Carter allowed surveillance in 1977

Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies.

"Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign.

"And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act," he said.

The next day at Mrs. King's high-profile funeral, Mr. Carter evoked a comparison to the Bush policy when referring to the "secret government wiretapping" of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam.

The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men's rights.

In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons."

In 1976, after living in the United States for more than a decade, Vietnamese citizen David Truong met Dung Krall, a Vietnamese-American wife of an American Naval Officer who had many contacts among Vietnamese living in Paris. [FN473] Truong persuaded Krall to carry packages for him to the Vietnamese in Paris at the time of the 1977 Paris negotiations between North Vietnam and the United States. [FN474] The packages contained copies of U.S. diplomatic cables and other classified papers dealing with Southeast Asia. [FN475] Truong obtained the materials from Ronald Humphrey, an employee of the United States Information Agency, who *62 surreptitiously copied, removed classification markings, and delivered the stolen materials to Truong. [FN476] Humphrey later stated that his motive was to improve United States/North Vietnam relations so that he could be reunited with a woman imprisoned by the North Vietnamese government. [FN477]
Krall, however, was a CIA and FBI informant. [FN478] After the intelligence agencies first learned from Krall that Truong was transmitting classified documents to Paris, President Carter and Attorney General Bell authorized warrantless physical searches of the packages. [FN479] After presenting the packages Truong had given her to the FBI for inspection, copying and approval, Krall was permitted to carry the documents to Paris. [FN480] During this time the FBI monitored Truong and Humphrey closely, from approximately September, 1976, until January 31, 1978. [FN481]
The package searches led to the secret installation of closed-circuit television equipment in Humphrey's government office, the placement of a wiretap on Truong's telephone, and a microphone bugging device in Truong's apartment. [FN482] Truong's phone was tapped and his apartment was bugged from May 1977 to January 1978. [FN483] The telephone interception continued for 268 days; nearly every conversation was monitored and virtually all were taped. [FN484] The eavesdropping device was operative for approximately 255 days and it ran continuously. [FN485] The FBI never sought or obtained court authorization for the installation and maintenance of the telephone tap or the bug. [FN486]
After their indictment, Truong and Humphrey moved to suppress the evidence obtained by the government without a warrant. [FN487] Following the rationale of the decisions in Brown [FN488] and Butenko, [FN489] the District Court determined that because the surveillance was "for the *63 primary, or even sole, purpose of foreign intelligence gathering," [FN490] a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement applied. [FN491] On the basis of this standard, the Court upheld most of the electronic surveillance, but agreed to suppress a portion that had been collected after the investigation shifted its focus from intelligence gathering to criminal prosecution. [FN492]
The Court independently considered the constitutionality of the searches of packages Truong sent to Paris with Krall. [FN493] A letter and package searched with executive authorization but without a warrant before the date at which the surveillance became, in the Court's view, criminal in nature, were treated as governed by the foreign intelligence warrant exception. [FN494]
According to the court, another package, which was searched without executive authorization or a warrant, was not covered by the foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement, but was nonetheless constitutional because Truong had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the package. [FN495]
In sustaining the bulk of the surveillance, the Fourth Circuit agreed "that the Executive Branch need not always obtain a warrant for foreign intelligence surveillance" [FN496] where its primary purpose is to gather foreign intelligence: ...
EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY FOR NATIONAL SECURITY SURVEILLANCE, 50 Am. U. L. Rev. 1 (October 2000)

From IBD. Enjoy!:

Calling Jimmy Carter
Posted 2/9/2006

Freedom: Does a woman who accepts America's money to build democracy deserve 16 years in prison? Only to a brutal dictator. But that doesn't excuse Congress, NOW and Jimmy Carter for having nothing to say.

Right under the news radar, a politicized court is about to throw Venezuelan democracy campaigner Maria Corina Machado into prison for "treason." Her so-called crime: Accepting a $54,000 grant from U.S. Congress' National Endowment for Democracy.

If words mean anything, Machado's treason must have been a bid to overthrow Chavez or turn the nation over to the rule of another country, right? No, all she and three others did was inform citizens about their supposed rights under Chavez's own 1999 constitution.

For Chavez, that was a crime. So his prosecutor handed the one-man judge and jury his demand for the most draconian sentence ever imposed on a National Endowment for Democracy recipient anywhere in the world.

That's why the silence from our nation's Capitol is so strange. Is Congress admitting, right along with Chavez, that its open-books bipartisan democracy-building arm is an instrument of conspiracy?

Where now is Rep. Lynne Woolsey, fresh from hosting "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan, whose last whistle-stop was a Venezuelan foreign-ministry-sponsored trip to kiss Chavez in Caracas?

Or Rep. Bill Delahunt and Sens. Lincoln Chafee, Bill Nelson and Chris Dodd, all of whom have junketed to Caracas to be at the dictator's side and, like pull-string dolls, robotically repeat that he was "democratically elected."

Most are ignoring what Chavez is doing to democracy and people like Machado who try to put meaning behind his hollow claims. Some remain silent — so long as cheap heating-oil spoils from Chavez are passed along to constituents as political pork to them.

Meanwhile in Caracas, Machado has declined to flee the country and vowed to stay even in the face of a 16-year prison sentence.

That, however, won't stop the National Organization for Women from making an appreciative pilgrimage to Venezuela next month along with Sheehan's pals at Global Exchange.

NOW's concern about women's rights means little if Machado is in jail. It means even less, given the sexually harassing ads that have run on Chavez's state TV depicting Machado as a "bobblehead" who takes raining dollar bills from a cartoon Statue of Liberty.

But hey, if Chavez's barrage of sexual dirty talk last year against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice didn't annoy NOW, why will this?

More morally bankrupt silence comes from ex-President Carter. Never at a loss for public words, he's famous for certifying Venezuela's 2004 recall referendum — what Chavez now calls treason — as "free and fair."

Carter has put his stamp of approval on the way Chavez runs his voting operations, but he has nothing to say about the dictator's vengeance on those who organized the petition to recall him.

Carter worked with Machado in his 2004 observation mission. His Carter Center election-monitoring outfit claims to be an independent civil society organization affiliated with other independent civil society organizations — at least until they're clapped into prison by dictators.

The sham of it is that Chavez has tried to convince us — using the words of Congress, NOW and Carter — that he's as much a democrat as we are. Getting them to say this means something to him.

We know now, however, that such imprimaturs come cheap. What comes with a price in Venezuela today is standing up for real democracy.

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