My brother-in-law (the gun-owning, gas-guzzler-driving real estate agent whose livelihood won't exist without private property rights-"liberal") started ranting about illegal wire taps and the last president to do this was impeached. Well he was correct, Clinton was impeached but not because of illegal wire tapping. When I pressed my brother-in-law to tell me what FISA stood for or who signed the act into law, the "conversation quickly deteriorated since there was nothing about that on Michael Moore's website, so he had no answer.
Now Jimmy Carter is back on the bandwagon leaving one to question his mental health because it turns out that Jimmy Carter, of all people, also authorized warrantless surveillance when he was president. Ask not for whom Griffin Bell toiled.
At the recent funeral of Coretta Scott King, with George and Laura Bush seated right behind him, Carter went out of his way to condemn Bush's surveillance of potential terrorists with al-Qaida links. He did so by referring obliquely to "secret government wiretaps" of Mrs. King's husband, Martin Luther King.
(Unmentioned, of course, was the fact that those wiretaps were authorized under and carried out by Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson under the auspices of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.)
The day before the funeral, at an event in Nevada where Carter's son Jack launched his campaign for the U.S. Senate, the former president was more direct. "Under the Bush administration," he said, "there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision: We're not going to let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people."
Actually, that decision was made during Carter's own administration, when he signed Executive Order 12139 on May 23, 1979. It authorized the attorney general "to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order." This was after 1978's Foreign Intelligence Service Act set up a special and secret court for the purpose of granting foreign intelligence.
Two years earlier, Carter and his attorney general, Griffin Bell, authorized the warrantless surveillance of two individuals, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, who subsequently were convicted of spying for the Vietnamese government.
The two men challenged their convictions on the basis that evidence against them was obtained illegally using the wiretaps. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld their convictions, saying the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as spies and terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when the surveillance is "conducted primarily for foreign intelligence reasons."
Sound familiar? Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used almost the same language recently in defending Bush's National Security Agency surveillance of suspected terrorists abroad and their contacts in the U.S.
Similar language also was used by Bell when he went to Capitol Hill in '78 to speak in favor of FISA. While the measure didn't explicitly acknowledge the "inherent power of the president to conduct electronic surveillance," he testified, "it does not take away the power of the president under the Constitution."
Yet Jimmy Carter, contradicting both his words and his deeds, and those of his attorney general, said after Gonzales' testimony that it was "ridiculous" for Bush's top law enforcer to argue that spying is justified by Article II of the Constitution.
If anything is illegal, it's the unauthorized disclosure of the NSA program. Former Congressman and now CIA Director Porter Goss, who co-sponsored the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act that protects those who report abuse of authorized surveillance programs, on Friday said that those who leaked the program's existence "are committing a criminal act that potentially places American lives at risk."
In an op-ed published in The New York Times, which publicly exposed the NSA program, Goss wrote that the law requires suspected abuses be reported to Congress, not directly to the media. "Those who choose to bypass the law and go straight to the press are not noble, honorable or patriotic," he said, but criminals.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, courageously broke with her party and suggested that the Times should be prosecuted for its role in exposing the classified program. "If the press was part of the process of delivering classified information," she said, "there should be some limits on press immunity."
I agree.
And perhaps Jimmy Carter can be a character witness at the trial.
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