[Infowarrior] - NSA Surveillance: A Leap of Faith, Off a Cliff

[Richard Forno]

(I love the first sentence....geez!  -rf)

A Leap of Faith, Off a Cliff
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/opinion/15thurs1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pag
ewanted=print

On Monday, the Bush administration told a judge in Detroit that the
president's warrantless domestic spying is legal and constitutional, but
refused to say why. The judge should just take his word for it, the lawyer
said, because merely talking about it would endanger America. Today, Senator
Arlen Specter wants his Judiciary Committee to take an even more outlandish
leap of faith for an administration that has shown it does not deserve it.

Mr. Specter wants the committee to approve a bill he drafted that tinkers
dangerously with the rules on wiretapping, even though the president has
said the law doesn't apply to him anyway, and even though Mr. Specter and
most of the panel are just as much in the dark as that judge in Detroit. The
bill could well diminish the power of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, known as FISA, which was passed in 1978 to prevent just the sort of
abuse that Mr. Bush's program represents.

The committee is considering four bills. Only one even remotely makes sense
now: it would give legal standing to groups that want to challenge the
spying in court. The rest vary from highly premature (Senator Dianne
Feinstein's proposed changes to FISA) to the stamp of approval for Mr.
Bush's claims of unlimited power that Senator Mike DeWine drafted.

Mr. Specter's bill is not that bad, but it is fatally flawed and should not
go to the Senate floor. He is trying to change the system for judicial
approval of government wiretaps in a way that suggests Congress is facing a
technical problem with a legislative solution, when in fact it is a
constitutional showdown.

There is also a practical problem: a bill on the floor of this Senate
becomes the property of the Republican leadership, which will rewrite it to
the specifications of Vice President Dick Cheney, the man in charge of this
particular show of imperial power. Mr. Specter, of all people, should have
no doubt of that, having been forced to watch in embarrassment last week as
Mr. Cheney seized control of the committee's deliberations on the spying
issue.

Mr. Specter says his bill would impose judicial review on domestic spying by
giving the special court created by FISA power to rule on the
constitutionality of the one program that Mr. Bush has acknowledged. But the
review would be optional. Mr. Specter's bill would eliminate the vital
principle that FISA's rules are the only legal way to eavesdrop on
Americans' telephone calls and e-mail. It would give the president power to
conduct surveillance under FISA "or under the constitutional authority of
the executive." That merely reinforces Mr. Bush's claim that he is the sole
judge of what powers he has, and how he exercises them.

Mr. Specter's lawyers have arguments for many of these criticisms, and say
the bill is being improved. But the main problem with the bill, like most of
the others, is that it exists at all. This is not a time to offer the
administration a chance to steamroll Congress into endorsing its decision to
ignore the 1978 intelligence act and shred constitutional principles on
warrants and on the separation of powers. This is a time for Congress to
finally hold Mr. Bush accountable for his extralegal behavior and stop it.