Posted on 01/21/2006 11:48:37 AM PST by wildbill
Algore is not lying. Liberals cannot lie. They believe that Truth is relative or does not exist at all. Reality is a mental construct. Facts are just an unenlightened or not very smart person's truncated way of viewing things. Liberals have a different word Truth. Truth is what supports the Good. The Good is that which is or promotes the realization of the Liberal mental construct. TTruth to a Liberal is what was once known as The Party Line.
Year Applied Granted Denied Modified
1979 199 207 0 0
1980 319 322 0 1*
1981 431 433 0 0
1982 473 475 0 0
1983 549 549 0 0
1984 635 635 0 0
1985 587 587 0 0
1986 573 573 0 0
1987 512 512 0 0
1988 534 534 0 0
1989 546 546 0 0
1990 595 595 0 0
1991 593 593 0 0
1992 484 484 0 0
1993 509 509 0 0
1994 576 576 0 0
1995 697 697 0 0
1996 839 839 0 0
1997 749 748 1* 0
1998 796 796 0 0
1999 886 880 0 0
2000 1,005 1,012 0 1
2001 932 934 0 2
2002 1,228 1,228 0 2
2003 1,727 1,724 4* 79
2004 1,758 1,754 0 94
* 1980: No orders were entered which modified or denied the requested authority, except one case in which the Court modified an order and authorized an activity for which court authority had not been requested.http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/1980rept.html
* 1997: In one case, although satisfied as to the probable cause to believe the target to be an agent of a foreign power, the court declined to approve the application as plead for other reasons, and gave the government leave to amend the application. The government has filed a motion to withdraw that case as it has become moot.
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/1997rept.html
* 2003: Of the four applications that the Court denied, two merit additional discussion:
(1) In one case, the Court issued supplemental orders with respect to its denial, and the Government filed with the Court a motion for reconsideration of its rulings. The Court subsequently vacated its earlier orders and granted in part and denied in part the Government's motion for reconsideration. The Government has not yet appealed that ruling. In 2004, the Court approved a revised application regarding this target that incorporated modifications consistent with the Court's prior order with respect to the motion for reconsideration.(2) In another case, the Court initially denied the application without prejudice. The Government presented amended orders to the Court later the same day, which the Court approved. Because the court eventually approved this application, it is in the 1724 total referenced above.
Given Toensing's description, it's clear why the President isn't attending to the legal niceties of FISA. It would make the Congress happy -- though not the Democrats and the ACLU; in their case, nothing would serve -- but he has the Constitutional authority to proceed sans warrant.
I'd think any reasonable person would do the same.
"....For example, al Qaeda agent X, having a phone under FISA foreign surveillance, travels from Pakistan to New York. The FBI checks airline records and determines he is returning to Pakistan in three hours. Background information must be prepared and the document delivered to the attorney general. By that time, agent X has done his business and is back on the plane to Pakistan, where NSA can resume its warrantless foreign surveillance. Because of the antiquated requirements of FISA, the surveillance of agent X has to cease only during the critical hours he is on U.S. soil, presumably planning the next attack...."
I'd like her to flesh that out a little more. Nothing that I've seen in the FISA statutes has a territorial implication. Unless she is saying that there is no law that pertains to surveilling a person who is outside of the US, but once they enter the US, they have some "protection."
I confess that I don't know what the law says about surveillance of Non-US citizens who are visiting the US.
Victoria's article brings up another point, and that is the burden that attaches to warrantless electronic surveillance. The substitute for a Court-approved warrant is authorization from one of a handful of high officials (those subject to Senate confirmation) in the executive administration, e.g., Attorney General. She seems to be arguing that THAT requirement is too onerous.
On a separate point in her piece, the "primary purpose" test is no longer in force.
Correct...superficially. Inasmuch as the evidence is more likely to be used to target an assassination or a foreign capture than in court.
But, should it come to that, the evidence would be allowed in court. The 4th amendment does not protect an American citizen (or resident) who is complicit in an act of treason. In that case, their rights of citizenship (and, thus, 4th amendment protection) are forfeit.
But, if the charge was a garden variety felony (drug-dealing, e.g.), the evidence would be disallowed.
And there are two critical points around this.
If the Bush Admin got tempted and used this power for warrantless survelliance that had nothing to do with a clear national security purpose, then they should get spanked.
On the other hand, if the Dems keep harping on a clear national security issue as they work to cover up the Barrett Report, all their claims of abuses of power by the Bush Admin will ring hollow and bite them in the arse.
So we'd better hope this power has not been abused. And I'm kinda scared about that, because certain elements on the right are tempted to abuse such powers for their own agendas that have nothing to do with national security.
You refer, I trust, to the Google subpoena -- which is outright snooping.
Gore has no one but himself to blame for not occupying the White House right now. If he had stood up to Clinton on the basis of principle, he'd likely be president today.
Critics like Al Gore and especially critics in Congress, rather than carp, should address the gaps created by a law that governs peacetime communications-monitoring but does not address computers, cell phones or fiber optics in the midst of war.
Oh, Gore has addressed this issue as well. He demanded that encryption keys have a backdoor for the government, for example, to deny criminals the ability to encrypt their information.
And that gets to a key point - the Clinton Admin treated terrorism as a criminal problem. And that was the key to their inability to both deal with terrorists when they had the chance to nab them and also their inability to properly assess the growing threat against this country.
Compare the difference - the Clinton Admin wrestled long and hard as to how they could prosecute bin Laden under criminal statutes.
Wheras the Bush Admin, if they did have a chance to nail bin Laden, would have just declared him to be an enemy combatant and locked him in the brig for perpetuity.
Even though the Dems fight such a concept. And the irony is, if they had embraced a narrow view of that concept, bin Laden would be rotting in a military brig right now.
Yeah, I HOPE TO HELL some nimrod didn't toss a request to NSA to run down a lead in a pet criminal case. And quite frankly, I don't trust the Bush Admin to resist that temptation. And that would bite them hard in the arse if any such thing did happen. So we'd better pray it didn't.
Considering the low importance the Toon admin gave national security, I'd love to know why the increase in requests the last five years of his administration. Can one FOIA the FISA requests, or will those records be off limits permanently?
I'd think off limits for a lifetime anyway, and maybe longer. The justification for secrecy is that the information is in the nature of "spying on foreign agents," and disclosure could be bigtime detrimental to foreign relations.
Some of the contents of the surveillance may emerge in the context of criminal prosecutions. In that venue, I suspect that any information that discloses "the nature of the FISA activity" would be submitted to the Court "in camera," and not see the light of day.
These were the first denials in the court's history. I also think we need to look at another point:
"The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation."
And, during a time when terrorists have killed 3,000 of our citizens and thouands more around the world and want to kill more:
"But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history."
Data from the UPI on this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547700/posts
We had a discussion earlier on this article:
Bush remains defiant on eavesdropping policy
If you want to read the article or see the thread and haven't:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1562200/posts?q=1&&page=1#1
Thanks for the detailed info. It will be interesting to see if the numbers change after Robertson resigned from the FISA court. It will also be interesting to see if he's implicated in Tice's leak of the NSA to the NY Time (sorry but I can't help be suspicious - -the timing may have been a coincidence, but I wonder).
Do all the rights and procedures described in the Constitution cease to apply in the case of a citizen being charged and tried for treason?
Thank your for your #14 thread. That is right on. Speed and the rapid response to the information if it is necessary can only be left to the President if we are to prevent terrorist attacks. Can't wait for a bunch of judges on FISA.
Probably helpful to have the precise wording in front of us...
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
My understanding, which may be in error, is that, in the case of treason, what was "unreasonable" can become "reasonable".
In other words, if warrantless surveillance should produce evidence that the subject is plotting to commit a treasonous act, the 4th amendment protection would not hold -- because it would constitute an unreasonable constraint. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact", e.g.
Aldrich Ames was convicted on evidence collected without a warrant, as I recall.
If I am in error, please correct me.
Fisa requests are a rubber stamp because only the slam dunk kind which the DOJ knows will be approved are submitted according to several articles I;ve read.
Kind of like how prosecutors don't prosecute cases they know aren't slam dunks because they don't want to ruin their batting average.
Remember the case of the other 9/11 pilot, Missoui (sp) who was found out by a local FBI office but they couldn't get DOJ to pursue it and get a warrant to get into his laptop?
Well, I was probing how far your previous statement extended. It asserts a more broad "loss of rights" than just the 4th. You said,
The 4th amendment does not protect an American citizen (or resident) who is complicit in an act of treason. In that case, their rights of citizenship (and, thus, 4th amendment protection) are forfeit.
"Rights of citizenship are forfeit." And you go on to note, correctly -IF- rights of citizenship are in fact forfeit, that the rights in the 4th amendment would be forfeit.
My understanding, which may be in error, is that, in the case of treason, what was "unreasonable" can become "reasonable".
There aren't many treason cases out there. Aaron Burr, John Brown, Anthony Cramer, the 1922 treason trials (Bill Blizzard), and Hans Max Haupt. I don't think any of those cases turned on the application of the 4th amendment. The evidence in each case came either from actions in public view, or testimony by other than agents of the government.
In other words, if warrantless surveillance should produce evidence that the subject is plotting to commit a treasonous act, the 4th amendment protection would not hold ...
I don't see how one gets there, under the law, but am open to an education. But at a glance, the logic seems a bit twisted -- citizens can't have their privacy invaded except on probable cause; but if the government surveils without probable cause and finds the citizen is a traitor, then the government surveillance without probable cause is excused because the person is no longer entitled to the protection of the constitution. I think the term is "bootstrapping" a conviction.
Aldrich Ames was convicted on evidence collected without a warrant, as I recall.
On April 28, 1994, Ames and his wife, Rosario, pled guilty to charges stemming from their espionage activities. Entered into the record at the time the pleas were made was an agreed-upon "Statement of Facts" which provided new details regarding the Ames's espionage activities. Meetings with the Soviets in Washington, D.C., Vienna, Bogota, and Caracas were acknowledged for the first time. Ames also acknowledged that as of May 1, 1989, he had been paid over $1.8 million by the KGB and that $900,000 more had been set aside for him.In a statement read to the court at the time the plea agreements were entered, Ames admitted having compromised "virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me" and having provided to the Soviet Union and to Russia a "huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies." Ames went on to say:
For those persons in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere who may have suffered from my actions, I have the deepest sympathy even empathy. We made similar choices and suffer similar consequences.As part of their plea agreements, both defendants agreed to cooperate fully with the government to explain the nature and extent of their espionage activities. Both signed agreements forfeiting the proceeds of their espionage activities to the U.S. Government. Ames was sentenced to life in prison, his wife later received 63 months in prison.
The above link has all sorts of fun reading in it. Seriously. It's part of the Senate Select Committee report that aimed to deconstruct the Ames incident, and recommend actions so that the CIA would not be compromised so badly in the future.
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