Posted on 02/05/2006 5:19:32 PM PST by West Coast Conservative
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program appears to be illegal.
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Specter called the administration's legal reasoning "strained and unrealistic" and said the program appears to be "in flat violation" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Hearings into the surveillance program are scheduled to begin Monday on Capitol Hill.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency, defended the surveillance on ABC's "This Week" and the Fox News Network, the International Herald Tribune reported.
"It's about speed," General Hayden said in his ABC appearance. "It's about hot pursuit of al-Qaida communications."
The Bush administration says the surveillance has been carefully monitored and targeted at individuals with known or strongly suspected terrorist ties. But officials have also given different estimates of the amount of monitoring.
Wow Specter is judge and jury...what a PUTZ! No good deed goes unpunished Geroge. Try to save an abortion-lover and you;ll get nothing but trouble!!
Let's say the President loses ~ then the burden of dealing with AlQaida links in the United States falls back on "the people", and I'll guarantee you that "the people" will not be as surgical or careful as the Executive.
The waging of a civil war in this country while we are trying to smash world terrorism really isn't as desirable an outcome as the Democrats think.
He's the gift that keeps on giving...
One thing that had me boiling was that Specter and Russert both spoke of Carter's signing endorsement of the FISA bill, but not of the 1979 Executive Order allowing just the kind of surveillance which the Administration is conducting.
Exactly. They should all know better.
Arlen, who????
This RINO jackass is an ash heap unto himself.
"The President has to win. The battle isn't really between the Executive and Congress; it's between individual private citizens and their need for personal security against TERRORISTS WHO WANT TO KILL THEM and the Democratic party".
Well said...
For all I know the Clintons have him (and others) by the short hairs with a FBI file in front of their noses.
The nine hundred FBI files were not just selected at randon, I am sure.
Spectre has needed to go away for a long, long time.
Arlen has been aiding the Democrats for years but this is plain ridiculous.
This will get him center stage for the MSM talking shows and later, hearings....just what he is looking for.
Nah, never mind.
Thank you so much for the clarification of this article and for post 13 that accurately states what Specter said. It seems many in the media deliberately mislead the public for their own reasons. In an earlier post on FR today, many members complimented Brit Hume for being a reporter we could trust. Thank you for being that type 'poster'!
I don't like Specter but UPI took his comments out of context and left out some important info like the President had the authority as President to do this.
So President Bush monitors Al-qaida phone calls - And Senator Spectre was getting bent out og shape over the Philadelphia Eagles contract practices. Hmmmm
S.P.E.C.T.E.R. is a moron. Somebody needs to brief the idiot on 09-11-01 and then somebody needs to fill him in about America's War On Terror.
Specter is not a constitutional expert, in spite of what he thinks, and from what I have read the FISA law is not the basis of the administration's legal justification for the programs monitoring the terrorists electronic communications.
And yes, Presidential political support a Specter, as will also be true of Chafee, represents a type of grave political error that a sitting conservative President should not commit himself to.
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