Surveillance Shell Games
The Bush administration, in a surprise reversal, said on Wednesday that it had agreed to give a secret court jurisdiction over the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program and would end its practice of eavesdropping without warrants on Americans suspected of ties to terrorists.
The Justice Department said it had worked out an “innovative” arrangement with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that provided the “necessary speed and agility” to provide court approval to monitor international communications of people inside the United States without jeopardizing national security.
It’s about damn time! If they had done this in the first place, there would have been no issue, right?
Well, don’t get excited just yet… The “Justice” Department is trying to pull a fast one.
But senior lawmakers said they were still uncertain Wednesday, even after the administration’s announcement, about how the court would go about approving warrants, how targets would be identified, and whether that process would differ from the court’s practices since 1978.
The administration said it had briefed the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees in closed sessions on its decision.
But Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico, who serves on the Intelligence committee, disputed that, and some Congressional aides said staff members were briefed Friday without lawmakers present.
Administration officials “have convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program,” Ms. Wilson said in a telephone interview. She said Congress needed to investigate further to determine how the program is run.
It turns out Attorney General Gonzales is trying to do an end around to avoid upcoming congressional investigations. The “Justice” Department also plans to file a motion in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals saying the ACLU’s lawsuit isn’t necessary anymore.
A Justice Department official said the department would file a motion with the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, arguing that the court’s review of the issue in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union “is now moot” in light of this week’s developments.
The warrantless wiretapping was already deemed illegal by Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor here in Detroit, and they’ve been working illegally for the past five years. By claiming to have worked out a backroom deal with the already secret FISA court, Gonzales hopes to deflect scrutiny.
The problem is that all of these shady dealings are happening in the dark. And none of it prevents them from going through your mail or your financial records or your library records.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t trust anything that anyone in the administration says. They’ve been caught in too many different lies about too many different things. Wasn’t Alberto Gonzales the guy who said torture is legal?
