Today's Constitutional Abomination

...but not here. Witness the following statement in the new Iraqi constitution:

"The freedom of communication, and mail, telegraphic, electronic, and telephonic correspondence, and other correspondence shall be guaranteed and may not be monitored, wiretapped or disclosed except for legal and security necessity and by a judicial decision."

I'm really curious what the President feels his limits are under his supposed statutory authority to do anything to protect Americans. Using the same justification, he has legalized torture and allowed American citizens to be held without charges or access to attorneys. An article in Slate posits:

Bush and his lawyers contend that the president's national security powers are unlimited. And since the war on terror is currently scheduled to run indefinitely, the executive supremacy they're asserting won't be a temporary condition.

More good stuff:

[I]n inverting specific prohibitions into blanket permission that Gonzales reaches for the genuinely Orwellian. The Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 not only does not authorize Bush's warrant-less snooping but clearly and specifically prohibits it by prescribing the FISA court system as the "exclusive" method for authorizing electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes...[Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales proposes that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act must either be read as consistent with the position that [the president] can wiretap whomever he wants (thus becoming meaningless) or, alternatively, be dismissed as an unconstitutional irrelevancy.

In other words, laws either mean what we want them to or they are unconstitutional. This is really what these people are saying.

But why does this all-purpose rationale not also extend to press censorship or arresting political opponents, were the president to deem such measures vital to the nation's security?

They've insinuated to varying degrees that political opponents are traitors and that all bad news is the fault of a biased press...if things get bad enough, they just might lock them up and shut 'em down. Fox News can stick around as the state-run news channel.