling new light on his insistence that we are fighting a "war on terror" and that he is a "wartime president." Constitutional lawyers have long argued about the limits of presidential or executive power, but all agree that the limits are more elastic in wartime, and it is increasingly evident that the Bush administration has treated this distinction as a barn door [i.e., one that's wide open]. The shock caused by the revelation of the NSA program is not centered on concern for the civil liberties of al-Qaeda terrorists but on the scale, still unknown, of the eavesdropping authorized by the President; on his refusal to use the courts or seek any change in the governing laws; and on his blanket claim that Article Two of the Constitution gives him, as president and commander in chief of the armed forces, both the responsibility for defending the country and "the authority necessary to fulfill it."