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.
Please see posts 298 & 300 re the President's authority to conduct warrantless searches.
That's exactly right. Al Qaida cells inside the U.S. are a military incursion onto our soil. Their communications back to their overseas headquarters are fair game. It's really no different than if WWII German commandos had come ashore, and were calling back to Berlin. Enemy troops on our soil (as defined by those who contact and coordinate with enemy units abroad) are a military threat, and should be dealt with accordingly.
I guess the truth of the matter is that politics in the US today is nothing more than a competition for what kind of dictatorship we'll have - a left-wing one or a right-wing one.
http://newsbusters.org/node/3291
It is quite telling to note, that the New York Times and all the mainstream media that cried out thousands upon thousands of times demanding the identity of the person who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame are silent on the same demand for identity disclosure in the N.S.A. leak story.
"So why bypass such a system?"
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Are you for real?!
This entire thread started out with the article, which pointed out that the FISA court denied the warrants in quite a number of cases.
As the article, excerpt of which I posted in posts 298 & 300, said, the President HAS the authority in the first place, he doesn't need to go through FISA.
I thought the court was supposed to be "secret", not "isolated".
Your response sounds just like you're shooting for a position on the FISA court.
"US today is nothing more than a competition for what kind of dictatorship we'll have - a left-wing one or a right-wing one."
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There you go leaping to totally unwarranted conclusions.
The president HAS the authority to defend us against the enemy. It's WAR, in case you missed 9-11-01.
Read this article written by two attorneys who seerved in the Justice Dept.
Unwarranted complaints
David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey The New York Times
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/12/27/opinion/edcasey.php
The Constitution's framers did not vest absolute power in any branch of the federal government, including the courts, but they did create a strong executive and equipped the office with sufficient authority to act energetically to defend the national interest in wartime. That is what President Bush has done, and nothing more.
There hasn't been a single allegation that the requests were not reasonable.
"There hasn't been a single allegation that the requests were not reasonable."
That is exactly what denial of a warrant request is.
I have difficulty imagining a court denying a retroactive warrant in such a case. So why bypass such a system?
Because it has been politicized.
Do people here really understand what happened to the Weimar Republic? That even in emergency situations you can't give unlimited power to the executive for indefinite period of time? I guess I understand the power of fear in shaping emotions, but people really should look at history, especially the collapse of the Roman Republic or the Weimar Republic.
Did Hillary hire Craig Livingstone?
Did Hillary order the prosecution of the head of the White House Travel Office?We don't know that she did, but she's a suspect - and we know that she didn't substantively protest either. There is no reason to suppose that Hillary would confine herself to what she could reasonably expect courts to finally vindicate, any more than x42 did.
The FISA may have thought it's not reasonable, that doesn't mean it wasn't.
"Do people here really understand what happened to the Weimar Republic? That even in emergency situations you can't give unlimited power to the executive for indefinite period of time?"
Not a popular point of view these days.
On Monday, December 19, General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and now deputy director of national intelligence, briefed journalists. The back-and-forth included this exchange:
Reporter: Have you identified armed enemy combatants, through this program, in the United States?
Gen. Hayden: This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.
Reporter: General Hayden, I know you're not going to talk about specifics about that, and you say it's been successful. But would it have been as successful-can you unequivocally say that something has been stopped or there was an imminent attack or you got information through this that you could not have gotten through going to the court?
Gen. Hayden: I can say unequivocally, all right, that we have got information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.
And do people understand what a NUKE can do to a US city and the country?
I guess you don't think we should prevent it, if the only way is by wiretapping conversations of terrorists inside the US, right?
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