Posted on 02/08/2006 8:14:28 PM PST by frankjr
Are you really that angry? Anyway, a visit to a shrink or a hemorrhoid shrinker is out, I'm afraid. I have no medical insurance.
Thanks .. I missed it the first time
but my point still stands ... we will be hit again .. because these nit wits are too busy protecting the terrorists who want to murder us
I've have had it .. these people make me sick
Are these judges all playing musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic? Can you imagine during WWII if Nazis in Germany were calling people inside the United States? Would anyone not use that information to protect the country? This is all very bizarre.
Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court's probable-cause requirement, government officials said.
So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.
Pass it on.
Specifically, the defendants seek to review the warrant applications the FBI submitted to the FISA Court, on the basis of which the warrants were granted. Pursuant to the warrants, the FBI secretly wiretapped the suspects' phones and planted microphones in their homes. As a result of its surveillance, the FBI ended up intercepting more than 271 conversations.
Without knowing the basis for the warrants, the defendants contend, they cannot know if their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures were abridged. The judge ruled, however, that the basis for the warrants will remain secret.
Bush has been quiet on one of the main problems with FISA.
Under FISA you need so many top administration officials to sign off on it and the attorney general to personally go down to the court for a warrant.
How can you fight a war when the intelligence agents in the field need to be worried if they are making the right decision by having to bother the attorney general each time they want to listen to a conservation from overseas from a terrorist to the u.s.
Also the terrorist survallience program allows you to not have to meet a very high threshold like fisa.
Judges shouldn't be fighting wars. In 2000 a judge stopped clinton from getting warrants and clinton agreed.
The FISA judges suck.
I have read of only one FISA judge that said this is a war.
We are back to pre 9/11 thinking with clinton with these judges.
Remember Clinton said it was a legal not military matter.
This lead makes it clear why Pres. Bush decided NSA shouldn't use FISA warrants. And is this cited lawyer a holdover?
"Add to this the recent report that three weeks prior to 9-11, FBI headquarters refused the Minneapolis field office’s FISA petition to look at the contents of Moussaoui’s computer and notebook, which has been blamed in part by whistleblower Coleen Rowley on the “climate of fear” already then in place – a “climate” which had been created by Judge Lamberth’s earlier shut down of the Al Qaeda-linked Africa embassy bombing wiretaps."
"The lead FBI investigator of those very Al Qaeda-linked 1998 African embassy bombings that Judge Lamberth shut down “up to 20” FISA taps regarding (as well as a lead investigator of the U.S.S. Cole attack), John O’Neill, publicly resigned in protest from the FBI claiming that his investigation was being blocked and sabotaged – we now know at least in part due to Judge Lamberth’s actions."
"Only two weeks before 9-11, this same John O’Neill became Director of Security for the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, where he died in the attack on 9-11.”
A Free Republic thread from Dec. 27, 2005 here.
My concern has always been that some of the leaks were coming from the FISA court itself. I note that shortly after this story broke one of the judges resigned "in protest." Now if he was so concerned about this program (which it is obvious the FISA court knew about given the information in this story) then why did he wait to resign until after the story broke? I smell something fishy.
IF one or two people on FISA were security riskes, then the use of the NSA wiretap makes all the more sense. And it would not be possible for the President to say WHY he is using this other program, since an accusation of leaks from the court would cause a nine days wonder in the press, Congress would insist on "investigating," and we would probably end up with even MORE leaks.
I also note Schumer's comment to O'Reilly this evening supporting this program. I think that is an indicator that the polls (especially in New York) are showing this to be a losing issue. It could also mean that Schumer has realized that if they continue down this path, there will be some democrats arrested.
I am quite fearful for the 2008 elections. Whoever is nominated will receive a treatment 10 times worse than the President has received. The left has gotten so desperate they will do and say just about anything in order to regain power. I note that they are trying to stop Allen by running Webb against him for the Senate, and that Haley Barbour has already taken himself out of the race.
That may be, but he was still dead wrong when he "expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal".
"However, because of the President's constitutional duty to act for the United States in the field of foreign relations, and his inherent power to protect national security in the context of foreign affairs, we reaffirm what we held in United States v. Clay, supra, that the President may constitutionally authorize warrantless wiretaps for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence."
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"We agree with the district court that the Executive Branch need not always obtain a warrant for foreign intelligence surveillance."
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"Prior to the enactment of FISA, virtually every court that had addressed the issue had concluded that the President had the inherent power to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance to collect foreign intelligence information, and that such surveillances constituted an exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment."
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"The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent [constitutional] authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information."
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bttt
Huh? The article says that Kollar-Kotelly has repeatedly declined to comment. She's most certainly not acknowledging that the "court was making it harder to obtain warrants". Did you not read the whole article?
Several FISA judges said they also remain puzzled by Bush's assertion that the court was not "agile" or "nimble" enough to help catch terrorists. The court had routinely approved emergency wiretaps 72 hours after they had begun, as FISA allows, and the court's actions in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks suggested that its judges were hardly unsympathetic to the needs of their nation at war.[On Sept. 12] Mueller and Justice officials went to Lamberth, who agreed that day to expedited procedures to issue FISA warrants for eavesdropping, a government official said.
The requirement for detailed paperwork was greatly eased, allowing the NSA to begin eavesdropping the next day on anyone suspected of a link to al Qaeda, every person who had ever been a member or supporter of militant Islamic groups, and everyone ever linked to a terrorist watch list in the United States or abroad, the official said.
Thats good news!
LOL thank you for the reply..
That's the way I understand it.
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