Newsweek reports that President Bush pulled out all the stops tried to talk the New York Times into killing the story on domestic spying:"The president was so desperate to kill The New York Times’ eavesdropping story, he summoned the paper’s editor and publisher to the Oval Office. But it wasn’t just out of concern about national security."Jonathan Alter raises important concerns in his commentary on the meeting and the President's insistence that the story hurts national security.
The big question is: How?
It's pretty obvious if you're a terrorist operating in the US, you're likely to be spied on. Terrorists will expect that to happen. How does being able to spy on them without a warrant change our tactics? It doesn't. How does exposing the fact that the obvious spying is being done without warrants threaten national security? It doesn't.
Next. The FISA court that issues warrants in national security cases -- and issued 1228 of 1228 requests in 2002 -- when President Bush issed the domestic spying order. This leads us to the next question:
If you're getting all the warrants you want, why do you suddenly go off the reservation and start spying without warrants?
If you think like a lawyer or a cop, the obvious answer is that the administration is spying on people who they know the court would never let them spy on.
We've seen the NBC report on the Pentagon spying on Quakers and peace groups. You have to wonder if there are other non-terrorists in their sites. And if you think like a politician, you think of Nixon's enemy lists, Clinton's FBI file scandal, and wonder if this administration is also using government resources to keep tabs on political opponents.
Which leads us to the question that ties these two together:
If exposing warrantless spying can't possibly affect national security, why is the administration so worried about it being exposed?
Answer: Political damage in 2005, a Democratic majority elected in 2006, and articles of impeachment in 2007. (Newsweek, HT: PoliticalWire.com)
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COURT SAYS U.S. SPY AGENCY CAN TAP OVERSEAS MESSAGES
By DAVID BURNHAM, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT) 1051 words Published: November 7, 1982
A Federal appeals court has ruled that the National Security Agency may lawfully intercept messages between United States citizens and people overseas, even if there is no cause to believe the Americans are foreign agents, and then provide summaries of these messages to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Because the National Security Agency is among the largest and most secretive intelligence agencies and because millions of electronic messages enter and leave the United States each day, lawyers familiar with the intelligence agency consider the decision to mark a significant increase in the legal authority of the Government to keep track of its citizens.
Reverses 1979 Ruling
The Oct. 21 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit involves the Government's surveillance of a Michiganborn lawyer, Abdeen Jabara, who for many years has represented Arab-American citizens and alien residents in court. Some of his clients had been investigated by the F.B.I.
Mr. Jabara sued the F.B.I, and the National Security Agency, and in 1979 Federal District Judge Ralph M. Freeman ruled that the agency's acquisition of several of Mr. Jabara's overseas messages violated his Fourth Amendment right to be free of ''unreasonable searches and seizures.'' Last month's decision reverses that ruling.
In earlier court proceedings, the F.B.I. acknowledged that it then disseminated the information to 17 other law-enforcement or intelligence agencies and three foreign governments.
The opinion of the three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals held, ''The simple fact remains that the N.S.A. lawfully acquired Jabara's messages.''
The court ruled further that the lawyer's Fourth Amendment rights ''were not violated when summaries of his overseas telegraphic messages'' were furnished to the investigative bureau ''irrespective of whether there was reasonable cause to believe that he was a foreign agent.''
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