Carter deliberately put himself above the Bill of Right’s protection from unwarranted search. Administration officials considered the Vietnam case "an ideal vehicle for reasserting executive power on several counts," according to the New York Times.

The Democrat who campaigned on a platform of open government resorted to the same methods that his predecessors used against anti-Vietnam War protesters and other political dissenters.

The Justice Department explained, "Every President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has asserted the power...." And just like every president since Roosevelt, Carter defended the illegal electronic surveillance in the name of "national security."

February 23, 1953
Hardly a week goes by without more murders and woundings of Korean and Chinese war prisoners in U.S. prison camps. A steady stream of massacres has been perpetrated against POWs confined behind barbed-wire in compounds on isolated, desolate islands off South Korea. The latest massacre resulted on Feb. 9 in death to five North Korean prisoners of war and injury to 19 on Koje Island. "There were no U.N. casualties," reported the Associated Press.

Col. C. C. Cadwell, U.S. commander of the prison camps, complained the killings followed a "deliberate attempt" by the "Communist prisoners" to carry out the plan to harass the U.N. command. They forced the camp commander to order their wounding and death with gas, concussion grenades, and bullets by "shouting Communist songs in violation of written orders."

These massacres, which have taken a toll of hundreds dead and more than 1,300 wounded, have been explained invariably as a diabolical Communist plot, engineered all the way from North Korea.  
 
 
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