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Judge Royce C. Lamberth

Judge Lamberth received his appointment to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in November 1987. He was appointed Presiding Judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in May 1995 by Chief Justice Rehnquist. Judge Lamberth graduated from the University of Texas and from the University of Texas School of Law, receiving an LL.B. in 1967. He served as a Captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the United States Army from 1968 to 1974, including one year in Vietnam. After that, he became an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. In 1978, Judge Lamberth became Chief of the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, a position he held until his appointment to the federal bench.

Lamberth may not be the usual imbecile liberal (from his background he doesn't appear to be), but that just shows even more how foolish it is to allow lawyers and judges and civil standards to be in the driver's seat in the War on Terrorists. Even if Lamberth were 100% correct about any problems with FISA petitions (and I suspect he was just being needlessly bureaucratic and legalistic), only a few weeks, at most, should be permitted for any review and revision of procedures. The usual civilian bureaucratic standard of devoting a year (or many years) to revamping procedures is simply not acceptable when dealing with terrorists constantly striving to kill us. The fact that the investigations of the 1998 bombers and any new Al Qaeda leads were so greatly hampered by Lamberth's tantrum is simply UNACCEPTABLE, and it doesn't matter whether he was appointed by President Reagan or anyone else.

"NEWSWEEK has learned there was one other major complication as America headed into that threat-spiked summer. In Washington, Royce Lamberth, chief judge of the special federal court that reviews national-security wiretaps, erupted in anger when he found that an FBI official was misrepresenting petitions for taps on terror suspects. Lamberth prodded Ashcroft to launch an investigation, which reverberated throughout the bureau. From the summer of 2000 on into the following year, sources said, the FBI was forced to shut down wiretaps of Qaeda-related suspects connected to the 1998 African embassy bombing investigation. "It was a major problem," said one source familiar with the case, who estimated that 10 to 20 Qaeda wiretaps had to be shut down, as well as wiretaps into a separate New York investigation of Hamas. The effect was to stymie terror surveillance at exactly the moment it was needed most: requests from both Phoenix and Minneapolis for wiretaps were turned down."