GOP flogs false terror alert to spy on more Americans
Six years of “the sky is falling” is getting mighty f’n old, you fascist goons:
Republicans pushed ‘bogus’ terror threat to expand FISA, lawmaker says
Republicans and the Bush administration used a ‘bogus’ terror threat that raised specific fears of an attack on the Capitol to scare lawmakers into adopting a dramatic temporary expansion of the government’s spy powers last month, a former top intelligence committee Democrat said Wednesday.
Congress agreed to give President Bush and the nation’s intelligence agencies extra authority to spy on Americans just hours before lawmakers left for a month-long recess in August. In the legislative session’s final week, news emerged of an impending plot by foreign terrorists to attack the US Capitol, and Republicans pointed to the reports as justification to expand the administration’s powers.
“That specific intelligence claim, it turned out, was bogus; the intelligence agencies knew that,” Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) said at a forum on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act organized by the Center for American Progress in Washington. However, lawmakers did not learn of the claim’s unreliability until “the day” they approved the FISA expansion, she said.</em>
Gotta hand it to the GOP. They can’t- or won’t- govern worth a bucket of lukewarm spit, but they can create and pimp terror like nobody’s business. After watching a season of Rome, one pines for the time when somebody could walk on the Senate floor and stick a knife between a tyrants ribs.
