Kudos to Senator Feingold

Kudos to Senator Feingold for using his time for questions at the Senate hearings on the warrantless wiretapping to slap down the Attorney General's ridiculous line of argument that Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt ordered warrantless wiretaps too so it's ok to do them now.

He asked the Attorney General that since those presidents were acting before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 to create a secret court to issue warrants for just these cases, weren't those examples not really relevant to the issues we are facing today with this program? Unbelievably, the Attorney General said that they were still relevant. Did he used to get away with this kind of argument in the courtroom?

Feingold's statement on the warrantless wiretapping has this nice summary of how President Bush and his advisors are misleading the public on this issue:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 to create a secret court, made up of judges who develop national security expertise, to issue warrants for surveillance of terrorists and spies. These are the judges from whom the Bush Administration has obtained thousands of warrants since 9/11. The Administration has almost never had a warrant request rejected by those judges. They have used the FISA Court thousands of times, but at the same time they assert that FISA is an “old law” or “out of date” and they can’t comply with it. Clearly they can and do comply with it – except when they don’t. Then they just arbitrarily decide to go around these judges, and around the law.

The Administration has said that it ignored FISA because it takes too long to get a warrant under that law. But we know that in an emergency, where the Attorney General believes that surveillance must begin before a court order can be obtained, FISA permits the wiretap to be executed immediately as long as the government goes to the court within 72 hours. The Attorney General has complained that the emergency provision does not give him enough flexibility, he has complained that getting a FISA application together or getting the necessary approvals takes too long. But the problems he has cited are bureaucratic barriers that the executive branch put in place, and could easily remove if it wanted.

You can find the rest here.