Cyrus Dugger

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. & Reflecting on Today

An excerpt from a 2006 speech by Al Gore worth reflecting upon during this day in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Transcript: Former Vice President Gore's Speech on Constitutional Issues Monday, January 16, 2006:

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all of our people.

And on this particular Martin Luther King Day it is especially important to recall for that for the last several years of his life Dr. King was illegally wiretapped, one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during that period.

GORE: The FBI privately labeled King the -- and I quote -- "the most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to -- again, I quote -- "take him off his pedestal."

The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide. This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder.

The discovery that the FBI conducted this long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life was instrumental in helping to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

And one result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, often called FISA, which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there was indeed a sufficient cause for the surveillance.

It included ample flexibility and an ability for the executive to move with as much speed as desired.

I voted for that law during my first term in Congress. And, for almost 30 years, the system has proven a valuable and workable means of affording a level of protection for American citizens while permitting foreign surveillance to continue whenever it is necessary.

And yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that, in spite of this long-settled law, the executive branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on -- and I quote the report -- "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages and other Internet traffic inside the United States."

GORE: The New York Times reported that the president decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program without search warrants or any new laws that would permit domestic intelligence collection.

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the president seemed to go out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But, surprisingly, the president's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the president confirmed the story was true but in the next breath declared that he has no intention of stopping or bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and insistently.

(APPLAUSE)

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. (link)

Cyrus Dugger: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 4:44 PM, Jan 15, 2007 in
Permalink | Email to Friend | Comment on this post