Slashdot Mirror
Judge Orders White House To Produce Wiretap Memos
sv_libertarian sends this excerpt from the Associated Press:
"A judge has ordered the Justice Department to produce White House memos that provide the legal basis for the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 warrantless wiretapping program. US District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. signed an order (PDF) Friday requiring the department to produce the memos by the White House legal counsel's office by Nov. 17. He said he will review the memos in private to determine if any information can be released publicly without violating attorney-client privilege or jeopardizing national security. Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping."
Sure, if you think in terms of tapping an individual line, FISA worked. Now, what if you want to tap thousands or millions of calls simultaneously?
I suspect that Bush's primary reason for the warrantless wiretapping simply boils down to they didn't know exactly who/what/where to look and wanted to perform a dragnet on foreign calls. Something that would have been impossible to do under FISA.
... are we finally going to see some serious investigations and accountability for this current administration?
I'm not holding my breath. On the one hand, the party in power generally prioritizes the things it wants to get done over the things it would like to see punished. On the other hand, if you dig too deeply into anything in Washington, you're going to find wrongdoing on both sides. And on the other other hand, presidents don't generally act to limit their own power.
There may actually be an opportunity here to break the back of the Repbulican party, but it's not clear that that would benefit the Democrats. The timesharing arrangement they've got going now seems to work out pretty well for them. How much do you think they want to face a wave of conservative activists energized to build a new party?
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
The Stasi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi), East Germany's secret police, ended up collecting so much information on its citizens that it was impossible to process and analyze it all. "Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens."
Sure, the NSA has all kinds of wizz-bang gadgets to sort and process their stuff, but I wonder if the same thing is happening with them?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Or maybe the courts are just being "allowed" to draft in restrictions now because the Reps have already figured that they're not going to be in this time around...
Some people always believe that anything bad is the result of a conspiracy by the groups they are not part of (and which they claim have the exact opposite stance on everything)...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
No, for the simple reason that President Bush keeps top Congress members appeased on what he was doing. This has come up a few times when something has hit the news and Democrat members have said they did now know of it and then the White House would release the listing of attendees and there were the Democrats.
if the Democrats were to do anything it would just lead them to having to try their own members, so it is far better for them to stay quiet and let the rumors spread that something illegal was done.
Also, if it becomes clear that any backlash that reduces the power of the presidency will limit *Obama's* power, there's litle incentive to avoid it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I'm pretty sure that Echelon has a far worse bark than bite.
I haven't changed my sig (which is also my email sig) since 1998.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Qwest lost pentagon contracts for refusing to illegal wiretap when it was asked to in February 2001 . The 9/11 attacks are a strawman argument for the executive branch grabbing as much power as they can.
As to impeachment, Pelosi has said impeachment is off the table for quite awhile. Kucinich has tried to start impeachment hearings but they got killed in subcommittees. The two parties may bicker at some level but they wouldn't actually want to oh, follow the law or anything when it comes to trampling personal liberties.
It's a lot more nuanced than that.
The idea of a single chief executive is really useful when decisions have to be made fast, especially in wartime. The founding fathers thought a lot about how to properly balance government, and basically decided that congress was to be a slow and deliberate body, and the executive was to be able to make quick decisions. (it's also more nuanced than that, but I think my version is closer to the mark.)
That it worked well in 18th century diplomatic circles was a happy side effect.