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Banned
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
American Left: We think those terrorists 4th amendment rights were violated. If so they should go free.
J.Q. Public: Pardon?
American Left: Don't you see, Bush is acting like an emperor (Ustwo note, such language was used in this thread) he must be stopped he is voilating the constitution!
J.Q. Public: So you think that the known and proven terrorists should go free?
American Left: Yes of course!
J.Q. Public: Ummm......What should he have done instead?
American Left: Used the Patriot act! Thats why he got it!........
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Ustwo....I wince as I read the "content" of your posts, and I observe that you ignore the challenges that I direct to you, accompanied as they are by linked excerpts to reports published by "newspapers of record" and the ruling government's, own web pages.
The quote box above indicates to me that you are hopelessly "outclassed", here, yet you continue to deny and distract from what is actuaully, and finally being reported by MSM, after an admitted delay of more than a year.
I urge you to bring the level of your discourse nearer to the level of the following research that I am posting here for the examination of all interested members. Please endeavor to counter it, and equally worthy material posted by other members, commensurate to the level of your education and abilities.
All we know of you is what you have told us....and sir....you do yourself an injustice that directly conflicts with who you have told us you are.
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...122102326.html
Judges on Surveillance Court To Be Briefed on Spy Program
By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 22, 2005; A01
The presiding judge of a secret court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases is arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges to address their concerns about the legality of President Bush's domestic spying program, according to several intelligence and government sources.
<b>Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal.</b> Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.
<b>"The questions are obvious," said U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah. "What have you been doing, and how might it affect the reliability and credibility of the information we're getting in our court?"</b>
<b>Such comments underscored the continuing questions among judges about the program, which most of them learned about when it was disclosed last week by the New York Times. On Monday, one of 10 FISA judges, federal Judge James Robertson, submitted his resignation -- in protest of the president's action, according to two sources familiar with his decision.</b> He will maintain his position on the U.S. District Court here.
Other judges contacted yesterday said they do not plan to resign but are seeking more information about the president's initiative. Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who also sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, told fellow FISA court members by e-mail Monday that she is arranging for them to convene in Washington, preferably early next month, for a secret briefing on the program, several judges confirmed yesterday.
Two intelligence sources familiar with the plan said Kollar-Kotelly expects top-ranking officials from the National Security Agency and the Justice Department to outline the classified program to the members.
<b>The judges could, depending on their level of satisfaction with the answers, demand that the Justice Department produce proof that previous wiretaps were not tainted, according to government officials knowledgeable about the FISA court. Warrants obtained through secret surveillance could be thrown into question. One judge, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also said members could suggest disbanding the court in light of the president's suggestion that he has the power to bypass the court.</b>
The highly classified FISA court was set up in the 1970s to authorize secret surveillance of espionage and terrorism suspects within the United States. Under the law setting up the court, the Justice Department must show probable cause that its targets are foreign governments or their agents. <b>The FISA law does include emergency provisions that allow warrantless eavesdropping for up to 72 hours if the attorney general certifies there is no other way to get the information.
Still, Bush and his advisers have said they need to operate outside the FISA system in order to move quickly against suspected terrorists. In explaining the program, Bush has made the distinction between detecting threats and plots and monitoring likely, known targets, as FISA would allow.
Bush administration officials believe it is not possible, in a large-scale eavesdropping effort, to provide the kind of evidence the court requires to approve a warrant. Sources knowledgeable about the program said there is no way to secure a FISA warrant when the goal is to listen in on a vast array of communications in the hopes of finding something that sounds suspicious. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said the White House had tried but failed to find a way.</b>
One government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said <b.the administration complained bitterly that the FISA process demanded too much: to name a target and give a reason to spy on it.
"For FISA, they had to put down a written justification for the wiretap," said the official. "They couldn't dream one up."</b>
The NSA program, and the technology on which it is based, makes it impossible to meet that criterion because the program is designed to intercept selected conversations in real time from among an enormous number relayed at any moment through satellites.
"There is a difference between detecting, so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important to note the distinction between the two," Bush said Monday. But he added: "If there is a need based upon evidence, we will take that evidence to a court in order to be able to monitor calls within the United States."
The American Civil Liberties Union formally requested yesterday that Gonzales appoint an outside special counsel to investigate and prosecute any criminal acts and violations of laws as a result of the spying effort.
Also yesterday, John D. Negroponte, Bush's director of national intelligence, sent an e-mail to the entire intelligence community defending the program. The politically tinged memo referred to the disclosure as "egregious" and called the program a vital, constitutionally valid tool in the war against al Qaeda.
Benson said it is too soon for him to judge whether the surveillance program was legal until he hears directly from the government.
"I need to know more about it to decide whether it was so distasteful," Benson said. "But I wonder: If you've got us here, why didn't you go through us? They've said it's faster [to bypass FISA], but they have emergency authority under FISA, so I don't know."
As it launched the dramatic change in domestic surveillance policy, the administration chose to secretly brief only the presiding FISA court judges about it. Officials first advised U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the head of FISA in the fall of 2001, and then Kollar-Kotelly, who replaced him in that position in May 2002. U.S. District Judge George Kazen of the Southern District of Texas said in an interview yesterday that his information about the program has been largely limited to press accounts over the past several days.
"Why didn't it go through FISA," Kazen asked. "I think those are valid questions. The president at first said he didn't want to talk about it. Now he says, 'You're darn right I did it, and it's completely legal.' I gather he's got lawyers telling him this is legal. I want to hear those arguments." Judge Michael J. Davis of Minnesota said he, too, wants to be sure the secret program did not produce unreliable or legally suspect information that was then used to obtain FISA warrants.
"I share the other judges' concerns," he said.
But Judge Malcolm Howard of eastern North Carolina said he tends to think the terrorist threat to the United States is so grave that the president should use every tool available and every ounce of executive power to combat it.
"I am not overly concerned" about the surveillance program, he said, but "I would welcome hearing more specifics."
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...121901884.html
White House Elaborates on Authority for Eavesdropping
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 20, 2005; A10
.......Bush told a news conference that he still wants investigators to seek warrants in many cases from a secret foreign intelligence surveillance court, as required by a 1978 federal law. But he said authorities should be able to act outside that framework when the government needs "to move quickly to detect" plotting of terrorism between people in the United States and abroad.
"Having suggested this idea," the president said, "I then, obviously, went to the question, is it legal to do so? I swore to uphold the laws. Do I have the legal authority to do this? And the answer is, absolutely."
The statements by the president and other top officials triggered immediate debate, as many legal experts questioned his power to act on his own in an area where Congress has already legislated. The 1978 law, adopted by Congress and signed by President Jimmy Carter, claims to establish an "exclusive" set of rules and procedures for foreign intelligence surveillance.
"The issue here is this," said Jamie Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton and as a member of the Sept. 11 commission. "If you're John McCain and you just got Congress to agree to limits on interrogation techniques, why would you think that limits anything if the executive branch can ignore it by asserting its inherent authority?"
The Supreme Court spoke at the height of the Korean War on the president's authority to override Congress. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal takeover of the steel industry to prevent a strike that would have disrupted the supply of weapons to troops at the front. He cited his authority as commander in chief.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court rejected Truman's claim. In an influential concurring opinion, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote that the president's power is "at its lowest ebb" when he "takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress."
"With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations," Jackson wrote.
Analysts said that precedent makes Bush's claim of inherent constitutional authority to eavesdrop the most controversial aspect of his legal argument. But such claims have a long history. Presidents going back to Franklin D. Roosevelt either acted as if they had such power, or openly asserted it.
But the intelligence scandals of the 1960s and '70s changed the political and legal climate. In 1972, the Supreme Court rejected warrantless searches in cases of alleged domestic national security threats, but left open the issue of eavesdropping for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. The court has still not explicitly addressed the issue.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was intended to fill that gap. It required that the executive branch get approval from a secret court before conducting wiretaps within the United States. In signing the law, Carter praised it for protecting privacy and said it "clarifies the Executive's authority."
The original version of the law was silent on warrantless physical searches of suspected spies or terrorists. The Clinton administration claimed inherent authority to conduct such "black bag" jobs, including searches of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames's house that turned up evidence of his spying for Russia. But it later sought amendments to FISA that brought physical searches under the FISA framework.
The Bush administration argues that the steel seizure case poses no problem for its NSA program because Congress adopted a joint resolution on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to battle al Qaeda. That would include listening in on suspected terrorists, the administration argues.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales referred reporters yesterday to a 2004 Supreme Court opinion signed by a four-member plurality of the Supreme Court that said the 2001 resolution implicitly authorized the military detention of American citizens as suspected terrorists.
"We believe the court would apply the same reasoning" to electronic eavesdropping, Gonzales said. He added that the Sept. 14, 2001, resolution also corresponds to a provision of FISA that prohibits wiretapping "except as authorized by statute."
Outside experts were skeptical of these arguments. The 2004 ruling required federal court access for citizen detainees, they noted. Also, they said that the USA Patriot Act itself consisted largely of amendments to FISA designed to make it easier for the president to conduct surveillance. That would hardly have been necessary, the experts noted, if Congress had meant to supersede FISA through the 2001 resolution.
"One wonders if Congress really contemplated all these things when it enacted the resolution," said Michael J. Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Tufts University.
<b>FISA also contains emergency provisions that permit warrantless eavesdropping for up to 72 hours when the attorney general certifies that there is no other way to get crucial information. The law also permits warrantless eavesdropping for up to 15 days after a declaration of war.</b>
<b>"There is an emergency provision within FISA, and one could ask for more authority," Gorelick said. "If they had good reason, Congress would have given it to them."
Gonzales said that the administration contemplated doing that, but was told by "certain members of Congress" that "that would be difficult if not impossible."</b>
In effect, the administration is asking the public to accept a program that was conceived in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when tolerance for exceptional measures may have been greater than it is now.
"In times of crisis I think you have to explore, use every capability and explore every option," said Roger Cressey, who was principal deputy to the White House counterterrorism chief during Bush's first term. "But past those, in the day-to-day operations when there is no imminent threat, you need to revisit procedures and structures in place to ensure proper oversight."
Staff writer Dafna Linzer contributed to this report.
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<b>Maybe getting congress to grant presidential authority for warrantless searches would be "would be difficult if not impossible", because it goes against the wishes of the majority of American voters, and is fucking unconstitutional. These
lawless thugs admit that, in the face of the knowledge that congress would not approve of it, they "did it, anyway!</b>
Quote:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=58545
Transcript of Attorney General Gonzales, DHS Sec. Chertoff Press Briefing on Need for Senate to Reauthorize USA PATRIOT Act
12/21/2005 5:00:00 PM
To: National Desk, Legal Reporter
Contact: U.S. Department of Justice Public Affairs, 202-514-2007; Web: http://www.usdoj.gov
WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following is a transcript of a press briefing of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on the Need for the Senate to Reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act
...... ATTORNEY GENERAL: Okay. We'll take a few questions.
REPORTER: I wondered why, you had said that, you were told it was difficult, if not impossible to get Congress to reauthorize the FISA, the warrant for eavesdropping. How is it that you and the administration can enforce the resolution, granted the authorization that is impossible to get in another...
(Inaudible)
ATTORNEY GENERAL: I'm here to talk about the Patriot Act. But I will answer the one question, because I read the quote. Someone showed me the quote in The Washington Post. What I said, or <b>what I surely intended to say, if I didn't say is that we consulted with leaders in the congress about the feasibility of legislation to allow this type of surveillance. We were advised that it would be virtually impossible to obtain legislation of this type without compromising the program. And I want to emphasize the addition of, without compromising the program.</b> That was the concern. (Inaudible)
This is the last question I'll answer with respect to the matter relating to the NSA. I have no reason -- I don't know the reason. I'm not going to speculate why a judge would step down from the FISA court. If you're asking about the legality of the program. I came out on Monday and explained the administration's position, the legal rationale for the legality of the program. We believe the President has both the statutory authority and constitutional authority to engage in the intelligence during a time of war with our enemy. Any questions regarding the Patriot Act?.......
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Translation: <b>The elected legislators who represent American voters in congress would "jeaopardize the program" by voting against providing presidential authority for warrantless eavesdropping. So...they did it...sectretly....ANYWAY!</b>
Quote:
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-spy21de...home-headlines
December 21, 2005
THE NATION
Cheney Defends Domestic Spying
# He says Bush's decision to sidestep the courts and allow surveillance was an organized effort to regain presidential powers lost in the 1970s.
By Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writer
...........<b>White House spokesman Scott McClellan insisted that lawmakers had been informed of the program but declined to answer questions about whether members of Congress could act in any way on the information.</b>
"We believe it's important to brief members of Congress, the relevant leaders," McClellan said, adding that Congress was "an independent branch of government. Yes, they have oversight roles to play." When asked how lawmakers could have acted on the oversight, McClellan responded: "You should ask members of Congress that question."
<b>Some congressional Republicans defended Bush but others said they had doubts. Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) joined three Democrats in a call for an investigation.
"At no time, to our knowledge, did any administration representative ask the Congress to consider amending existing law to permit electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists without a warrant," the five senators wrote.</b>
New rounds of criticism followed reports Tuesday of comments Bush made last year in which he seemed to assure his audience that the government conducted wiretaps only with court approval.
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretaps, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order," the president said in a speech in Buffalo, N.Y. on April 20, 2004, in which he discussed enactment of the Patriot Act.
"Nothing has changed, by the way," Bush continued in the speech. "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said it was "time for the president to tell the truth."
<b>"Why is it that President Bush went in front of the American people and said that a wiretap 'requires a court order' after having approved a wiretap program without a court order two years earlier?"</b>
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