Posted on 12/27/2005 10:47:23 AM PST by Pragmatic_View
WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.
A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.
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.
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.
But he doesn't have unlimited or extra-Constitutional authority either. If the Framers wanted the President to have dictatorial powers during war they would have explictly put that in the Constitution. They didn't do that however. The Framers more than anyone understood the balance needed between the legitimate needs of government and individual liberty.
They wrote the Fifth Amendment requirement of indictment for example, even knowing that in some cases, conspirators could be tipped off by the simple fact that an investigation was occuring. They rightly believed this to be a better outcome that simply hauling people into court on flimsy evidence. Ditto for the Fourth Amendment - conspirators may be tipped off by a seach and destroy valuable evidence before the government gets to it - but the Framers thought this was a better outcome than giving the government the power to randomly enter your home.
"And do people understand what a NUKE can do to a US city and the country? "
Nuke, hell why stop there, I hear "they" are working on a modified Martian Discombobulator!! I'm scared, lets just disband congress, close the courts and hand control to the meanest looking general we can find. /sarc
Easy. You have two competing elements here that aren't designed to work with each other.
Judges, especially FISA judges, are not rubber stamps. They want to see probable cause, and are sticklers for detail. The process to put something before a FISA judge is very strict, time consuming, and will weed out anything that won't get approved.
Intelligence analysts, on the other hand, are in a perpetual race against the clock. Their targets are elusive, and evasive. They rarely leave enough of a footprint to be deemed 'probable cause'. Through pattern analysis a smart analyst can find needles in the haystack, but that requires being allowed to look.
To that end, the analysts don't care about prosecuting these guys, just stopping attacks. They only needs a quick peek. The law enforcement types might want to build a case, get a warrant, do some long term surveillance, and eventually prosecute. They may even determine that the analyst was wrong, and drop the case entirely.
The point is that law enforcement tools are not agile enough to defeat a military opponent. Nor should they be. We shouldn't expect the FISA judges to rubber stamp any request that gets sent their way, since that would allow FAR more than the quick peek the analysts need. On the other hand, letting the intelligence side of the house have some flexibility to screen for potential threats should be seen for what it is: a sensible precaution against a known foreign adversary that has advanced into our territory, and who hides behind laws that weren't designed to protect him.
Thank God! that George W. Bush was elected and re-elected. I sure wouldn't want to be living in any major parasite nest, er, city, if a scumbag Democrat gets elected. Whew!
On the other hand, if a scumbag Democrat gets elected, it will mainly be thanks to the voters of the major parasite nests, er, cities. In which case they can get what they deserve.
(As long as the winds don't bring too much fallout my way.)
Are there any lines that you would draw? Concentration camps for Arab muslims in the US? Genocide? Even if that were the only way to prevent a nuke attack? Looking at the cases of the London subway shooting and the Miami plane shooting, do you think that the government gets it right all the time? That everyone that the administration labels a terrorist is one? Is this situation made better or worse by lack of political or judicial oversight?
Freeper Arizona Carolyn found this:
Judge Lamberth, who sits on the FISA court, has ties to islamic extremists and rejected many FBI warrant requests, prior to 9/11.
FBI whistleblowers specifically mentioned him to Attorney General Ashcroft right after 9/11.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547743/posts?page=34#34
These of course are the same analysts that concluded Iraq had stockpiles of WMD.
Ah, chock up another consequence of the Liberal Death Wish.
This tidbit from the article I linked to above is interesting.
Ahhhhhhhhhhh, this gives me cold chills.
I remember Judge Lamberth from the clinton scandal's.
Thanks Peach for the link. Bookmarked for closer study.
This isn't a conventional war - there is no army to defeat, no enemy capital to overrun. Secondly, the Framers did not give the President dictatorial powers - only the power over the use of the military in conduct of the war as is explictly stated in the Constitution. And the framers again were people who didn't even want a standing army. He has no authority to spy on private citizens contrary to judicial oversight. He cannot write laws without Congress. He can, with the consent of Congress, suspend habeus corpus.
This makes no sense - has the MSM lost its collective mind? Can they no longer tell the truth at all? They 1st line is contradicted in the 3rd paragraph.
Boy I sure hope you are correct, because the loony left is getting shriller every day.
Well, you maybe right or the President maybe right but when questions arise about right or wrong we use case law and for that reason, the President is right. I don't think it's a case of the President writing the laws but a case of interpreting the laws and Constitutional Obligations.
From everything I have read on this subject, you are sooooo correct. If nothing else is operative, he has the Constitutional authority as Commander In Chief to do whatever is necessary to wage a war. Thought that is what we were doing after 911? Didn't Bush throw out the old Clintoon model of "police action" and actually wage a war on terror?
You're welcome. Try to remember to ping me if you see anything more about this matter. Thanks!
One would bypass such a system if one had reason to believe that one or more of the judges were passing information to enemies of this country.
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