Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans.

-- Tom

 

Isn't perjury when DEA lies to the Federal judge?

 

GLENN GREENWALD:
So this should be a huge scandal for the following reason. The essence of the Constitution is that the government cannot obtain evidence or information about you unless it has probable cause to believe that you’ve engaged in a crime and then goes to a court and gets a warrant.

And only then is that evidence usable in a prosecution against you.

What this secret agency is doing, according to Reuters, it is circumventing that process by gathering all kinds of information without any court supervision, without any oversight at all, using surveillance technologies and other forms of domestic spying.

And then, when it gets this information that it believes it can be used in a criminal prosecution, it knows that that information can’t be used in a criminal prosecution because it’s been acquired outside of the legal and constitutional process, so they cover up how they really got it, and they pretend—they make it seem as though they really got it through legal and normal means, by then going back and retracing the investigation, once they already have it, and re-acquiring it so that it looks to defense counsel and even to judges and prosecutors like it really was done in the constitutionally permissible way.

So they’re prosecuting people and putting people in prison for using evidence that they’ve acquired illegally, which they’re then covering up and lying about and deceiving courts into believing was actually acquired constitutionally.

It’s a full-frontal assault on the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments and on the integrity of the judicial process, because they’re deceiving everyone involved in criminal prosecutions about how this information has been obtained.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/5/greenwald_is_us_exaggerating_threat_to?autostart=true

 

There's nothing new here, I think.

For example, see -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_%28organization%29 at "Withdrawal of charges, 1973".