Posted by: Dale Franks on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 Today saw a huge climb-down by the Bush Administration over the NSA warrantless wiretaps. The Bush administration has agreed to shift course and let a secret but independent panel of federal judges oversee the government's controversial domestic spying program.Not to put to fine a point on it, this story indicates that the Bush Administration was lying through its teeth about the NSA program, its necessity, and the unsuitability of FISA for overseeing it. Captain Ed puts it better than I can: [M]y point can be found in the letter Gonzales sent to the committee:Apparently, the Bush Administration did, in fact, think that FISA was a controlling authority for this behavior. They were, in fact, in the process of negotiating with FISA to work out a practical solution for exigent circumstances and blanket wiretap authority when necessary.In the spring of 2005 — well before the first press account disclosing the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program — the Administration began exploring options for seeking FISA Court approval.This is my point, here. It's not that the program has ended; it obviously will continue. My anger is over the fact that the Bush administration insisted on two points: one, that the FISA court would not cooperate on streamlining the process for warrants on these intercepts, and the second that the Bush administration had the authority to proceed without it. They took everyone along for a big ride, making all sorts of legal arguments about the AUMF and Article II — and now Gonzales has revealed that even they didn't really believe it. All of the public statements, closely reasoned legal arguments, congressional testimony...well, it was just bunk. The White House has now repudiated all of it. The White House was in the process of preparing that repudiation, even as they argued otherwise. After years of arguing that this was a central presidential authority concomitant with the AUMF and the president's inherent wartime powers, they've now just dumped the program on the FISA, to let them handle it. So, why didn't they just do that in 2001 in the first place? Obviously, because they could get away with it when the Republican-led Congress was willing to act like lap-dogs to the executive branch, rather than exercise their oversight powers as a separate and equal branch of government. Now that that situation no longer obtains, the administration has managed to turn it over to FISA less than two weeks after the Democratic-led congress convened. Glenn Greenwald was right. |
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