Jan 15 2009
Finally! Top Federal Court Vindicates Bush On FISA-NSA
Final Comment: A lot of delusional liberals keep trying to claim this ruling means little. It is quite hilarious to watch a lot of people with law degrees miss the major points of the case. They seem to think if they ignore the main thrust on focus on irrelevant details there is an argument to keep this conspiracy theory alive.
First off, this is not a ruling in isolation, it is part of a series of rulings regarding the President’s rights to engage in intelligence gathering on people overseas without a warrant. By re-establishing this Presidential power it means anyone swept up in these actions is as much fair game as any non-warranted person who is caught on a warranted wire tap. This is the difference between a TARGET of the investigation and the CONTACTS that communicates with the TARGET, and who have their communications with the TARGET snooped on by the Feds. The only difference is whether a warrant is required, not that CONTACTS don’t get caught on wire taps.
Additionally, while the authority under which these intelligence actions took place have changed from executive orders to temporary legislation to permanent legislation – the actions have not changed. The Feds are still using communications between Americans and known terrorists to ensure the safety of this nation. Over the years the process and paperwork has of course been tweaked. And once leaked to the public, the restriction on only the Chief FIS Court judge knowing which cases were the result of NSA intercepts verses FBI warrants was clearly not needed anymore. But the basic act of using the information intercepted to investigate threats inside our borders – the changes Bush directed – has not changed under any of the various legal authorities set in place.
Even further, the legislation making these acts legal as executed under the executive order, was the legislature’s signature that this was allowed. They removed debate by codifying the executive orders – they did not once overturn them. And with a series of judicial stamps of approval there is a common federal voice across the three branches on this matter. This is a mountain of precedence and law and decisions. How blind by denial must one be to miss this?
So no matter what legal instrument was used, the acts are now deemed legal. If legal under the temporary legislation it is legal under the permanent laws. And since the decision re-affirms the right to do foreign intelligence gathering without a court warrant (as do both sets of laws), the actions under executive order are also legal. It is not the laws that count, it is the fact the laws all assume, and the decision confirms, the President doesn’t require a warrant to gather intel on foreign threats, even if people in America and US citizens get swept up in it.Â
The threat of attack, as agreed to by people other than the President, gives the executive branch the power to retain the information they capture and pass it to the FBI. And that is the big change since 9-11: we don’t throw known leads away and not tell the FBI whom and where to look for threats. Only an idiot with a law degree could rationalize going back to that model of protecting the people of the United States from foreign attack.
It is nice to know a lowly space engineer with a biology degree is still sharper than a bunch of over payed liberal lawyers. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Major Update: For all the liberals in denial out there the WSJ has a great round up of the mountain of rulings that preceded this landmark vindication. Denial is not an excuse anymore. – end update
 
The NY Times allowed a liberal, disgruntled DoJ employee to expose one of our nation’s most valuable defensive programs against terrorist attack based on the man’s ignorance of the facts. I recently wrote about the traitor Thomas Tamm – who should be indicted and thrown in jail for pretending (a) to be more powerful than our laws or the commander-in-chief and (b) for exposing national security secrets based on fantasies in his head that bore no resemblance to the truth of the matter. He is a modern day Benedict Arnold.
And the NY Times should be punished for running this false crap as fact. Tamm had no clue what the program was about, and no idea that the FIS Court Chief Judge was supporting the new processes put in place after 9-11. Processes that are critical to saving American lives. Processes which replaced dangerously muddled thinking from the late 1970’s, where some in our government knew that someone in the US was in contact with known terrorists out to kill us, but they were not allowed to tell the FBI so they could go investigate and see how bad or real the danger was! No, couldn’t have that.
Well now the top intelligence court of the land has come out with an opinion vindicating Bush and settling once and for all how insane the lunatic left is when it comes to national security.
A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, issued a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a specific court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved.
…
The Aug. 22 appeals court decision upheld a secret ruling issued last year by the intelligence court that it oversees, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or FISA, court. In that initial opinion, the secret court found that Congress had acted within its authority in August 2007 when it passed a hotly debated law known as the Protect America Act, which gave the executive branch broad power to eavesdrop on international communications.
“The Department of Justice is pleased with this important ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which upholds the constitutionality of foreign intelligence surveillance conducted under the Protect America Act of 2007,†a Justice Department statement said.
The FIS Court of Review is the top court in the land on such matters. Think of it as the Appellate/Supreme Court on national security matters. There is no higher authority in the federal court system.Â
All those moans and groans about the 4th Amendment and Bush spying on Americans was a bunch fantasy fiction. And now the court has made it unanimous, all three branches of government have supported the changes. Maybe now the NY Times and all those nuts on the left can finally eat their crow – they have a lot of it to shovel down.
I have followed this story from the day it broke (you can find my numerous posts on the matter here) and was one of the first one to realize the NY Times lied. It lied about Bush bypassing the court (the FIS Court judge who also exposed national secrets on this matter was mad that the NSA leads were being heard at the court, not that they were going around the court). It lied about the essence of the program. It lied about the entire matter – an won journalism awards for their garbage.
They lied and risked the lives of all Americans by tipping of our enemies about how we were detecting their forces as they tried to get into the country and to their targets. These people filled their heads with righteous fantasies of themselves as heros and could have easily killed thousands of people if the news had broken at the wrong time.
Bush leaves office vindicated, and the Mad-Hatter left has destroyed what little credibility they have left. They are lucky that is all their insane actions resulted in.
Update: Here is the opinion itself.
I was getting ready to write up a long explanation about how wrong almost everything above is, but luckily somebody else (with more knowledge of the law than myself) already did:
“The new ruling — at least based on Lichtblau’s reporting (it hasn’t been made public yet) — has absolutely nothing to do with whether President Bush had the authority to order the very eavesdropping which FISA prohibited. The ruling has nothing to do with whether the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was legal notwithstanding a Congressional statute that criminalized those activities. The ruling has nothing to do with the scope of executive power or the ability of a President to act in violation of Congressional statutes. And, contrary to Lichtblau’s suggestion, it certainly has nothing to do with the constitutionality of telecom immunity, which is currently being challenged in the telecom lawsuits.
Instead, the FISA court appears (again, based on Lichtblau’s description) to have addressed a very narrow (though important) question: namely, whether the warrantless eavesdropping powers authorized by Congress in 2007 when it enacted the Protect America Act are constitutional under the Fourth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1972 Keith case, held that the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless eavesdropping on Americans’ communications for domestic terrorism investigations, but explicitly left unresolved the question of whether such eavesdropping would be constitutionally permissible for international terrorism investigations. The FISA court presumably said that Congress — not the President, but Congress — is constitutionally permitted to authorize such eavesdropping, as it did when it passed the Protect America Act, though it’s likely a question the Supreme Court will ultimately decide.
None of that changes, nor even relates to, the fact that the Bush administration authorized and conducted warrantless eavesdropping for years while the law was crystal clear that anyone engaging in such activities was committing felonies. That’s a fact that is never going to change.”
Guy,
You are absolutely correct and it was actually easier to find the explanation than you thought. It is contained in the very same article that AJ linked to above:
“The opinion did not directly rule on the legality of the once-secret operation authorized by President Bush between October 2001 and early 2007, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international communications of Americans suspected of ties to terrorists. The disclosure of the program’s existence in The New York Times in December 2005 set off a national debate on wiretapping, privacy and the limits of presidential power. Critics charged that Mr. Bush had violated a 1978 law requiring that the government obtain a court order to listen in on Americans’ communications.”
AJ, you really ought to actually read the articles you link to rather than merely reading the headline and assuming that it supports your preconcieved notions. I know you have been busy of late, but that is pretty sloppy investigative work.
Conman,
You clearly do not understand how the law works.
Let me help your challenged mind. If it WAS illegal wouldn’t the court have ruled for the petitioner?
What – you didn’t read the ruling but simply read the NY Times try and cover up for its mistake? Was it too hard for you to read? The ruling is clear – the acts were legal
LOL! You are a fool’s fool Conman.
Actually, if Guy had ‘read’ the ruling too he would find out how wrong he was about the Keith case. too.
The foolish blind leading the foolish blind. Remember laddies – Darwin was right!
We’ll undoubtedly be treated to thorough coverage of this decision by MSNBC and CNN.
AJ
what’s so funny to me is that Conguy and GuyF are the first of the blind out of the chute.
Their modus operandi…..
1. see your post
2. assume you don’t know what you are writing about
3. skim the post, looking for something they disagree with.
4. find they disagree with everything they skim.
5. Hastily write a comment without ‘thinking’ about what they are saying.
6. Claim you are wrong about ‘everything’
7. Provide links to loonies.
8. Wait for the rebuttals.
9. Realize they looked stupid (as usual)
10. Write followup comments trying to cover their A*s.
11. Don’t realize they didn’t help their case, at all.
repeat steps 1-11, repeatedly.
Hey, these are Judges and they are always right.. aren’t they?
I hear that Obama has already decided to keep the program in place as well. After all, he got all the mileage he could out of pretending he did not support it. The lefties sent him their money and lined up to vote for him.
suckers.
Redteam:
Very true.
AJ,
I hate to tell you, but you have no idea what you are talking about. I am a lawyer, so I do understand how the law works and clearly understand it better than you. Let me try and simplify it for you so you can understand. I then suggest that you read the opinion carefully to confirm what I’m about to explain to you so you don’t say anything else that makes it obvious you don’t understand these issues.
The Court’s decision is limited to the question of the constitutionality of the 2007 Protect America Act (PAA). It was brought by a telecommunication company who was order to produce information pursuant to the PAA and refused to on the grounds that the PAA was unconstitutional. The Court’s decision rejects that argument and concludes that the PAA is constitutional. That is the only issue the Court’s decision decided.
The Court’s decision is limited to the 2007 PAA – it did not consider any NSA activity or NSA program implemented by Bush prior to Congress’ adoption of the PAA 2007. In fact, the Court couldn’t consider the legality of any other NSA program that preceded the 2007 PAA because it had no jurisdiction to consider other issues that were not presented in the petition to the Court. The NY times article and the Tamm disclosure all related to the NSA program that preceded the 2007 PAA. We don’t know the full extent of the NSA program in place before 2007 because it is secret, but we do know that the entire senior leadership of the DOJ and FBI were prepared to resign over Bush’s insistance that a part of this program continue despite objections from DOJ.
I know judicial opinions can be complicated, lengthy and cumbersome to read, but they are written in plain English. It is right there in the first page of the opinion.
Conguy:
I hate to tell you, but you have no idea what you are talking about. I am a lawyer, so I do understand how the law works and clearly understand it better than you
OMG, a lawyer, now we all know for sure you don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about.
Most lawyers are libs and are only in the business of making money, for themselves.
You’re really stretching when you pull out the ‘I’m a lawyer’, that’s usually the last thing a lawyer wants you to know about them, they can have a little credibility up to that point, then it’s all downhill.
you’ve heard the joke haven’t you?
what do you call 100 lawyers on the bottom of the ocean? a good start.
They’re all members of the shyster class.
conguy, I re-read the original post and GuyF and your rebuttals. AJ was 100% correct in his interpretation. you and guyf don’t have a clue. better stick with your day job, your nightime job must be imitating a lawyer.
The court said:
“A foreign intelligence exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement exists when the surveillance is conducted to obtain foreign intelligence for national security purposes and is directed against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers reasonably believed to be located outside the United states.”
Maybe earlier legal opinions also took this postion about the Fourth Amendment.
I wonder why the court is now publishing its decision and revealing what is permitted.
If the decision were secret, the terrorists would be more in the dark about what we can do legally to track them.
RedTeam:
“conguy, I re-read the original post and GuyF and your rebuttals. AJ was 100% correct in his interpretation. you and guyf don’t have a clue.”
Oh – well gosh, that certainly settles it. Your complete lack of explanation, facts, or examples of where conman or I was wrong has certainly convinced me!
But wait… oh, I re-read the original post and the two rebuttals, and I have come to the conclusion that we were right and AJ was wrong! So there, smart guy! Top *that*!
You see, guy/con, our guy kept us safe and has LEGAL OPINIONS (from lawyers!!!) that support his doing so…not to mention just pure common sense void of liberal guilt and neurosis.
Your guys DID NOT KEEP US safe. In fact, liberal policies are toxic to freedom loving people.
And for the record, I want to be more like George W. Bush…
NEVER LIKE THE LIBERAL LEFTIST RADICALS. EVER.
ivehadit:
“And for the record, I want to be more like George W. Bush.”
Well, you do have the “complete detachment from reality” part down pat. So, you seem to be well on your way. Congrats.
More people died from terrorist attacks on American soil during Bush’s term than all other Presidents combined. How is that “safe”?
AJ-
Why do you think the court is publicizing this now?
Guy wrote:
“The Bush administration authorized and conducted warrantless eavesdropping for years while the law was crystal clear that anyone engaging in such activities was committing felonies.”
Are parts of these wiretap laws classified?
Maybe this same interpretation of the Fourth Amendment also applied under the old law.
I was completely wrong. I thought that once the president had a “D” after his name anything he wants to do is fine. Obama says he will continue this program. Conguy and Guyf need to get on the stick. What’s the matter? Didn’t they get their memo of the day? Or did they just not check their e-mails? They will probably change their spiel after Tuesday. The only reason all these liberal nuts opposed the wiretaps was to hamstring Bush. They didn’t care that they were endangering the peole of this country as long as they could trash Bush.
Funny that this is reported less than a week before Obama’s inauguration. Can’t let the One assume office with this issue up for grabs. We all now know that the wiretaps are legal and Obama will not get the flack that Bush endured even though they were legal during his terms also. We have to make sure no tarnish reaches Obama. He is, after all, the bringer of light and the One we have all been waiting for.
Quote of the day…
AJ Strata on the FISA court’s decision upholding the terrorist surveillance program that was blown to the public (and the terrorists) by a disgruntled, narcissistic Justice employee and the New York Times: All those moans and groans about the 4th……