For the third consecutive time, a Federal judge has ruled Bush's wiretapping illegal and shot down most of the specious arguments Bush Dog Democrats have been making in an attempt to defend their gutting of the Fourth Amendment.
A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.
The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.
But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.
“Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”
Bush has been using his (Cheney's) usual argument that the court has no right to hear the evidence because it's a "state secret" but Judge Walker (an appointee of Poppy's btw) wasn't impressed. He pointed out that FISA did allow just such evidence to be presented.
The Bush administration argued that the plaintiffs could not prove their case because, to do so, they would have to rely on documents and information that the President deemed to be "state secrets" (i.e., the Government's eavesdropping activities) and which are, therefore, unusable in court. That is the argument the court rejected -- holding instead that Congress, when it enacted FISA, established a procedure that allows even classified information to be considered by a court, and the President's Article II powers cannot override the FISA statute. As the Court pointed out, Congress' core purpose in enacting FISA in 1978 was to bar the President from exercising untrammeled, unchallenged power in the area of eavesdropping. Thus, presidential assertions of secrecy do not override the law.
(emphasis in the original)
So yet another judge has found thr Bush/Cheney/Pinochet defense that it's nobody's business what they do because, as Nixon used to say, "If the president says it's legal, it is." Well, no. But as Greenwald says, it will be.
[W]e have extremely strong indications from multiple courts that the President deliberately broke the law for years -- a law that provides that violations of its provisions are felonies punishable with 5 years in prison for each offense. And yet our political establishment, with Democrats at the helm, are about to ensure that there are never any consequences for that lawbreaking and no accountability whatsoever in a court of law.
(emphasis in the original)
There are a bunch of other lawsuits from some of the people Bush and the telecoms spied on illegally, but the GOP/Bush Dog "compromise" would pretty much ensure that they never see the light of day.
The immunity issue would not directly affect this lawsuit because Al-Haramain is suing the government, not the phone companies. But the nearly 40 other lawsuits against phone companies that Judge Walker is overseeing would almost certainly have to be dismissed if immunity is signed into law, legal analysts say.
Get out your pencils, b's and g's. From now on, Low Tech Rules.
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