Jimmy Carter and Dems to Republicans: "Hey....Democrat presidents can do it; Republican presidents cannot."



Carter allowed surveillance in 1977By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 11, 2006


Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies.
"Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign.
"And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act," he said.
The next day at Mrs. King's high-profile funeral, Mr. Carter evoked a comparison to the Bush policy when referring to the "secret government wiretapping" of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam.
The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men's rights.
In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons."
That description, some Republicans say, perfectly fits the Bush administration's program to monitor calls from terror-linked people to the U.S.
The Truong case, however, involved surveillance that began in 1977, before the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which established a secret court for granting foreign intelligence warrants.
Democrats and some Republicans in Congress say FISA guidelines, approved in 1978 when Mr. Carter was president, are the only way the president may conduct surveillance on U.S. soil.
Administration officials say the president has constitutional authority to conduct surveillance without warrants in the name of national security. The only way Congress could legitimately curtail that authority, they argue, is through an amendment to the Constitution.

When Mr. Bell testified in favor of FISA, he told Congress that while the measure doesn't explicitly acknowledge the "inherent power of the president to conduct electronic surveillance," it "does not take away the power of the president under the Constitution."

Jamie S. Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, agreed. In 1994 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Miss Gorelick said case law supports the presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches and electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes.
Earlier this week, however, Mr. Carter said it was "ridiculous" for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to say the spying is justified by Article II of the Constitution.
Republicans say they welcome such criticism because it proves Democrats can't be trusted with national security.
"Just when you thought that the Democrats' image of being soft on defense issues couldn't get any worse, enter the sage wisdom of President Jimmy Carter to save the day," said Brian Nick, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "


http://www.washingtontimes.com/natio...0722-2189r.htm

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

Horse Chiclets signed his own executive order providing for warrantless wiretaps. I linked it in some other thread, but don't feel like looking it up again.

But I would be remiss for not acknowledging and giving credit to Horse Chiclets, for he and his Presidency perhaps contributed more to the success of conservatism than just about any other thing I can think of. Jimmy, we owe it all to you. Keep up your good work, because everytime we see those horse chiclets, we are reminded once again of why we are conservatives.

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"Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival."
Winston Churchill

Never mind that FISA wasn't passed until 1978. Or that Truong was a ruling setting *limits* on presidential power, and led directly to FISA.

Or that this all occurred nearly 30 years ago. Jurisprudence and attitudes have changed since.

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Man up.

How do you figure that considering....the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men's rights and that the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons." The only way Congress could make law that lessened presidential power would be to amend the U.S. Constitution. And that ain't gonna happen!


But the U.S. Constitution hasn't changed.

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

Truong has been beaten to death. To quote from the Court of Review ruling:
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fiscr111802.html

This limitation on the President's inherent powers -- warrants are required unless the target is a "foreign power, its agents or collaborators" being surveilled for "foreign intelligence" purposes -- was later incorporated into FISA, which also clearly defined what is meant by "foreign power, it's agents or collaborators."

The other key distinction, overlooked by your link, is that Truong was not a U.S. citizen; he was, even by FISA standards, a "foreign agent."

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Man up.

The people Carter were wiretapping were foreign agents. They weren't US citizens so they were not afforded constitutional rights. If they were US citizens, it would have been a violation of the constitution. Some of the people Bush are wiretapping are US citizens, and not foriegn agents so he is violating the constitution.

Not to mention that FISA wasn't passed until Carter was out of office. This clarifies aspects of domestic and international spying and specifies that the only justifible reason to wiretap without a warrant is if both parties are foreign agents and it can be shown that the information gathered will be "relevant" to a foreign agent.

What makes you think that FISA took away a president's authority under the U.S. Constitution as Commander-In-Chief?

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

The Fourth Amendment and the oath of office in Article II.

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"I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased- short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed." (Max Beerbohm)

You DO realize, don't you....that some of the al Qaeda terrorists are American citizens? One who escaped from the Yemen prison last week and who took part in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole is an American citizen. That's just one example.

Care to prove that FISA negates a president's authority under the U.S. Constitution, Article II? For your reading pleasure........



"Vital Presidential Power"

By William Kristol and Gary Schmitt

Tuesday, December 20, 2005; Page A31

A U.S. president has just received word that American counterterrorist operatives have captured a senior al Qaeda operative in Pakistan. Among his possessions are a couple of cell phones -- phones that contain several American phone numbers. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, what's a president to do?

If the president were taking the advice offered by some politicians and pundits in recent days, he would order the attorney general to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The attorney general would ask that panel of federal judges for a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to begin eavesdropping on those telephone numbers, to determine whether any individual associated with those numbers was involved in terrorist activities.

But the attorney general might have to tell the president he might well not be able to get that warrant. FISA requires the attorney general to convince the panel that there is "probable cause to believe" that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist. Yet where is the evidence to support such a finding? Who knows why the person seized in Pakistan was calling these people? Even terrorists make innocent calls and have relationships with folks who are not themselves terrorists.

The difficulty with FISA is the standard it imposes for obtaining a warrant aimed at a "U.S. person" -- a U.S. citizen or a legal alien: The standard suggests that, for all practical purposes, the Justice Department must already have in hand evidence that someone is a problem before they seek a warrant.

Consider the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan who came to the FBI's attention before Sept. 11 because he had asked a Minnesota flight school for lessons on how to steer an airliner, but not on how to take off or land. Even with this report, and with information from French intelligence that Moussaoui had been associating with Chechen rebels, the Justice Department decided there was not sufficient evidence to get a FISA warrant to allow the inspection of his computer files. Had they opened his laptop, investigators might have begun to unwrap the Sept. 11 plot. But strange behavior and merely associating with dubious characters don't rise to the level of probable cause under FISA.

This is presumably one reason why President Bush decided that national security required that he not simply follow the strictures of the 1978 foreign intelligence act, and, indeed, it reveals why the issue of executive power and the law in our constitutional order is more complicated than the current debate would suggest. It is not easy to answer the question whether the president, acting in this gray area, is "breaking the law." It is not easy because the Founders intended the executive to have -- believed the executive needed to have -- some powers in the national security area that were extralegal but constitutional.

Following that logic, the Supreme Court has never ruled that the president does not ultimately have the authority to collect foreign intelligence -- here and abroad -- as he sees fit. Even as federal courts have sought to balance Fourth Amendment rights with security imperatives, they have upheld a president's "inherent authority" under the Constitution to acquire necessary intelligence for national security purposes. (Using such information for criminal investigations is different, since a citizen's life and liberty are potentially at stake.) So Bush seems to have behaved as one would expect and want a president to behave. A key reason the Articles of Confederation were dumped in favor of the Constitution in 1787 was because the new Constitution -- our Constitution -- created a unitary chief executive. That chief executive could, in times of war or emergency, act with the decisiveness, dispatch and, yes, secrecy, needed to protect the country and its citizens.

That is why the president uniquely swears an oath -- prescribed in the Constitution -- to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Implicit in that oath is the Founders' recognition that, no matter how much we might wish it to be case, Congress cannot legislate for every contingency, and judges cannot supervise many national security decisions. This will be especially true in times of war.

This is not an argument for an unfettered executive prerogative. Under our system of separated powers, Congress has the right and the ability to judge whether President Bush has in fact used his executive discretion soundly, and to hold him responsible if he hasn't. But to engage in demagogic rhetoric about "imperial" presidents and "monarchic" pretensions, with no evidence that the president has abused his discretion, is foolish and irresponsible."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...121901027.html

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"This is a time for a national imperative not to fail in Iraq." Condoleeza Rice, January 11, 2007

Once again, thank you Horse Chiclets. Stay in front of the camera and open your pot hole every chance you get, because every time you do, you advance the conservative cause.

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"Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival."
Winston Churchill