In a repudiation of the Bush administration's now-defunct terrorist surveillance effort, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that government investigators illegally wiretapped the phone conversations of an Islamic charity and two American lawyers without a search warrant.I know it's too late for a perp walk.
But I'd still love to see it.
It's like Terri Schiavo. Wanna talk about intruding into people's health care decisions? Wanna talk about legislators making medical decisions for citizens of this country?
ReplyDeleteThe people screaming the loudest about "government takeovers" were overseeing the most intrusive expansion of government powers when they were supporting Bush.
Looks like Dayvoe got it wrong. Big surprise.
ReplyDeleteThe Obama Administration wasn’t arguing that the surveillance program was lawful. As a result, the decision doesn’t rule that the program was unlawful. Rather, the Obama Administration was just arguing that Judge Walker couldn’t reach the merits of the case because of the state secrets privilege. After Judge Walker rejected the state secrets privilege claim, the case was over: DOJ not having argued that warrantless monitoring was lawful, Walker had no choice but to grant relief to the plaintiffs on their claim.
The next paragraph of that post at volokh.com:
ReplyDelete"As I said, this is sort of a technical objection: It’s quite right that the plaintiffs prevailed in their legal claim that they were illegally subject to surveillance. And as I have written many times before, I happen to agree that the Bush Administration’s arguments were quite weak. But the opinion isn’t quite what the Times is reporting: The decision today wasn’t actually about the lawfulness of the warrantless surveillance program."
So in the opinion of a lawyer at Volokh dot com, the NYTimes mis-charecterized the decision. I guess Huffington was possibly mislead by the NYTimes. And HTTT was also somewhat selective in his quote.