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."

Comments

Re:I still don't get why this is neccessary

[Dr. Donuts]

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.

Re:Accountability ?

[Thrip]

... 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?

Too many wire taps?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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?

Re:Too many wire taps?

[Immostlyharmless]

Which is exactly why having access to all this information makes us MORE vulnerable to another terrorist attack, not less. Look at how much information the FBI already had on the 9/11 hijackers. They *literally* had the American populace calling them on the phone and saying "I think we have some terrorists here."

They still couldn't figure it out. Somehow now with a deluge of information of the sort they now have access to, they are going to do any better? Me thinks not...

Re:Accountability ?

[AndersOSU]

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.