White House, NSA Block Investigation of Spying

With news reports exposing the National Security Agency's previously secret spying on the phone conversations of tens of millions of Americans, what is the status of the U.S. Department of Justice probe of the Bush administration's authorization of a warrantless domestic wiretapping program?

The investigation has been closed.

That's right. Even as it is being revealed that the president's controversial eavesdropping program is dramatically more extensive – and Constitutionally dubious -- than had been previously known, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has informed Representative Maurice Hinchey that its attempt to determine which administration officials authorized, approved and audited NSA surveillance activities is over.

Why?

In a letter to Hinchey, the New York Democrat who has been the most dogged Congressional advocate for investigation of the spying program, OPR Counsel H. Marshall Jarrett explained that he had closed the Justice Department probe on Tuesday, May 9, because his office's requests for security clearances to conduct the investigation had been denied.


<snip>

"It is outrageous that people within the Bush administration have blocked an investigation into the role that members of the Justice Department played in establishing and executing this secret domestic spy program," says the New York Democrat. "We must get to the bottom of this and reveal who has stifled this investigation. The Bush administration cannot simply create a Big Brother program and then refuse to answer any questions on how it came about and what it entails. We are not asking for top secret information. We simply want to know how the domestic spy initiative evolved and who is behind what many legal scholars believe is an unconstitutional surveillance program. If the administration believes the program is legal then it should have no problem being forthright with Justice Department investigators as to how it was initiated and is being carried out."

</snip>



http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=83135

... from the FBI or Secret Service -- and I'm more enraged than even that.

More need to see this....

they don't have the support to pull of a big power play.

How do we stop this? I feel like I am going to become a raving lunatic if this abuse of power is. not. stopped.
Seriously, I am too pissed off to wrap my brain around any response other than a jumbled rant.
It's just too much. One damn thing after another, and most of those corporate owned "representatives" of ours don't do anything to stop it. The ones that do try get shut down, shut out, and "shutted upped".

"If the administration believes the program is legal then it should have no problem being forthright with Justice Department investigators as to how it was initiated and is being carried out."

They know damn well what they're doing is illegal. And not enough seem to be willing or able to make. it. stop.