President Bush says the foreign intelligence surveillance program is in the national interest and is legal.

In the video at this link George Bush says "We wanna know who is calling who... from over seas into America we need to know... in order to protect the people... it was legal, and now all of a sudden... plaintiff's attorneys, class-action plaintiff's attorneys, you know [inaudible] try and get inside their head, I suspect they see, you know, a financial gravy train... are trying to sue these companies, just its unfair, it is patently unfair..."

The fact is that if the program that the Bush administration asked the phone companies to assist in was legal, there would be no crime for which to grant them immunity. The fact is that if there is an ongoing risk that the phone companies would refuse to cooperate with the administration without this immunity than the program is still not legal. The fact is that the attorneys at non profit civil liberties organizations like the EFF are not in it for the money.

It is absolutely shameful, in my opinion, that Bush stoops to this sort of patently disingenuous rhetoric, telling these sort of lies about good, patriotic people on national television, in order to avoid taking responsibility for the fact that he has completely undermined and subverted the system of checks and balances that form the bedrock of our society. It was not necessary to undermine those checks and balances to protect America. The Administration had every opportunity to work with the Congress and the courts to build an effective, safeguarded system, and they did not because, fundamentally, they do not believe in these checks and balances. These facts are widely established by Administration insiders.

Assurances from the President that people's civil liberties are respected are absolutely not satisfactory in light of the history of willful abuse of intelligence surveillance powers for domestic political purposes in this country. Clearly, conservative lawyers believe that the balance reached in the 1970's was the wrong one. Even if they are correct, they do not have the right to merely cast it aside without any process or dialog simply because they do not like it! We are a country of laws, and we have a process through which laws are created, and razor thin electoral majorities do not empower Presidents to rewrite those laws arbitrarily as they see fit!