Quote:

because we can
Jan. 6, 2006 - To many people, the most perplexing aspect of the Bush administration’s domestic spying program is that it was largely unnecessary. President George Bush could have simply invoked the emergency provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which would have allowed the government to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists 72 hours before receiving authorization from the FISA court. Alternatively, the White House could have gone to Congress to amend the FISA statute. So why did the White House take such a controversial step, one that would inevitably open it up to serious charges of violating the civil liberties of American citizens? The answer may be as simple as this: a zealous belief that it could, regardless of whether doing so was necessary.

The administration’s biggest mistakes in fighting the war on terror have been the product of a willful defiance of the traditional rules of warfare. Bush understood instinctively that the United States needed more creative thinking and a new flexibility to prevail against an enemy as vicious and unconventional as Al Qaeda. But a small, powerful group of ideologically committed Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, had a more far-reaching agenda: to prove at virtually every turn that the Constitution vests in the president near unfettered powers in the conduct of national security policy. The principle became such an article of faith that upholding it often trumped the wisdom--and necessity--of individual policies. Playing out behind the scenes was a bitter struggle between the proponents of presidential supremacy during wartime and traditionalists, often career civil servants, who wanted to maintain the balance of power. A healthy tension between the two should serve as an important check on overreaching by ideologues or on the indolence of time-serving bureaucrats.
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msnbc

Fair play!