Democrats To Hold Own Hearings On Warrantless Wiretaps
Democrats to hold own hearings on warrantless wiretaps
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Democr...s_on_0110.html
(Gold9472: It's hard for me to get excited about this. We've already had the "Downing Street Memo" hearings which essentially proved we were lied to about why we went to Iraq, and what has come of it?)
John Byrne
Published: January 10, 2006
Reps. John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), Bobby Scott (D-VA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) will hold a Democratic hearing next Friday to consider the legal ramifications of President Bush's warrantless surveillance on international calls, RAW STORY has learned.
The Jan. 20 Democratic hearings come in the wake of a request from House Judiciary Committee Democrats to hold official Congressional hearings on the matter. The Republican chairman, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), has not responded to Democrats' requests.
In the Senate, Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) said he would hold hearings on the taps, but has not officially scheduled a session.
Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said he felt the need to hold his own hearings after his Republican counterpart demurred.
"Last month all 17 House Judiciary Democrats called on Chairman Sensenbrenner to convene hearings to investigate the President's use of the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance involving U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, in apparent contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," Conyers said in a statement. "As our request has since been ignored, it is our job, as Members of Congress, to review the program and consider whether our criminal laws have been violated and our citizen's constitutional rights trampled upon.
"We simply cannot tolerate a situation where the Administration is operating as prosecutor, judge and jury and excluding Congress and the courts from providing any meaningful check or balance to the process," he added.
Conyers and Sensenbrenner have tangled on several occasions, most notably when Sensenbrenner ordered that a microphone be turned off for a Democratic congressman during a meeting on the Patriot Act. Sensenbrenner, outraged that Democrats were using time dedicated to discussion of the Act to talk about detainee treatment, walked out of the hearing.
Conyers also released a letter from Harvard University constitutional law professor Lawrence Tribe, who asserted that the NSA program was illegal and violated the separation of powers provision under the constitution.
"The technical term for [the Bush Administration's legal arguments] I believe is poppycock," Tribe said. RAW STORY hopes to post Tribe's letter soon.
Those attending Conyers' hearing include: former Reagan Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, George Washington Law School Professor Jonathon Turley, former CIA General Counsel Jeff Smith and Caroline Frederickson from the American Civil Liberties Union.
House Judiciary Democrats held their last party-line hearing on the Downing Street Memos, minutes of a conversation between British intelligence and Bush Administration officials which quoted the Director of British Intelligence MI6 director Richard Dearlove as saying the intelligence was being "fixed" around a policy to attack Iraq.
