Senator Patrick Leahy:Take 30 seconds to protect your civil liberties

I hope you and your family are enjoying a safe and happy holiday season. While many of us are visiting family and friends this week, I wanted to take just a moment to update you on our fight for striking the right balance between national security and civil liberties -- and ask for your help.

Thousands of members of the Green Mountain PAC community have already emailed President Bush, demanding that he end his program of secret domestic wiretaps without court review -- a program that the President admitted reauthorizing dozens of times since 2001.

But now, in just the past few days, we've learned that the practice was even more widespread than President Bush initially admitted. Indeed, it appears that the National Security Agency gained access to huge volumes of information traveling through centralized telecommunications "switches," gateways that route voice and data through networks across the U.S. and around the globe.

These new revelations only multiply and intensify the growing list of questions and concerns about President Bush's warrantless surveillance of Americans -- and we should tell him to end it at once.

Tell President Bush to end this violation of our civil liberties now!

Last week, Vice President Cheney claimed that Congress granted President Bush the authority to conduct warrantless domestic wiretaps in the 2001 resolution authorizing military force against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That couldn't be further from the truth.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle thoroughly debunked this claim in an op-ed on Friday in The Washington Post. Senator Daschle talked about the negotiations over the 2001 resolution, and his refusal to include explicit language proposed by the White House that would have granted President Bush expansive powers here in the United States.

The White House must come clean about the scale and scope of its illegal domestic wiretap program -- and it needs to put an end to it now.

Tell President Bush to stop his secret domestic wiretap program immediately!

Fortunately, there is bipartisan support for protecting our civil liberties. In recent weeks, a handful of Congressional Republicans have joined with Democrats to balance national security with civil liberty.

Thanks to your help, even in the face of strong White House opposition, we were able to pass a short-term extension of the PATRIOT Act to give us the time to build in greater civil liberty protections in the PATRIOT Act reauthorization.

Now it's time for President Bush to get the message.

A wiretap that short-circuits our laws and safeguards is no more effective than a legal wiretap. It will not get us better intelligence and it will not make us any safer as a nation. It only excuses the government from having to justify its conduct through constitutional checks and balances.