Probably, Probably, Probably…
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in General Politics, The War On TerrorismConcerning the wiretaps, Bush probably didn’t have the right to do them.
A report by Congress’s research arm concluded yesterday that the administration’s justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.The Congressional Research Service’s report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president’s authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.
The findings, the first nonpartisan assessment of the program’s legality to date, prompted Democratic lawmakers and civil liberties advocates to repeat calls yesterday for Congress to conduct hearings on the monitoring program and attempt to halt it.
The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001. Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said.
And concerning the authorization to use military force, which Bush says gives him the authority to do…well…nearly anything to protect our nation from terrorist attacks, the report had this to say…
The report also concluded that Bush’s assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force.“It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here,” the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration’s legal justification “does not seem to be . . . well-grounded,” they said.
What do you probably think?
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2006 and is filed under General Politics, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 7th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
I probably think if it’s possible to tell how a court is going to rule before the case is heard that we should just be able to do away with the entire judiciary. I mean if we know what they’ll do before they do it what’s the point?
I definitely think we should wait until we know what really happened here and how before we decide what was what.