Judge orders halt to U.S. wiretapping program

So, I don't understand the nature of the world. This sounds like a lot of third-rate pastors who claim that I can't understand the Bible unless they tell me what it means. And with all the info that has been coming out on the London scare, that may not be the best place to go...

 

I would be willing to accept almost any American's understanding of the nature of the worl over Bush's.

 

I'm glad the guy who has screwed up the Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, our relations with virtually every other country on the globe, our economy, our country's finances, Katrina and everything else he's touched (not to mention ignoring a document titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike at US") understands the nature of the world. I'll sleep easy tonight.

 

Rimrocker.

Keep D and D civil, Rimorcker. Don't be cruel.

 

I don't want to live in the world in which Bush lives, he is running around scared and thinks that cultures responsd to force.....hello McFLY !!! It is a cultural issue as the world shrinks and we all start to mix, all the cultures have to find out where each and every one of them fits in the mix.

100 years from now, people will laugh at GW, and think him a buffoon !!

Oh wait....I mean 1 minute from now..



DD

 

Wolcott... best writer on the web...

and

http://www.jameswolcott.com/

 

The Understanderer...

THE PRESIDENT: You know, when you have resentment and anger, that breeds hatred; that breeds recruiting grounds for people to become a suicider. Imagine the mentality of somebody willing to kill for an ideology that just doesn't -- is not hopeful, and yet I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that parts of the world breed resentment.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060816-6.html

 

Exactly. Can anyone give me an example where except for complete annihilation or several generations of intermarriage, military force or oppression has made a religion more moderate?

Unfortunately the Decider read one of his first books in years ,shortly after he "won" the first election. It was about Winston Churchill and WW II and Bush decided that he was Churchill II. Maybe we would have been better off if unlike Churchill,who was known to drink a 5th a day, the Decider had not decided to swear off drugs and alcohol.

Even with his background, Bush had only been curious enough to travel outside the US twice and I believe briefly. In aqddition he is not known for reading or scholarship. His woefully inadequate stock of knowlege for the POTUS has been a real disaster.

 

THIS IS OUR PRESIDENT TALKING!!!!! LIKE A ******* 9 YEAR OLD!!!!

i'm practically at a loss for words. this is the man making critical decisions for our country, and he can't even form coherent sentences!

 

rimrocker, it would help to read those quotes if you bolded them. I've always thought that the type was too small.

(then, maybe I could read 'em easier! )

He wrote some good stuff. Bush is rather scary.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

this just in: the DECIDER has a gut feel that you must be an EVIL DOER, probably since YOU HATE OUR LOVE OF APPLE PIE, MOMMAs, CHEVIES, and FREEDOM.

 

Yeah like the Constitution. I mean that was written like 200 years before 9/11. I mean how the hell could some guys in wigs in Philadelphia know about Isamic Fascist flying planes into buildings.

 

D'OH! Beat me to it.

 

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Benjamin Franklin

-furthermore, you miss the point. if bush wanted to change the law he could have. instead he chose to break it.

 

Ehhh...not so fast.

Experts Fault Reasoning in Surveillance Decision

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: August 19, 2006

Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge’s conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision’s reasoning and rhetoric yesterday.

They said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government’s major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions.

Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal, said Howard J. Bashman, a Pennsylvania lawyer whose Web log provides comprehensive and nonpartisan reports on legal developments.

“It does appear,” Mr. Bashman said, “that folks on all sides of the spectrum, both those who support it and those who oppose it, say the decision is not strongly grounded in legal authority.”

The main problems, scholars sympathetic to the decision’s bottom line said, is that the judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, relied on novel and questionable constitutional arguments when more straightforward statutory ones were available.

She ruled, for instance, that the program, which eavesdrops without court permission on international communications of people in the United States, violated the First Amendment because it might have chilled the speech of people who feared they might have been monitored.

That ruling is “rather innovative” and “not a particularly good argument,” Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale who believes the program is illegal, wrote on his Web log.

Judge Taylor also ruled that the program violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. But scholars said she failed to take account of the so-called “special needs” exception to the amendment’s requirement that the government obtain a warrant before engaging in some surveillance unrelated to routine law enforcement. “It’s just a few pages of general ruminations about the Fourth Amendment, much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect,” Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University who believes the administration’s legal justifications for the program are weak, said of Judge Taylor’s Fourth Amendment analysis on a Web log called the Volokh Conspiracy.

Judge Taylor gave less attention to the more modest statutory argument that has been widely advanced by critics of the program. They say that it violates a 1978 law requiring warrants from a secret court and that neither a 2001 Congressional authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda nor the president’s constitutional authority allowed the administration to ignore the law. A recent Supreme Court decision strengthened that argument. Judge Taylor did not cite it.

Some scholars speculated that Judge Taylor, of the Federal District Court in Detroit, may have rushed her decision lest the case be consolidated with several others now pending in federal court in San Francisco or moved to a specialized court in Washington as contemplated by pending legislation. Judge Taylor heard the last set of arguments in the case a little more than a month ago.

The decision has been appealed, and legal scholars said Judge Taylor had done the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the plaintiffs, few favors beyond handing it a victory. On the other hand, they added, the appeals court is bound to examine the legal arguments in the case afresh in any event.

Indeed, Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, predicted that the plaintiffs would win the case on appeal, but not for the reasons Judge Taylor gave.

“The chances that the Bush program will be upheld are not none, but slim,” Professor Sunstein said. “The chances that this judge’s analysis will be adopted are also slim.”

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who presides over the Volokh Conspiracy Web log and says he is skeptical of the legality of the wiretapping program, called the decision “not just ill-reasoned, but rhetorically ill-conceived.”

“If I were the A.C.L.U.,” Professor Volokh said, “I would rather have a decision that came across as more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger and that was as deliberate, meticulous, thoughtful and studiously impartial as possible.”

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U., said Judge Taylor’s decision represented vindication of established limits on the scope of executive authority.

“Ultimately,” Mr. Romero said, “any doubts about the decision will be taken up on appeal by sitting federal judges rather than pundits or commentators.”

Judge Taylor, a longtime trial court judge who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, enjoys a good reputation among lawyers who have appeared before her, according to anonymous comments collected by the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary.

“Lawyers interviewed rated Taylor high in legal ability,” the almanac concluded. The eight quoted comments ranged from enthusiastic (“She is smart as hell”) to lukewarm (“She is competent”).

Supporters of the program, disclosed by The New York Times in December, suggested that Judge Taylor’s opinion was as good a way to lose as any.

“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad it is,” said John R. Schmidt, a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration who says the program is legal. He pointed to Judge Taylor’s failure to cite what he called several pertinent decisions, including one from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review in 2002 that said it took for granted that Congress “could not encroach on the president’s constitutional power” to conduct warrantless surveillance to obtain foreign intelligence.

The decision also failed to cite a Supreme Court decision in June helpful to the plaintiffs, a group of journalists, scholars, lawyers and nonprofit organizations. The decision, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, struck down the administration’s plans to try prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as war criminals. It was widely interpreted as a rebuke to the administration’s expansive conception of executive power.

“After Hamdan,” Professor Sunstein said, “this program is not easy to defend.”

Professor Balkin said there was a rushed quality to Judge Taylor’s decision, but he added that her reason for moving fast may have been the laudable one of assuring that more than one appeals court would have the opportunity to pass on the legality of the program.

Martin S. Lederman, a former Justice Department official who believes the program is illegal, said he found the contrast between Justice John Paul Stevens’s approach in Hamdan and Judge Taylor’s in the wiretapping case telling.

“Justice Stevens was criticized for not including sound bites and sweeping constitutional interpretation,” Mr. Lederman said. Judge Taylor’s decision, by contrast, he said, “was meant for headlines.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/w...08f66aa4&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

If Her Honor's decision is as legally unsound as it seems, she has no business sitting on the bench rendering important decisions, & needs to retire posthaste. Unbelievable.

 

Greenwald responds...

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/

 

A rather turgid opinion based on... what? You don't like the ruling. With all due respect. I expect the basic ruling to hold up, and only a 5-4 opinion in the SC might overturn it, but even a couple of the conservative SC judges will find this trampling of the separation of powers too much to support, in my opinion.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

HAHAHAHA

The only reason we even know about this wiretapping program is because somebody leaked it to the press..

In other words, the leakers will be purged and the program will continue as normal...

Americs is still pwned. NOOBS, lolololololololo

 

Bush today...

I think a lot of Americans are listening very carefully.