Saturday, June 23, 2007
Thanks for NOTHING!
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth explains why the FISA court never had to rule on the NSA wiretapping program.
The former chief judge of a secret national security court took a swipe Saturday at the administration's recently halted domestic spying program and said he insisted from the outset that the information gleaned must not be co-mingled with intelligence gathered under court warrants.Good move! The tried and true Sgt. Schultz defense. If we see nothing we will say nothing. And how appropriate, what with Col. Klink running the country.
Because of that precaution, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said, he never had to rule on whether President Bush had the power to launch the separate, warrantless spying program in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Lamberth's seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ended in May 2002....
....When the NSA program to monitor overseas calls was first proposed in late 2001, Lamberth said, he had "many discussions" with Attorney General John Ashcroft and John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer whose legal opinions argued that the president has expansive emergency powers during wartime.
"My primary motivation was, if the president was going to assert this authority, that it be done totally separately," he said. "If anything was presented to the FISA court that came from that program, the FISA court had to be told about it. Then we had to rule on whether it was illegally obtained or not."
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