Qwest for Justice?

NY Times reports that Qwest was the only telecommunications company to refuse to cooperate with the NSA's request for the calling records for millions of Americans. Qwest's ex-CEO Joseph Naccio said "no" when NSA admitted they had no warrant, and according to Naccio's lawyer, there was a, "disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process."

We now have confirmation that the NSA asked for data on "virtually all" calls, despite Bush's equivocations. And since Naccio had been forced out in 2003 (after Qwest had been forced to "restate" and retract $1.1 Billion in nonexistent transactions), the NSA has had three years to mine the data.

So the NSA used patterns of calling to find "suspicious" people, wiretapped those people--and then for all we know, Bush labeled them "enemy combatants" and the CIA kidnapped them and "extraordinarily rendered" these "ghost detainees" to other countries. All without any court approval or oversight, of course--just Bush's word. And LTG is right when he points out (in earlier posts and comments) that Bush's word is worthless.

To get the Patriot Act renewed, Bush lied in 2004 and said he would never wiretap without a court order. Whenever someone leaks these secret programs to the press, the Bush administration hastily calls a press conference to deny the charges, attack the leakers, and say that in any case this is the end of it... and then along comes another whopper. Surprise!

LTG asks, "what next?" Let's hope what happens next is that the Democrats recapture the house and start investigating what's been going on behind closed doors. I shudder to think what dirty secrets might be "next." We know the NSA kept records on anti-war groups, even the quakers. Was LTG right, when he wrote in 12/19/2005 that it would eventually come out that the Bush administration used its unprecedented program of domestic surveillance for its own political purposes?