"So as of June, 2002 -- many months after the FISA bypass program was ordered -- the DoJ official who was responsible for overseeing the FISA warrant program was not aware (at least when he submitted this Statement) of any difficulties in obtaining warrants under the FISA "probable cause" standard, and for that reason, the Administration would not even support DeWine's amendment. If - as the Administration is now claiming - they had such significant difficulties obtaining the warrants they wanted for eavesdropping that they had to go outside of FISA, surely Baker - who was in charge of obtaining those warrants - would have been aware of them. And, if the Administration was really having the problems under FISA, they would have supported DeWine's Amendment. But they didn't.and he also has another post up on the same issue here:
[snip]
Put another way, the DoJ was concerned that it might be unconstitutional to eavesdrop with a lower standard than probable cause even as the Administration was doing exactly that."
"It seems that what really attracted the Administration when bypassing FISA was not some desire to lower the evidentiary standard for obtaining warrants (since it was obtaining all the warrants it wanted and since it could certainly have persuaded Congress to amend the standard), but rather, the ability to eavesdrop without having to tell any Federal Judge on whom they were eavesdropping. That’s the disturbing part of the illegality, much more than the "probable cause" v. "reasonable likely to believe" issue."kevin drum has been on the money on this too. see here, here and here.
there's been do much noise on this issue that i can safely say that nobody has a fucking clue what is going on. bamboozalapalooza. as best as i can tell, the safest bet is that the badministration was actively involved in spying on domestic political opponents. i can only imagine that the bolton nsa intercepts are relevant here - and i wonder whether our friend matthew freedman was somehow involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment