Why did President Bush circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?
National Review columnist Byron York defended the president as keeping the nation's best interests in mind, describing the process of receiving a warrant from FISA court as arduous.
York writes:
In 2002, when the president made his decision, there was widespread, bipartisan frustration with the slowness and inefficiency of the bureaucracy involved in seeking warrants from the special intelligence court, known as the FISA court.
"It takes days, sometimes weeks, to get the application for FISA together," says one source. "It's not so much that the court doesn't grant them quickly, it's that it takes a long time to get to the court."
But York forgets something:
In the case of national emergencies, it's permitted to get a search warrant 72 hours after surveillance is conducted. (In the link, see Section F, Item 2.) The argument for speed doesn't make much sense when warrants can be issued after the surveillance operations have taken place.
David Sirota, writing yesterday on the Huffington Post Web site, wondered aloud about this spin: "There really is only one explanation that a sane, rational person could come up with: The surveillance operations Bush is ordering are so outrageous, so unrelated to the War on Terror and such an unconstitutional breach of authority that he knows that even a court that has rejected just four warrant requests in 25 years will reject what he's doing."
Merging Sirota comments with York's, one would have to assume that a Homeland Security team wouldn't be able to put together the paperwork quickly enough to gain a retroactive warrant from a lax court. It's a hard sell.
***
If the "arduous paperwork" defense sounds familiar, it's because the Bush Administration used it just a few weeks ago.
Article comments
1 - Nancy
I think the reason Bush hasn't followed the rules - any rules - is that he feels as president he is above the law, & by the GOP being in control of both houses & the WH, he is beyond the reach of the law. Together with his natural arrogance & almost complete lack of sense of reality, I suspect he's headed (at the behest of Cheney & Co.) towards some sort of power grab, possibly even thinking of trying to suspend elections, etc. using the excuse of 'being at war', which he seems to think means he has no limitations whatsoever. Obviously he has no concept of the parameters of the constitution, bill of rights, or any other part of US government, and his flunkies like Gonzalez aren't about to enlighten him. Let's put it this way: I wouldn't be surprised if that was a future move by Dubya. He's getting more & more blatant in pushing 'way over the line.