Monday, May 29, 2006
 U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Dealey Plaza) is working to retoractively justify illegal police-state actions by the Bush Administration, and lying in order to do it. From
Huffington Post : "Last week Arlen Specter proposed a second bill to gut the protections of the FISA statute and legitimize the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. [...]
Unlike the previous proposals, it would not create any new oversight committee in Congress to review surveillance outside the FISA statute. Instead, it would lower the standards for issuing FISA warrants so far that the FISA Court would become superfluous. It would also validate the President's most radical legal justification for the NSA Program--that the commander in chief has inherent power under the Constitution to spy on "any person ... associated with a foreign enemy" of the United States. It would retroactively eliminate the criminal liability of the President and all his minions who ordered or participated in warrantless surveillance. While it wouldn't retroactively eliminate civil lawsuits seeking an end to the program, like ours, it would move all of the existing cases to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, a three judge appellate court that hears the appeals when the government's wiretap applications to the FISA Court are rejected. (This doesn't happen often: only 5 of the 18,800 total applications for wiretaps have been rejected in the 27 year history of FISA.) This is probably the most secretive court in America; it has issued only one opinion throughout its entire existence. Members of the Court are chosen by the Chief Justice, not the President; all three are Republicans who were named by Chief Justices Rehnquist and Roberts. (One recently-retired member, Laurence Silberman, was with Dick Cheney a strident opponent of FISA when Congress was drafting it during the post-Watergate period.)
Anytime a bill like this is proposed, Congress usually feels the need to spell out why so much radical change is necessary. . . . "findings" . . .and then set forth the actual new provisions of law designed to address those real world problems. The Specter bill .. "findings" [have] a troubled relationship to reality.
Here is the worst falsehood among a long list in the bill's legislative findings: (3) For days before September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected that confessed terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was planning to hijack a commercial plane. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, could not meet the requirements to obtain a traditional criminal warrant or an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 [("FISA")] to search his laptop computer. Report of the 9/11 Commission 273-76. This is an urban legend of 9/11: it makes for a great story; it has "truthiness"--but it just isn't true.
The government and its minions in the blogosphere and mainstream media have claimed that FISA--the same statute the President violated by ordering the NSA to carry out warrantless surveillance--stood in the way of getting a warrant-order to search Moussaoui's computer. Their version of the story goes like this: FBI agent Colleen Rowley, investigating this guy who had no prior flight experience but wanted to learn how to fly a 747, wanted a FISA warrant to search his laptop's hard drive, but she couldn't get one because FISA's legal requirements stood in the way: there wasn't enough evidence to link Moussaoui to a "designated" terrorist group (meaning a group on the State or Treasury Department's formal lists of banned groups, with whom all financial transactions are blocked). . . .
So was this an example of the onerous FISA statute, passed in 1978 by a Congress shell-shocked by Watergate, posing such a high barrier to a search warrant that the FBI had to watch helplessly until thousands of Americans died a month later?
Not at all. The FBI field agents had enough evidence to get a FISA warrant, but they got bad (internal) legal advice from FBI headquarters. They were told by their lawyers that they needed to link Moussaoui to a formally designated terrorist organization (what they had on him in late August 2001 was only a link to a rebel Chechen group not on the official designated lists), but that was simply wrong under the law at the time. FISA did not require that Moussaoui have a link to a terrorist organization formally designated as such by Treasury or State; instead, FISA allowed a wiretap order to issue if there was probable cause to show that Moussaoui was an agent of any group involved with terrorism outside the U.S. (or, indeed, even an agent of any foreign political organization), regardless of whether that particular group was designated. And the record the FBI had in front of it in August 2001 would easily have supported that conclusion.
[...]
----- Those FBI lawyers need to be investigating for actively protecting the patsies in the 9/11 operation. And Arlen Specter, who got his break in politics by authoring the "magic bullet" theory for the Warren Commission needs to face the bar of justice as well.
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.....| Posted at 03:47 | PERMA-LINK |
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