Free Republic

The Obama Administration this week released its predecessor's post-9/11 legal memoranda in the name of "transparency," producing another round of feel-good Bush criticism. Anyone interested in President Obama's actual executive-power policies, however, should look at his position on warrantless wiretapping. Dick Cheney must be smiling. In a federal lawsuit, the Obama legal team is arguing that judges lack the authority to enforce their own rulings in classified matters of national security. The standoff concerns the Oregon chapter of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity that was shut down in 2004 on evidence that it was financing al Qaeda....

The Obama DOJ's embrace of Bush's state secrets privilege in the Jeppesen (torture/rendition) case generated substantial outrage, and rightly so. But it's now safe to say that far worse is the Obama DOJ's conduct in the Al-Haramain case -- the only remaining case against the Government with any real chance of resulting in a judicial ruling on the legality of Bush's NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. Here's the first paragraph from the Wired report on Friday's appellate ruling, which refused the Obama DOJ's request to block a federal court from considering key evidence when deciding whether Bush broke the law in...

A special appeals court for the first time has upheld a Bush administration program of warrantless surveillance. In a ruling released Thursday, the court embraced the Protect America Act of 2007, which required telecommunications providers to assist the government for national security purposes in intercepting international phone calls and e-mails to and from points overseas. The decision, which involves the gathering of foreign intelligence, was made last August but only released Thursday after it had been edited to omit classified information. An unidentified telecommunications company had challenged the law. The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review said the time...

Ever since the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program was exposed in 2005, critics have denounced it as illegal and unconstitutional. Those allegations rested solely on the fact that the Administration did not first get permission from the special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Well, as it happens, the same FISA court would beg to differ. In a major August 2008 decision released yesterday in redacted form, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, the FISA appellate panel, affirmed the government's Constitutional authority to collect national-security intelligence without judicial approval. -excerpt- For all the political hysteria and...

Anyone who has ever entered the United States after traveling abroad knows that the federal government does not always need a warrant to conduct a reasonable search of a person’s belongings. The federal government has a myriad of interests, including national security, that outweigh a person’s right to privacy at the border (which if you’re flying from Cancun to St.Louis, includes the St. Louis airport). Following that same logic, the government also has an interest in monitoring international communications between persons inside the United States and persons abroad.

Secret FISA Court Approves Specific Application of Expired Law For Warrantless Wiretapping The FISA Court of Review (FISCR) today released a public version of an opinion concerning warrantless wiretapping. An unnamed telecommunications carrier stood up for its customers' privacy by fighting the case through an initial decision by a FISA court and the appeal to the FISCR. The Court approved the specific application of the expired Protect America Act (PAA) and expressly rejected arguments that the law was unconstitutionally applied in the case before it. What does that mean for cases in the public, nonsecret courts challenging dragnet surveillance? Legally:...

Your inaccurate swipe at my record ("President Gulliver's Lawyer," Review & Outlook, Jan. 10) demands a response. First, the March 1995 memo I wrote about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act did not set policy for the Justice Department. It resolved a particular problem in the WorId Trade Center bombing case, which was that the U.S. Attorney wanted to use a FISA warrant to tap individuals who had already been the subject of criminal wiretaps -- something that had never been done before and which the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy feared the FISA court would not permit. I was...

A U.S. Foreign Intelligence court released a ruling Thursday upholding the right of the president and Congress to wiretap private international phone conversations and intercept e-mail messages without a court-issued warrant. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Appeals Court released an unclassified version of an August 2008 ruling that seems to validate President George W. Bush's claim that the government can act without court orders in gathering foreign intelligence. The Bush administration came under heated criticism three years ago when a National Security Agency's program for warrantless eavesdropping was revealed. In 2007, Congress passed the Protect America Act, which authorized the executive...

WASHINGTON — A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.

In between meaningful football games yesterday, I saw clips of Vice President Cheney with Chris Wallace and read some comments on the interview. Frequent readers of my blog understands that I am far from a Bush / Cheney apologist. In fact, I am pretty close to a non-entity in conservative Republican circles because of my early public support for Obama last January. However, in this case, I have to agree with the Vice President (almost) in his opinion that the Congress is equally culpable in both the breach of civil liberties but also the Constitutional idea of checks and balances....

Dick Cheney's interview yesterday with Fox's Chris Wallace was filled with significant claims, but certainly among the most significant was his detailed narration of how the administration, and Cheney personally, told numerous Democratic Congressional leaders -- repeatedly and in detail -- about the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. And, according to Cheney, every one of those Democrats -- every last one -- not only urged its continuation, but insisted that it be kept secret: WALLACE: Let's drill down into some of the specific measures that you pushed — first of all, the warrantless surveillance on a massive scale, without telling the...

Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program.... The Center for Constitutional Rights plans to sue on behalf of four lawyers at the center and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,... Similarly, the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit include five Americans who work in international policy and terrorism, along with the A.C.L.U. and three other groups.... One of the A.C.L.U. plaintiffs, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, ... Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist...

Since your historic victory in the primary, there have been troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign, toward a more cautious and centrist stance--including, most notably, your vote for the FISA legislation granting telecom companies immunity from prosecution for illegal wiretapping, which angered and dismayed so many of your supporters.

The online activists are angry with Barack Obama. But only a bit IT WAS summer and it was Austin, where keeping things weird is a popular civic pastime. But for the 2,000 bloggers and readers at last weekend’s Netroots Nation, the mood was more wonkish than wild. The “netroots”—the online version of “grassroots” political activists—spent hours in panels on policy and technology, and kept up running analyses via blogs and Twitter. They allowed themselves to be plied with margaritas of an evening, but made it back for a morning question session with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of...

The Dark Knight has no use for FISA By Sharon McGovern This is not a review, though I submit The Dark Knight kicks a** so very hard. Instead, this will be a brief look at themes employed in TDK; a sequel to Batman is a NeoCon. If you haven’t already contributed to the movie’s astonishing opening weekend take, you might want to decide right now if you want to read something that gives away a number of its plot points. The Dark Knight begins with “the bat man” having become a fixture in Gotham. He inspires resentment for the toll...

If we had no armed central state to seize money from people against their will and fund the government schools, we'd have no tax-funded government schools. Which means your public school teacher had a fatal conflict of interest when he or she taught you "why we need to have a central state, with the power to shoot or jail people who don't pay up." I'll bet he or she never mentioned, as one of the reasons, "Because otherwise my paychecks would stop coming." Be deeply suspicious therefore of most of the reasons you've been given for "why we need a...

Ship sponsored in part by Carter Center to challenge Israeli blockade of Gaza Port http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=39984 "Free Gaza" initiative to try and enter Gaza by sea and open port Date: 19 / 07 / 2008 Time: 14:58 www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=30657 Bethlehem - Ma'an - A small shipping vessel will set sail for Gaza from Cyprus on 5 August expecting to be illegally detained as it enters Gazan waters. The waters off the Gaza Strip are patrolled by Israeli naval vessels, and Israel enforces a "Fishing Limit" that is 6 nautical miles (11.1 km) from the Gaza shore. These restrictions on access and borders...

Thursday, July 17, 2008 The Real Reasons: Things are not always what they appear to be.....particularly in Washington. Sometimes, the real reason that a bill is changed, or shelved, or amended is not what the spin and press reports say. Two such instances have occurred here recently. The first has to do with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which was finally passed by the Senate and was signed into law by President Bush last week. This bill has been held up in negotiations and partisan fighting all year. Most people believe that the hold up was because civil libertarians...

Obama, FISA and My Revised Thinking By Nathan Donarum - June 22, 2008, 2:08AM I originally wrote this as a response to Pangaea's post. He quoted my original post concerning the FISA bill. I thought it deserved its own post to clear some things up, and clear up the air. I wrote to Senator Obama and said it was "inexcusable" that he would vote for such a bill. I have had time to think, ruminate, read and research since then, and here I present my revised thoughts concerning this. Do I believe it inexcusable for Obama to vote for the...

Hey, it's politics. In the primary, when Barack Obama wanted to connect with his party's disaffected left, he said that he would support a filibuster to stop a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if it granted retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the federal government after the 9/11 attacks. Now Obama has those voters in the bag. So he is reaching out to the majority of Americans who want aggressive international surveillance to prevent another terrorist attack. And the average voter certainly isn't going to lose sleep if the price of that security is that...