DNC chair Howard Dean isn’t about to let a war get in the way of playing politics. On the DNC web site, — see here (scroll down a bit) — you will find a picture of a grinning Dean standing next to a large stack of Freedom of Information Act requests with the caption:
Shortly after the New York Times publicized the president’s domestic-spying-without-a-warrant program, over 160,000 Americans signed a Freedom of Information Act Request along with Governor Dean in an attempt to determine just why President Bush believed he had the authority to undermine the Constitution. Earlier today Joe Sandler, DNC attorney, delivered each and every one of those FOIA requests to the Department of Justice.
Several days earlier, the ACLU had sent along their FOIA requests to the Justice Department.
ACLU Demands Records About Warrantless Spying by National Security Agency NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today submitted records requests under the Freedom of Information Act to the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency for information about the NSA’s program of warrantless spying on Americans, which was authorized by President Bush….
Of course, the ACLU has never been a fan of the NSA. From the July 29, 2001 Washington Post:
In 1999, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence declared that the NSA was “in serious trouble,” desperately short of capital and leadership. Civil libertarians, Internet privacy activists and encryption entrepreneurs — not to mention the European Parliament and thousands, perhaps millions, of ordinary Europeans — question the continuing need for such an agency, describing the NSA as an “extreme threat to the privacy of people all over the world,” in the words of an American Civil Liberties Union Web site.
Perhaps the Democrats can dust off Michael Dukakis for the 2008 race.
