Tenet: Cheney instigated illegal, unconstitutional warrantless domestic surveillance program

Happy Clusterfuck Day! Good news from the Baltimore Sun:

In the most detailed accounting to date of the origins of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program, former CIA Director George J. Tenet says the effort was started at the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney’s role at the inception of the NSA program had been hinted at previously in news reports that quoted anonymous sources, but Tenet’s description is the first time [Cheney’s role] has been detailed on the record.

In October 2001, Cheney asked Tenet if the NSA could do more to monitor al-Qaida, and Tenet called Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the NSA’s director, to relay the message, Tenet says.

Hayden “made it clear we could do no more with existing authorities,” and he and Tenet met with Cheney, Tenet wrote. “Mike laid out what could be done that would be feasible, prudent and effective.”

But Cheney doesn’t do feasible. Or prudent. Or effective.

Within a week, Tenet says, the NSA was authorized to pursue what President Bush has called the “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”

And Cheney doesn’t do Constitutional, either.

Please, can we at least impeach Cheney? I mean, over thirty felonies for ignoring FISA (that’s the illegal part), and trashing our right to be secure in our papers and effects (that’s the unconstitional part) makes Niger forgeries look like small potatoes, doesn’t it?

NOTE See the links below for the ramifications of Cheney’s decision to destroy the Fourth Amendment. See especially The Network Architecture of Treason, It has be ratfucking (at “sharply focused”), and We said it was ratfucking, and it’s ratfucking.