Posted on 02/05/2006 5:16:31 AM PST by Alas Babylon!
The Talk Shows
Sunday, February 5th, 2006
Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows:
FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence; House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Boehner; Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.
FACE THE NATION (CBS): Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.
THIS WEEK (ABC): Gen. Michael Hayden; Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman.
LATE EDITION (CNN) : Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.; Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.; Afghan President Hamid Karzai; former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi; Prince Turki Al-Faisal, Saudi ambassador to the United States; Pittsburgh Mayor Bob O'Connor; Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels.
Geez - "Domestic" spying. When are they going to call it what it is - -Terrorist surveillance
Could go to FISA - haven't had any leaks.
How do we know that?? Convenient that Robertson resigned right after the NYT article on this came out.
Also, as I understand it, FISA is fine after you have info (e.g., proof as to why you need a warrant) it is not good for intelligence gathering.
Victoria Toensing: Why Bush had to override FISA
Source: WSJ (1-19-06)
[Ms. Toensing, a Washington lawyer, was chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration.]
In a speech this week, former vice president Al Gore took another swing at the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program, which monitors international communications when one party is affiliated with terrorists. Specifically, Mr. Gore argued that George Bush "has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently," and that such actions might constitute an impeachable offense. The question he raises is whether the president illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But the real issue is national security: FISA is as adept at detecting -- and, thus, preventing -- a terrorist attack as a horse-and-buggy is at getting us from New York to Paris.
I have extensive experience with the consequences of government bungling due to over-strict interpretations of FISA. As chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1981 to 1984, I participated in oversight of FISA in the first years after its passage. When I subsequently became deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, one of my responsibilities was the terrorism portfolio, which included working with FISA.
In 1985, I experienced the pain of terminating a FISA wiretap when to do so defied common sense and thwarted the possibility of gaining information about American hostages. During the TWA 847 hijacking, American serviceman Robert Stethem was murdered and the remaining American male passengers taken hostage. We had a previously placed tap in the U.S. and thought there was a possibility we could learn the hostages' location. But Justice Department career lawyers told me that the FISA statute defined its "primary purpose" as foreign intelligence gathering. Because crimes were taking place, the FBI had to shut down the wire.
FISA's "primary purpose" became the basis for the "wall" in 1995, when the Clinton-Gore Justice Department prohibited those on the intelligence side from even communicating with those doing law enforcement. The Patriot Act corrected this problem and the FISA appeals court upheld the constitutionality of that amendment, characterizing the rigid interpretation as "puzzling." The court cited an FBI agent's testimony that efforts to investigate two of the Sept. 11 hijackers were blocked by senior FBI officials, concerned about the FISA rule requiring separation.
Today, FISA remains ill-equipped to deal with ever-changing terrorist threats. It was never envisioned to be a speedy collector of information to prevent an imminent attack on our soil. And the reasons the president might decide to bypass FISA courts are readily understandable, as it is easy to conjure up scenarios like the TWA hijacking, where strict adherence to FISA would jeopardize American lives.
The overarching problem is that FISA, written in 1978, is technologically antediluvian. It was drafted by legislators who had no concept of how terrorists could communicate in the 21st century or the technology that would be invented to intercept those communications. The rules regulating the acquisition of foreign intelligence communications were drafted when the targets to be monitored had one telephone number per residence and all the phones were plugged into the wall. 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.
The NSA undoubtedly has identified many foreign phone numbers associated with al Qaeda. If these numbers are monitored only from outside the U.S., as consistent with FISA requirements, the agency cannot determine with certainty the location of the persons who are calling them, including whether they are in the U.S. New technology enables the president, via NSA, to establish an early-warning system to alert us immediately when any person located in the U.S. places a call to, or receives a call from, one of the al Qaeda numbers. Do Mr. Gore and congressional critics want the NSA to be unable to locate a secret al Qaeda operative in the U.S.?
If we had used this ability before 9/11, as the vice president has noted, we could have detected the presence of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego, more than a year before they crashed AA Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
And to correct an oft-cited misconception, there are no five-minute "emergency" taps. FISA still requires extensive time-consuming procedures. To prepare the two-to-three-inch thick applications for non-emergency warrants takes months. The so-called emergency procedure cannot be done in a few hours, let alone minutes. The attorney general is not going to approve even an emergency FISA intercept based on a breathless call from NSA.
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....
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/20706.html
Specter is really a Democrat at the end of the day.
But Bush supported Specter's re-election. They must have made a deal and Bush got the short end of the deal.
If I'm not mistaken, I think DOD was cut during Bush I as well. The Democrats were stampeeding to spend the so-called "peace dividend."
Well, he did say yes to reporters being witnesses. I have to give Specter good marks on that answer.
It's maddening but Bush has consistently supported every Republicvan incumbant.
Her complete absence is interesting, isn't it? Of course, his being one of the Keating 5 and past adultery plus his wife;s having a drug, forgery, and theft problems in the past do not bode well for his aspirations for the presidency. It's ironic, too, imo that he is making noise about Abramnoff et al.
My pleasure - I corrected the dates today I got them wrong mid week LOL
The Steelers have more National support than the Hawks.
There will be more Steeler fans in Detroit since it is closer to Pittsburgh too. This contest comes down to Big Ben and the Steel curtain's ability to stop the passing
game.
Specter says he believes that Roe v. Wade is secure in the culture of our country. They really do live in their own bubbles, don't they.
Timmy is getting on mine, too. Subpoena, subpoena, subpoena - when is his fat bum going to get a subpoena on the Plame case?
Wish someone would ask Timmy and Arlen about the wall and how FISA may have prevented some of the dots from being connected:
Did the FISA court Stop Us From Connecting the Dots?
American Thinker ^ | 01-03-06 | Teri O'Brien
Posted on 01/03/2006 10:50:39 AM PST by smoothsailing
Did the FISA court Stop Us From Connecting the Dots?
By Teri O'Brien
Jan. 3, 2006
Ever since the New York Times revealed the horrifying news that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to monitor both sides of conversations that involve known al Qaeda operatives, the usual chorus of carping critics has whined incessantly "Why didn't they just go to the FISA court?" They proceed to robotically recite a meaningless statistic, purporting to demonstrate that this super-secret court, authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, is a "rubber stamp."
For example, on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, January 1, 2006, the venerable William Safire said
"and I think what's happening now is that the—as a result of that scandal back in the '70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now, this court's a rubber-stamp court, let's face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses."
Ah, but there are "no's," and there are "no's," as I discovered while researching the post-9/11 history of the FISA court, and even more interesting, the media's reporting of it.
Consider the piece "What Went Wrong," by Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, May 27, 2002. Amid the predictable gratuitous jabs at John Ashcroft and attempts to rehabilitate the failures of the Clinton administration, we learn some reasons we may have failed to connect the dots, including the sickening revelation that the FBI ignored the now-famous Phoenix memorandum due to concerns about racial profiling. Then there's this very disturbing, and suddenly newly relevant, paragraph:
"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."
Just in case you missed that last sentence, please read it again. Better yet, memorize it and recite it to anyone who has the audacity in the days to come to ask "Why didn't President Bush just go to the FISA court?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1551183/posts
.....yeah and he just called Timmy's hand on misquoting him about Supreme Court nominations too.
Not a bad show IMO by Specter.
For sure snugs. Colorado and Montana are two really popular spots for stream fishermen.
I don't like it either, but it has insured a majority in the Senate. The last four years would have been a nightmare with a Dem majority or split 50/50. We are better off with the RINOs than with Dems in their place.
At least they vote with us sometimes and keep our parliamentary edge.
Umm that's correct.
Pat Roberts wrote a letter to Specter & likewise Pete Hokstra wrote a letter to Congressional Research Service (Kerry donor wrote the report) supporting President on NSA issue.
Thanks. I didn't see that....of course, the fact that it was reported in the India News Time and not the NYT is also interesting.
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