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Feb. 9, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
February 9, 2006, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program to the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Boy, was uh that on display yesterday on Fox News Neil Cavuto show.
Uh there's uh Rush out there playing golf.
Now I don't know, when I'm out, you know, doing what I do to recreation, which is not golf, but other things, uh, I'm my mind is not as focused on, you know, this sort of thing.
I get out there to think about other stuff.
And uh here was Rush, uh Atea in the It was like a short burst.
He was there, what, under seven minutes of the most concentrated rush limb was just distilled down to the essence.
I I just couldn't believe it.
It was awesome.
So today we're going to uh again, I felt the privilege of being sitting in here for Rush at the Attila the Hun chair here.
And so we're just gonna have to uh uh well, do it better, ladies and gentlemen.
You and I together, as Rush is gone, he'll be back on Monday.
Uh this uh from now you you have been following this is the fifth day now of the uh international protests, burnings, killings, lootings uh uh associated with uh and a religion being offended.
A religion of peace being offended.
They ain't seen nothing yet.
This out of the UK, the uh online edition of the Independent.
Uh it seems that uh the uh Muslims better brace themselves.
If they thought a cartoon of Mohammed uh wearing a turban with a fuse being lit coming out of the top of it, wait till they find uh wait till wait till they see a picture of the Mustafa shag.
It's a new blow-up doll, a sex doll being um marketed in the UK.
Erotic retailer Ann Summers unveil unveiled uh a new line of uh of sex dolls, blow-up dolls.
I'm not gonna get into any more explanation for those of you who aren't following this.
Just just trust me on this.
Um Mustafa Shag, you're saying, what does that have to do with anything?
Mustafa is one of the names given to the Prophet Mohammed.
Um when Mustafa, in the words of the Ann Summers catalog, was described as quote, an inflatable escort for your hen night and v adventures, unquote.
Um I just gotta believe Muslims this time are going to go berserk.
I think about a billion people will start slashing themselves, burning everything in sight, uh reducing themselves to the seventh century personally after they see this one.
Yikes.
Um course, this uh this has already hit the fan back in the U.K., the uh Manchester Central Mosque wrote a letter to the firm asking it to withdraw the product.
The letter says in part uh the letter says in part uh that they wrote a letter.
Uh it was on parchment.
I don't know.
It was uh it said uh you have no idea how much hurt, anguish, and disgust this obnoxious phrase, referring to Mustafa Shag, has caused to Muslim men, women, and children.
And uh we want you to remove the afflicted word shag as soon as possible.
I don't know.
What's this what's that movie that was in that uh famous uh Austin Powers movie?
This is this is just fabulous.
Anyway, uh Ann Summers were uh last night uh contacted by the independent, we're examining their options.
Chief Executive Jacqueline Gold, reluctant to withdraw the item from sale.
She said, quote, we don't want to offend, but this feels like political correctness gone mad.
If anyone has a better name for a blow up doll, please let us know.
So in the interest of peace between and harmony uh between the Muslims and the rest of the world, we would appreciate it if you would direct to uh Ann Summers, uh which is not the name of a person, apparently this is an erotic retailer.
Um the uh uh a a possibly a better name for this uh blow up doll.
An inflatable escort for your hen adventures.
I think the Muslims go nuclear on this one, basically.
That's my take on it.
Uh if uh speaking of hen nights, uh they have a different way of dealing with uh that phrase down in Archadelphia, Arkansas.
According to UPI, an Arkansas chicken was saved when its owner's relative gave it mouth to mouth resuscitation after the chicken was found face down in a deep puddle.
Jackie Calhoun came home for lunch to find Boo Boo the Chicken floating in the backyard of their Arkadelphia home.
Next to the refrigerator, I'm sure.
He and his wife Becky tried to save the bird with no luck.
Jackie's sister Mary Ann happened to stop by just then, a retired nurse.
She did what nurses do, attempted mouth to mouth, and boo-boo's eyes popped open.
After see, now if it was a California story, they'd be engaged.
You know, they they would be here here's the reception for the wedding right now.
See, in California, we're we're we can just roll with this stuff.
Uh by the way, after 15 minutes of CPR, the um hand started to liven up.
Spent the night in a cardboard box with food, water, and a heater to keep it warm.
The next day it started making noise and returned to the chicken yard.
That's just like that.
Resuscitated the chicken.
Now you gotta uh down in Arkadelphia, I appreciate uh that you want to get that chicken resuscitated, but uh you you've got to stop kissing these chickens because they found out in Vietnam and other places this is the bird flu thing.
The only way you can get bird flu is by kissing chickens.
So you just gotta stop that.
Uh it's just not healthy.
I'll tell you what else not healthy is holding the Olympic games on uh stones and uh dirt, which is apparently what's going to happen in Torino because there's no snow.
In the middle of the winter in Torino, Italy, it's right now today, we just checked this on the computer.
It is fifty degrees.
Now it it it's not I don't know what they're gonna do for the winter Olympics down there.
Um the cartoon issue, interestingly enough, the Danes, the Danes are now in the same kind of introspection as uh Democrats were, uh many of them after 9-11.
What did we do wrong?
What could we have done to offend?
We've been so liberal, so accepting, so diverse, so tolerant.
And here we are attacked.
How can this be?
We're superior people.
You don't attack superior people.
What is it that we haven't understood about your plight?
The Danes are going through this convulsion today out of the LA Times.
This is just amazing.
Uh here's the um the first paragraph.
This diminutive nation, by the way, they only have about three and a half million people.
I mean, that's as many people who are uh uh murdered in L.A. every year.
Uh the diminutive nation with an off-beat sense of humor and a strong self-image of cultural tolerance is not accustomed to having its flag burned, embassies stormed, coat of arms pelted with eggs.
The scope and intensity of the violence ignited by the cartoons has left this country, says the LA Times, bewildered.
This is great.
Morton Rickson, a philosophy student, looking out his window at uh Copenhagen, a city awar a swirl in snow and angst.
He says, quote, a lot of Danes have problems understanding what's going on and why people in those countries reacted this way.
We're used to seeing American flags and pictures of George Bush being burned, but we've always seen ourselves as a more tolerant nation.
We're in shock to be the center of this.
You gotta laugh at these people.
That's the only thing you can do.
Um, and I want to get to the uh the bulk of it here today.
Uh George Bush has come out now and said, okay, if we're gonna start second guessing, without knowing what I'm doing.
By the way, I looked it up.
There is a court, administrative court records of for how many wiretaps, how many phone taps have been authorized by any federal court anywhere for any reason.
This is racketeering and drugs and who knows what else.
In the total country.
How many phone calls do you think are made in this country by how many people?
They got almost 300 million people.
Uh I make 50 phone calls a day.
I don't know, a hundred phone calls a day.
How many phone calls do you make a day?
Okay.
Seventeen hundred and ten warrants have been issued for the government at any level, your local DA, the state, the feds, everybody combined.
1710 last year.
That's everything.
Drugs, mafia, Hollywood, divorce court, everything.
I just threw that in.
I don't know whether the divorce court does that.
But this is um finally, after all the hectoring, which started to include whoop Republicans yesterday about the spy program, not just Arlen Specter.
Oh, how's the chemotherapy going, Arlen?
Um, But Sam Brownback and uh and some of these other Republicans starting to echo the oh uh spying.
Well, uh we better be careful.
We better be careful.
So George Bush says, yeah, we better be careful.
In a speech today, he said, this is how careful we've been.
I had uh and and and Bush should have s should have said it just this way, but here's what I'm gonna interpret it for you.
This is what Bush said.
I've told you from the beginning that when we had successes in the war on terror, we probably couldn't talk about it.
That what you ought to look at is the absence of attack.
If we haven't been attacked since September 11, it doesn't mean that they weren't trying.
It doesn't mean that we uh you know we're just sitting back here being lucky.
So today he shared one of what Bush has said previously were ten thwarted attacks on the United States.
In a speech about the war, he detailed, as much as I think he was comfortable in doing, that the government foiled an attack in 2002 in which plotters coming from Asia were going to be hijacking planes coming across the Pacific and crashing into uh there's a library building it's called in it's I don't know whether it's a library or not,
but it's a tallest building in uh LA.
I mean, you wouldn't want to crash into just a bungalow down in Santa Monica.
You've got to hit something big, and there's not that much in LA, there's a little concentrated downtown.
So uh because it's spread out over about six hundred and fifty uh million square miles, about four times the size of Rhode Island.
So, you know, you hit LA and you gotta hit something big.
Well, uh mountains are the biggest thing in LA, so tallest.
So you you hit this this this skyscrap.
When you see it, you're gonna laugh.
Those of you who live in Manhattan, but that's what you know what we call it.
Uh this uh attack was foiled because Bush administration intercepted the phone calls.
Now that's the lesson today.
How much of our secret methods do we have to give away to reassure our friends across the aisle in the Democrat Party that the purpose of intercepting phone calls is not to find out if you've just called your mistress or your economic uh uh inside uh secrets, or you're calling your mom for set up Sunday uh meals.
Believe me, the NSA does not care.
What they've been tasked to care about is Al Qaeda using phone lines, cell phones, email, other methods of communication to set up attacks that will kill massive amounts of Americans and stop it.
So uh I thought today Bush finally said, Look, uh, I guess I just have to start talking about the fact that we have had successes, that what this means, this this selective uh spying on our enemies means is that we can stop them.
We can stop them.
Now, I don't know.
Who in America doesn't want to stop them?
Sam Brown back?
What are you thinking?
You you don't want to stop them?
You've been briefed, Senator.
Senator Spector, you've been briefed.
You know that there's not millions of these spying wiretaps.
There's not hundreds of thousands, there's not tens of thousands, there's not even thousands.
These things have been selectively applied to known terrorists.
And Bush finally today had to say, and it's worked.
We haven't just been lucky since 9-11.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm Roger Hitchcock, Infor Rush, back with your calls after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for uh Rush Today, 1-800-282-2882.
Uh did get um feedback yesterday I was uh trying to focus in on one of the things liberals are all exercised about and that is uh the um the uh Patriot Act and the Patriot Act reauthorization and uh specifically, and I've been reading uh many articles about this, the fact that uh George Bush wants to establish a secret police.
He wants a secret police to arrest people without warrants.
So I went back, I said, Well, where where you see this in the Patriot Act?
Well, Section 605, Roger, 605.
They say it like they say Area 51.
You know, it's just amazing, these people.
So I went to 605.
I read the thing.
It says the Uniform Division, United States Secret Service, not Secret Police, a Secret Service, just the guys protect the President.
You know, I mean, guys have been around for a hundred years.
Uh protecting the President, the Secret Service, uh protecting foreign diplomats, embassies, the White House, blah, blah, blah, right?
I'm reading this thing 605, reauthorizes all of this.
And then uh it says uh let me find the exact wording here.
Oh, yeah.
This is the one where the Liberals really get exercised.
Uh subsection uh this is 3056A, uh, subsection small A, subsection B one.
I know this is this is the way they do these things.
Under the direction of the Director of Secret Service, members of the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division are authorized to, and then one of the subsections is make arrest without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence.
Now look, uh ladies and gentlemen, anyone can make an arrest without a warrant for any offense, felony committed in your presence.
You can.
Police certainly do.
Do you think when police see uh a guy uh breaking into uh the local convenience store that they go wake up the judge and get a warrant and come back and get the guy?
No, they arrest him because a crime is being committed in his presence.
Warrantless arrest.
Of course.
The crime is committed in his presence.
I hope everybody's with me on this.
But anyway, then I got a bunch of email yesterday.
Uh-da-da-da.
There's always been a uniform division of the Secret Service.
Uh what's the problem?
It's been there for a hundred years.
Here's go to the website, Secret Service.gov, Roger, come on, 1970.
The uh Protective Service was renamed the Secret Service, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, I don't know, I don't know.
So I said, well, well, then what is new about this?
Section 605.
Because when I went back to um uh the article that uh started all this in my thinking about this was in human events, which is normally uh pretty rational uh deal, and Paul Craig Roberts wrote this article, unfathomed dangers in Patriot Act reauthorization.
And the first line of this is, and he's talking about this Section 605, a provision in the Patriot Act creates a new federal police force with power to violate the Bill of Rights.
Well, I'm opposed to that too.
Except it isn't true.
There is it isn't a new federal police force.
The Uniformed Division of the Secret Service has existed for 36 years.
If I'm reading this timeline correct.
Um what it has so we called Paul Craig Roberts.
And he said, Oh, no, no, no, you don't understand.
Oh, here's the here's the email I'll read it to.
Um, we said, what is the problem?
Paul, what's the problem?
He writes back, it turns it turns the Uniformed Secret Service.
So there it is, he's th already he's uh announcing and acknowledging that the Uniformed Secret Service already exists when he wrote that the Patriot Act creates a new Federal Police Force.
No, it doesn't.
And he admits it in this in this email.
It turns the the Uniformed Secret Service, whose jurisdiction is guarding a few federal buildings such as the U.S. Treasury, White House, Old Executive Office Building, etc., into a nationwide federal police force.
Oh, so now the charge is it's going beyond what it used to do, and it's in a nationwide police force.
Really?
Well, Paul Craig Roberts, you're wrong again.
I went back to 605 and I read it.
And I said, it says, where uh are you going to be able to do this protection?
Sure enough, it has the White House, uh presidential offices, treasury building, the president personally, vice president, et cetera, et cetera, foreign diplomatic missions, uh, the um embassies, and then uh any permanent mission uh in a place where there's a lot of other, you know, the UN, it's what it's really talking about here.
Any visit of a foreign government official to metropolitan areas where there are located twenty or more counselor or diplomatic missions, former presidents and their spouses, except Jimmy Carter.
I I just threw that in.
It's my amendment.
Uh major presidential and vice presidential candidates uh and a special event of national secu.
Where is it that this is extended?
I don't I don't get it.
Than this is coming from the right, I guess, uh from the con so-called conservatives at the human events.
First of all, your article is dead wrong.
There's no new federal police force, and I was sucked into saying that yesterday when I should have uh read this even closer.
Six oh five simply restates the uniform division of the Secret Service.
It doesn't violate the Bill of Rights.
You can arrest someone committing a felony in your presence.
Every police officer does it.
Case closed.
Back after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for rush.
Uh by the way, that Neil Cavuto interview on Fox News uh is up on the Rush Limbaugh.com site and uh in the free part uh but if you're missing Rush while he's gone for these few days, just go to that website, Rush Limbaugh.com, join Rush 247, because you can listen to any of the radio shows you might have missed in the last month and get Russia's morning update in either audio or video versions too.
You can also sign up to get the uh Russian newsletter, the February issue of the Limbaugh Letter features Russia's interview with fellow conservative Tony Blankley on uh blankly's new book, uh, this is timely, The West's Last Chance, which talks about what would really happen if Islam is terrorist acquired weapons of mass destruction, all that at Rushlimbaugh.com.
All right, back to the phones.
Here's Kurt, a cell phone in Chicago, Illinois.
Hi, Kurt, welcome to the Rush program.
Thanks, Roger.
My question is uh and in let me just say I'm I'm a liberal democrat in Chicago.
I'm all for tapping phones and listening to Al Qaeda.
My question is they they got this, they thwarted the plot.
Would the plot still have been thwarted had they gone to the FISA court within seventy-two hours?
Well, I don't know is the answer, and I don't think uh Bush is going to reveal that.
But let me just assure you that after Gonzalez, this this should have been the conclusive argument uh on Monday of this week when uh Attorney General Gonzalez uh made his presentation and described what it takes just in the bureaucracy of the Justice Department and the different departments they have to go to to get signatures and buy and and uh and buy offs on the content of an application to get a warrant.
Even when you're talking about you can get a warrant after the fact, uh the seventy-two hours, they can't get the documentation put together in seventy-two hours.
So it's just the frustration that a bureaucracy moves like molasses, no matter what we're talking about, a building permit for your patio edition, or we're talking about a warrant uh for a wiretap for Al Qaeda.
Right.
I I agree with you.
And if the if the if the thing is cumbersome, I don't know what the Patriot Act does, I don't know what's going on, but I I think if it's inadequate, I don't understand it.
I think Patrick Lahey asked the question, why didn't you just come back and ask us to change the law?
And that's I think what's frustrating to us Democrats is that we don't have we I don't feel I'll speak for myself.
I don't feel like there's a check and a balance to really say that President Bush is doing this, and no one's ever been able to tell me conclusively or provide a proof source to me that it is only international calls and not domestic, and I think that's what concerns me.
So and and it's uh it's a rightful concern.
Now you have to look, however, at the facts.
Uh there is no allegation by anybody that any domestic calls have been, you know, spied upon.
Although my opinion is if two Al Qaeda guys are talking to each other uh through their uh they just stole a cell phone out of the convenience store, uh I want to know about it.
You know, before they bomb the elementary school down the street.
Frankly, Kurt, uh, you know, we're at war.
Uh the I guess what what I'm I'm thinking here is that every time there has been a war, the president has been assumed to have Article II of the Constitution powers as commander in chief in a war situation to do that which is necessary to defend and protect the United States of America.
He's sworn to do it.
He is doing it.
There is no uh sense here that we're talking about people uh Aunt Mabel isn't calling the retirement home to talk to her sister and suddenly NSA knows all the details.
Uh you know, I'll tell you what, though, Kurt, you're not going to hear too much out of the Clintons on this issue because later in the program I have a little set piece that I'm going to Do about the Clintons using wiretaps for economic espionage.
We'll get to that later in the program.
I appreciate your call.
Today in opinion journal, by the way, uh opinion journal uh the world uh at uh Wall Street Journal dot com, the um their abolished FISA editorial is pretty eye-opening, FISA being that um federal court that Kurt was just talking about that issues warrants.
It came in in 1978 in the wake of uh Watergate to try to uh cut the judiciary the cut the use the judiciary to cut the executive down to size, the imperial presidency, if you will.
And uh and the fact is that uh FISA has made it impossible for us to defend against enemies because of the bureaucracy.
And it's not I don't want to blame lawyers in the Justice Department.
What I'm saying is the requirements of the law to support a finding by the court that a warrant uh should be issued are similar to they're identical to the very cumbersome and they should be cumbersome the that uh that the things that are used in the criminal justice system because we want to protect individuals' rights who are who are who are uh to be uh monitored by the government, charged with crime, et cetera, you have Fourth Amendment rights, all of that.
That that that part I am a hundred percent into.
The government should not have any kind of arbitrary power in that area whatsoever.
But to have that shift over to the war defense powers under Article II of the of the of the Constitution for the President's powers as commander in chief is a mistake.
It is possibly a fatal mistake.
That's the point Bush is making, and I think it's the point that most Americans understand.
Here's Coretta in New York City.
Hi, Coretta.
Going.
Hi.
Um I live in New York, and we would have been minus a Brooklyn Bridge had it not been for wiretapping.
And in December we had uh you know you heard about that transit strike?
Yeah.
And people had to use that same bridge to cross to walk across had it not been for the wire tapping, what would they have done?
Because Brooklyn Bridge didn't translate into Arabic, and that's how they picked it up.
Isn't that funny?
Because they heard the word Brooklyn Bridge.
Put a wire tapping in the wiretap.
Keep doing it.
Coretta, God bless you for seeing through the shaft.
That's exactly the truth of this matter.
And uh and by the way, I mean, I I I'll get into this later, but here's uh Hillary Clinton today saying that Bush ought to get tough on the war on terror.
Now, which is it?
Are we are we too tough or not tough enough?
Um uh uh you know, and by the way, she was angry at being called angry.
Uh did you notice that?
We're gonna get into that later on, too.
Uh she was very angry.
So even the Washington Post is starting to get this.
This morning's article, Bucking Bush on spying, talks about Sam Brown back of Kansas, a loyal Republican, member of the Judiciary Committee, supporting uh President Bush, but uh saying, well, uh you know, in questioning uh Attorney General Gonzalez that uh he says it strikes me that we're going to be in this war on terrorism possibly for decades, and to have another set of eyes looking at this surveillance technique is an important thing in maintaining the public support for this, unquote.
Sam, the public is supporting the President on this.
And as soon as there are abuses and abuses come up, you know what the American public is going to do.
American public is not into being spied on by the government.
I j can I just tell you this uh honestly, just let me share this with uh with a f as a friend.
Uh most Americans just don't dig, being spied on by the government.
It just doesn't go over.
It's not one of those selling points.
But in a war in which 3,000 Americans have already died in an attack on our homeland, the first one since 1812.
It seems to me that most Americans agree that if Al Qaeda is phoning up saying, Hey, you guys ready with the bomb?
Uh Brooklyn Bridge, you know, and the rest of it's in Arabic except Brooklyn Bridge, that we we ought to be uh uh taping ta uh in those guys.
We ought to be able to trace those guys, and we ought to be able to arrest those guys in Lackawanna or wherever they are.
And we ought to be able to pick them up, put them in jail, and find out what the heck their their intentions are, because they're not just here to do jobs Americans won't do.
They're here to do bombs that Americans don't want done.
And and I think this is getting increasingly clear for people.
And so I'm uh in in shock that frankly the White House has agreed, this is according to the Washington Post as well, to expand beyond the eight top leaders in Congress, in the House and and Senate who have been briefed on every one of these intercepts, every one of these taps, eight members of Congress fully briefed.
And uh that where where did Fox get oh uh Congresswoman Harmon from California was on last night, and she was forced to admit as one of those eight.
Uh yeah, they put us in a room, yeah, they told us about.
They wouldn't let us make notes.
They wouldn't let us consult experts.
They wouldn't let us bring in the press.
They wouldn't let I mean Jane, hello, Jane, hello.
Jane.
Uh it's a secret briefing during a war of techniques we're using to defeat the enemy.
If the enemy knows about it, they will do something else.
Then we'll have to find out what else they're doing while we watch uh bombs go off in elementary schools, uh pizza parlors, and uh planes going into our to our high rises.
No, you can't bring in experts.
No, you can't make notes, but just listen.
Jane, did you hear anything about domestic spying?
No.
Were these all terrorist suspects that we found through computers of other terrorist people that we've apprehended in the battlefield in Afghanistan, etc.?
Yes.
So what's the problem?
Well, we didn't have enough experts.
We didn't have the press.
We didn't have an overview.
We didn't have judicial oversight.
What?
So now the the White House is saying, no, well, okay, we'll brief some other people.
We'll bring in some other folks.
We'll tell them the same thing.
We'll show them the wiretaps, we'll show them that each one of them has behind it uh intelligence that we've gathered, but if you leak that out to the press, then the enemy knows how we did it.
If they know how we did it, they defeat us the next time.
They kill Americans.
That's what's it's is it just been it's just that we've been so fat dumb and happy for so long we don't even realize what the threat is?
Didn't 911 wake you people up.
And let me just uh well, I'll make this point when we come back.
You think Bush is the first one to tap?
Your favorite president in mine did the same thing, and we'll find out just how and why after I come back.
Roger Hedgecock In for Rush, 1800-282-2882 after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Thank you for listening.
1-800-282-2882.
Roger Hedgecock In for Russia today, Mr. Sullivan in tomorrow, and Rush, of course, back on uh Monday.
You can catch uh catch up on all the uh rush happenings at Rushlimbod.com.
Uh by the way, uh thank you, Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday, who finally got a couple of Sundays ago uh Harry Reed to admit that uh he has known about the NSA monitoring program, monitoring uh these communications with uh known Al Qaeda folks uh in and out of the United States since shortly after 9-11.
That uh it's been going on uh for four years, and he has known about it.
The briefing, by the way, that they get, according to Jane Harmon, the briefing they get is uh Congresswoman Harmon is uh specifics.
Uh these are the people, this is why.
In other words, the whole thing that a FISA court would get, these people in Congress criticizing the program now as if it's something new because it was printed in the uh New York Times uh should know better.
Now look, here let me take you back because uh in context now to the sainted Bill Clinton era.
In February of 2000, during the Bill Clinton administration, Steve Croft, CBS correspondent, introduced a piece on 60 minutes this way.
Here is the quote.
I don't have the tape, but this is what he said.
Quote, if you've made a phone call today or sent an email to a friend, there's a good chance that what you said or wrote was captured or screened by the country's largest intelligence agency, unquote.
During the Bill Clinton administration, millions, millions of um of people were spied upon for economic reasons, it says.
In 1996, Clinton signed the Economic Espionage Act, which authorized intelligence gathering on foreign businesses without a court order, without a warrant, without a hearing, without an article in the New York Times, without any of the normal safeguards.
James Woolsey, by the way, tipped...
these people can't keep a secret.
James Woolsey didn't take a leak.
The CIA director for Bill Clinton in 2000 went over to Europe and in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro said that Clinton ordered him to take Echelon, which was the key name, the super secret surveillance program was called Echelon to monitor these personal telephone calls and private emails to take echelon and transform it into a tool for gathering economic intelligence.
It started in 1993.
It resulted in the tapping of millions of people.
Millions, not hundreds, millions.
So that's the context within which, and by the way, totally super secret till the CIA director blabs about it in a French newspaper interview, totally super secret.
A truly secret program that spied on Americans, as Hillary might say.
So where does Hillary get off?
Where does Schumer get off?
Where do these people, these Clintonites, get off, suddenly criticizing what might amount to 1700 or so taps on people who are, and then the criteria is one party of the two at least has to be a known Al Qaeda operative, known because the name has come up on a computer we got out of some guy on the battlefield or some guy out of Italy, which by the way, Italy, did this same thing and helped us thwart a lot of these plots because they were tapping known Al Qaeda people in Italy.
Why do I even keep talking I feel like as I'm listening to myself, isn't this all obvious to everybody, Roger better move on to something interesting?
And yet I I continue to see stuff in the in the press.
Well, we never knew about it before.
It was completely secret.
It's uh tapping Americans.
It's uh uh an invasion of privacy.
It's uh it's uh unconstitutional violates the bill of right.
It doesn't do any of that.
Not any of it.
Kevin in Wayne, New Jersey next.
Kevin, welcome to the Rush program.
Thank you, Roger.
How are you doing today?
Good.
Uh first, before I get into my uh my point, permit me to uh articulate my feelings on the uh wiretapping, and uh I can simply sum it up by saying, how can you not?
Exactly.
How can you not do it?
And even the Democrats agree with that because they're saying, well, all we want is for you to go through a court and brief enough of us so that the one that leaks it to the New York Times doesn't get nailed.
Correct, correct.
And uh the leaking is is actually the point that I called for, and I will give my wife the credit uh she brought it up this morning as we discuss this stuff uh every morning.
She basically was uh saying how sad and pathetic it is uh that we can't keep the methods that we use to conduct the operation of our national security a secret, but yet we never seem to get a leak on who's gonna win Survivor or any other of those ridiculous reality shows.
Or the Grammys or you know, anything important like that is held very secret.
Liberals know how to keep a secret when it's important.
Yeah.
That's very sad.
By the way, uh talking this over and then taking advice from your wife, Kevin, you're going to have a very long and prosperous uh marriage.
I I sure hope so.
Hey, thanks for the call.
I appreciate it.
We're going to take a break.
Roger Hedgecock in for rush.
Back with your call after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock, filling in for rush, got this email here from Bill T says the whole issue over wiretapping shows that as usual, the Democrats are twenty years out of date.
Something that is not emphasized, he writes, on this subject, is that when the FISA law was passed, 1979, there were no cell phones, and email was restricted to the few users on the ARPANET.
That's the predecessor to the Internet.
And he says, to listen in on an electronic conversation, you had to physically tap the phone line and connect a tape recorder.
Nowadays, when most long distance phone calls are digitalized and some are conducted over the internet, you are literally snatching bits out of the ether.
You're not tapping anything.
These connections are ephemeral, and you may get only one call per phone, in the case of those throwaway cell phones.
So this FISA FISA law is out of date as well as is the thinking of administrative uh administration critics, and he is absolutely right.
And let me give you an example.
If Bill Clinton says uh somebody who worked in intelligence, I won't go any farther than that.
If Bill Clinton and uh Berger had utilized the program against a known Al-Qaeda cell in Yemen, it's possible there would not have been a 9-11.
All the Al Qaeda calls in the world were directed through the Sana Yemen switchboard.
And Clinton refused to give NSA the authority to conduct surveillance and monitor that connection, their excuse it couldn't provide evidence to be used in a prosecution.
They were still in the prosecution of crime mode.
We're in the war mode and winning the war and protecting America.
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