"Mother‽ I've turned the cooling units back on! Mother... ?"

[elfs]

Bush rescinds authority of executive espionage oversight board.

Almost 32 years to the day after President Ford created an independent Intelligence Oversight Board made up of private citizens with top-level clearances to ferret out illegal spying activities, President Bush issued an executive order that stripped the board of much of its authority. ...

Under the old rules, whenever the oversight board learned of intelligence activity that it believed might be "unlawful or contrary to executive order," it had a duty to notify both the president and the attorney general. But Bush's order deleted the board's authority to refer matters to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation, and the new order said the board should notify the president only if other officials are not already "adequately" addressing the problem. ...

Bush's order also terminated the board's authority to oversee each intelligence agency's general counsel and inspector general, and it erased a requirement that each inspector general file a report with the board every three months. Now only the agency directors will decide whether to report any potential lawbreaking to the panel, and they have no schedule for checking in. ...

Executive orders were once widely understood to be binding unless a president revoked them, an act that would notify Congress that the rules had changed. But the administration has decided that Bush is free to secretly authorize spies to ignore executive orders - including one that restricts surveillance on US citizens traveling overseas - without rescinding them.

Comments

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

I've heard a few theories. Unfortunately, most of them sound like tinfoil hat stuff ... until you realize that by any reasonable standard (which assumes that he's using the same set of facts we are and has approximately the same goals) what he/they have been doing and saying does not qualify as sane.

--First theory is, of course, that Bush is not sane. Or rather, that he has a diagnosable disfunction. The theories I've heard range from severe Fetal Alcohol Syndrome to Narcissism.

--Second theory is, he's the front man (conscious or unconscious) for a group that are, in all seriousness, trying to trigger the prophesied Apocalypse. (This group does exist and they are tied to the administration. How much Bush's actions are tied to their goals is questionable.)

--Third theory is, there's a reason so many of their tactics resemble the fascist regimes of the '30's and '40's, and that he said, way back when, that "things would be a lot easier if this was a dictatorship" and he was the dictator. That is, in large part, what they've managed to accomplish--the democratic republic UI that's left is getting pretty damned thin.