Quote Of The Day

Ex CIA Analyst Ray McGovern on Bush's warrantless wiretapping program:

There's another aspect of this eavesdropping, which is pretty sinister. I go around the country speaking about these things and I ask people: "Does it not bother you that your telephone calls are monitored, email and so forth?" And I have to say, to my great distress, that 80 percent of the people say, no.

So I ask them another question; "Does it bother you that Senator Arlen Specter can be eavesdropped on, can be monitored?" And they say: "Why do you ask me about Sen. Arlen Specter? Who's he?" And I tell them he's head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has purview over these things (Purview over U.S. laws.) He was incensed, and learned last Dec. that the president had deliberately violated the FISA law. And he promised to hold committee hearings to look into this. He talked about this being clearly extra-legal. By Aug., surprisingly, Arlen Specter Senator from Pennsylvania now Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, changed his tune 180 degrees. Not only that but he drafted legislation, which now has been passed, that allows the president to eavesdrop on us at will without any court warrant.

Now what accounts for this 180-degree turn of view? Well let me offer a hypothetical guess. I stress this is a hypothetical idea and not fact; two FBI agents visited Sen. Specter two months ago. They sat down with him and said:

"Now Senator Specter we've just been in Cleveland. We spent the weekend there interviewing Mary Crawford. What a wonderful woman she is. We just had a wonderful interview with her and of course we knew that your travel records show that you go to Cleveland every weekend. And we just had a really informative session with her. And we don't think that anybody else needs to know about this and so we have some draft legislation that the president would like you to sign. It's a little intrusive on civil liberties but it's going to protect us against terrorists. And if you sponsor this, nobody has to know about Mary Crawford."