Bush's NSA Legal Bamboozlement Campaign

It's unfortunate that spin, stonewalling, coverup, arrogance and outright lies are a few terms that come to mind when looking at Bush's efforts to defend his NSA program(s?) that allow spying on Americans. But we also shouldn't overlook the multiple interpretations being used to try and justify the spying. As each legal argument begins to crumble, someone jumps into the breach and comes up with yet another legal argument to defend Bush's policies. One wonders if any of these defenders have any idea what the NSA is actually doing? I'm inclined to doubt it.

I can't pretend to keep up with all the legal ins and outs and resent trying to since it doesn't require rocket science to know a lot of right-wing flim flam is going on. I do know we have a president who neglects any number of issues when it comes to homeland security. I do know that Bush's policies are rarely as straight forward as they need to be for Americans to trust those policies. The Anonymous Liberal is following some of these issues closely and seems to suspect that even afterwards at least some of the people who have worked for Bush don't believe in the integrity of the arguments:

The Bush administration has so far refused to turn over its internal legal memos justifying its controversial warrantless surveillance program. The New York Times has reported, however, that there are two key opinions: one written in late 2001 by the infamous John Yoo, and the other in 2004 by the then head of the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith. As I explained in some detail in a previous post, I strongly suspect that the original Yoo memo relied almost exclusively on a robust reading of Article II, or as Professor Jack Balkin calls it, "Yoo's Article II on steriods theory." This is a purely constitutional argument, and a radical one at that. I suspect that the more recent memo, written by Goldsmith, more closely mirrors the Administration's current arguments and relies predominantly on a broad reading the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as providing statutory authority for bypassing FISA.

I remember back in 2002 when Bush signed into law a corporate reform bill that came as a result of all the nonsense going on at corporations like Enron. After Bush signed the reform into law, he immediately issued some executive orders watering down the laws. As one example, he made it more difficult for corporate whistleblowers to receive legal protection. This is not a president on the side of the American people.