Bush Ally Joins Authors Seeking US Wiretapping Ban

Chris Hitchens, a neo-con if I ever heard one, has joined the reality train.

The British writer Christopher Hitchens, one of the most reliable allies of the US administration's conduct of the war on terror, has joined a lawsuit seeking a ban on a domestic spy program authorized by President George Bush.
In two lawsuits filed separately yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union in Detroit and the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York City, the National Security Agency is accused of violating the constitution by eavesdropping on people without court oversight.
They represent the first legal challenge to the surveillance program, which has outraged members of Congress and led to charges that Mr. Bush has overstepped his authority as president.
In the ACLU suit, Hitchens joins other writers, Greenpeace and the Council on American-Islamic Relations in seeking an immediate end to the wiretaps, saying they violate constitutional rights to privacy and free speech.
The suit brought by Hitchens, Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at American Prospect magazine, James Bamford, author of two books on the NSA, and Barnett Rubin, an academic at New York University, addresses one of the primary fears surrounding the extrajudicial surveillance of telephone calls and email - that the NSA used the eavesdropping program to spy on opponents of the Bush administration. Hitchens and the other plaintiffs said they feared their email and telephone calls were monitored, compromising their contacts in the Middle East. "People will say it's wartime and we have a deadly enemy, and I agree with that. I was in favor of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan very strongly, but it is even more important in such a time that we don't give away power to the unaccountable agencies that helped get us into this in the first place," Hitchens told the Guardian. "It is extremely important we know what the rules are and there has to be a line drawn. You mustn't turn emergency or panic measures into custom or practice."

Self-motivated but... Now all he has to do is call for withdrawal.