According to Clinton he did not do warrantless wiretapping;

My attitude was that once the Congress had spoken on it and given us the tools that we needed, we used it,” he said. “We used the law. We either went there and asked for the approval or, if there was an emergency and we had to do it beforehand, then we filed within three days afterward and gave them a chance to second guess it, because I thought it was a good – I think in the country you always have to try to balance these things out, so that’s what we did.

Bush did not seek warrants, which means he was outside the law that the legislature made, and without judicial oversight. The definition of absolute power.

I hadn’t been aware of the Clinton situation. Two important things arise from the above quote. First, it establishes, as I said above, that there has NOT been any court decision on the legality of warrantless wiretaps, either under Clinton or Bush. It is merely executive government assertion of power in both cases. Thus your statement above that “it’s up to the courts to interpret that – and they interpreted it in such a way as to allow Bush’s wiretaps, and those of Clinton before him” is simply wrong.

Secondly, at least judging from your above quote, the Clinton wiretapping was directed solely against foreign embassies and foreign persons, whereas the Bush taps are avowedly aimed at US citizens who are (or at least might be) communicating with foreign terrorist groups. Thus the Bush taps are more worrying in civil liberties terms for Americans. However both are equally clearly in breach of FISA. So I agree with you that there is a fairly spectacular level of selective outrage at work here by some parts of the media.

“The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes,” Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 14, 1994, “and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General.”

“It is important to understand,” Gorelick continued, “that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities.”

Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, provides for such warrantless searches directed against “a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.”

Reporting the day after Gorelick’s testimony, the Washington Post’s headline – on page A-19 – read, “Administration Backing No-Warrant Spy Searches.” The story began, “The Clinton administration, in a little-noticed facet of the debate on intelligence reforms, is seeking congressional authorization for U.S. spies to continue conducting clandestine searches at foreign embassies in Washington and other cities without a federal court order. The administration’s quiet lobbying effort is aimed at modifying draft legislation that would require U.S. counterintelligence officials to get a court order before secretly snooping inside the homes or workplaces of suspected foreign agents or foreign powers.”

In her testimony, Gorelick made clear that the president believed he had the power to order warrantless searches for the purpose of gathering intelligence, even if there was no reason to believe that the search might uncover evidence of a crime. “Intelligence is often long range, its exact targets are more difficult to identify, and its focus is less precise,” Gorelick said. “Information gathering for policy making and prevention, rather than prosecution, are its primary focus.”

Clearly this is not a new idea that President Bush introduced. It goes back at least as far as President Carter’s pre-FISA warrantless wiretaps in 1977, and probably further than that.

In other words, it’s yet another beat-up by the left-wing media. The real issue here is — who violated national security by illegally leaking this information to the press?

Obviously they aren’t thinking very hard. What about Lincoln and FDR?

No US court has yet handed down a judgment on the legality of Bush’s warrantless wiretap regime. Their existence has only very recently come to light. I don’t know whether such an issue (warrantless wiretapping with a domestic component i.e. where at least one of the parties is a US citizen) was ruled on by a court in the Clinton era, but I doubt it very much. I haven’t seen any such case mentioned in the arguments of either side in the current debate. Moreover, much of the Bush administration legal argument claiming that its tapping regime is valid springs from an argument that Congress’s Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 18 September 2001 somehow impliedly repealed the 1978 FISA legislation which expressly required the obtaining of a warrant in such situations. Obviously no such argument (weak though it is, as the 14 law professors highlight) would have been available to the Clinton administration.

Where are all the liberals and conservatives that’s what I want to know.

As for the law, it’s up to the courts to interpret that — and they interpreted it in such a way as to allow Bush’s wiretaps, and those of Clinton before him. So I doubt they’d rule any differently if it was Gore instead of Bush or Clinton.

I’d just like the RWDBs to think for a moment if the Supreme Court in 2000 had behaved in a less blatantly partisan way, and 9/11 happened on Gore’s watch.

Don’t you think that, apart from blaming 9/11l on Gore (yes, yes, I know - there are plenty on the left trying to blame it on Bush), you’d be screaming for impeachment if Gore had publicly taken the attitude, with each signing of a Bill, tnat “the law is whatever I interpret it to be”, and if said interpretation resulted in arbitrary detainment, torture and wiretapping?

As I’ve said before, terrorists come and go (there’s been plenty before al Quaeda) but Big Brother is forever.

It has been debunked constantly by people more qualified than me on the issue. But if you want to go back to primary sources why the Executive (President) making laws (the domain of the Legislative) is a bad thing for liberty and good government, Federalist No.47 has an answer;

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

The US Constitution allows a small area where the Executive can intersect with the Legislative, and that is the veto. The Executive cannot make laws up (like an executive order which allows him to bypass FISA’s requirements). It is just stupid, as FISA gives the executive every possible advantage anyway, including retroactive wiretaps. They would trade away what makes America strong for what?

Just as it is to blindly and constantly DISagree with the executive, especially for the MSM, and this is something the NYT is regularly accused of.

I am most interested in good government. Poor governing adds inefficiencies and burdens to liberty, society, economy and culture. Liberty and prosperity are impossoble when a people are trapped under poor government or a tyrannical arm of government.

Charles Harpur believed that the biggest drag on a people was the avarice and greed of a poor political system. It is a social burden on the moral and ethical fabric of the people. A good recent example is the AWB, it appears to have been encouraged, and is now being excused or explained away. Poor government hurts more than just farmers who got payed less for their wheat than Saddam Hussein.

Anyone who is interesed in good government should be permanently suspicious of the executive and political parties. Especially when an individual and party hold power across two arms of government. Australian parliament embeds the executive in the legislative, which means we have to be doubly vigilant over the executive’s behaviour.

That’s the way governments work. The constitution confers powers on elected officals, and appointed officials execute those powers as directed. It happens in Australian ministries all the time. If there’s a legal issue involved in preparing the policy advice, officials get legal advice from the appropriate body, and prepare their recommendations acccordingly.

Sorry, I do not mean to sound snarky.

It’s a judicial decision.

It’s about a particular person’s liberty and rights. It calls for due process.

What decisions would you be unhappy with elected officials or the head of the executive making Rob and why?

From what I’ve read, the person that makes the decision to prosecute elements of this program is the President of the United States. He is a directly elected official, with certain powers conferred on him by the Constitution. It is entirely appropriate and within the spirt of representative democracy that it is he, not a judicial officer, who makes the decision about an operation designed to safeguard the United States, whose security is, of course, his ultimate responsibility.

We operate in a similar way. Out AG can approve a warrant against a person involved in terrorism. Here again the decision is made by an elected representative of the people. If the people don’t like his decision, or the Prez’s, they vote him (or his government) out.

Personally, I strongly believe that all significant decsisions by the executive arm of government should be made by elected officals. That’s why I think our system is superior to the Americans’, where equivalents to our Ministers are not elected, they are appointed.

That said, if I were an American, I would be quite confortable with a senior professional (head of agency) like Hayden making a judgement about a certain course of action - strongly informed, as he pointed out in his speech, by his own legal people - and a strong culture of organisational ethics, and the President signing off on it if he agreed.

Finally, repeating myself I daresay, I strongly disagree with your contention that our way of life relies on judicial officers making key policy decisions. It is elected officals who should make those decisions because they are accountable to the people.

No. Yes.

You said this.

“Yes I do, with an important proviso: the Amercian in question must be reasonably believed to be doing something seriously bad. As Bush said, if you’re an American talking to Al Qaida we want to know about it. What’s to object to in that?”

We have a long tradition of trying to make sure that the people who make the decisions about who’s doing somehting ’seriously bad’ are not political stooges and apparatchiks. That’s why we invented the traditions of the judicial branch of government - independence, tenure that kind of stuff.

You don’t seem to want to defend our way of life (which has judicial officers making important decisions like this). You want to destroy our way of life and have any old stooge of the left or right deciding whether the person who is being surveilled is “reasonably believed to be doing something seriously bad”.

If that’s right, then you’re not a republican or a democrat or a conservative or a liberal.

Y’know Rob, Dubya could sodomise a fluffy white kitten on TV in primetime and, along with the other few lollards leftyou’d still be gamely trying to frame it as another bold move in the war on terror.