Bush was denied wiretaps, bypassed them
WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.
A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.
The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation.
But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.
Yea, that's what you do when you respect the rule of law. If it gets in your way, just go around it.
Impeach
2 comments:
Interestingly enough, I can see that you conveniently forgot to paste this, which was part of the original post you copied and pasted from:
"“…Faced with that standard, Bamford said, the Bush administration had difficulty obtaining FISA court-approved wiretaps on dozens of people within the United States who were communicating with targeted al-Qaida suspects inside the United States.”
I thought I'd just help you clear up your post, just in case you "forgot" to copy and paste this part. :)
Weird, the "word verification" that I am using to post this is "liedg." Coincidence?
Can you not read or do you not know how to click on a link? If you click on the word "UPI" in the post (or here), you'll see that he cut and pasted THE ENTIRE ARTICLE.
You are quoting from a different article:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/25/MNGCEGD95C1.DTL
And, YOU left out this quote by Bamford:
"Bamford, 59, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran, likens the Bush administration's domestic surveillance without court approval to Nixon-era abuses of intelligence agencies."
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