A JUDGE, FISA AND FREDO

A former FISA court judge speaks out against Pres. Fredo's bypassing of the FISA court.

Judge Criticizes Wiretap Program
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 24, 2007

Judge Lamberth, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, disagreed with letting the executive branch alone decide which people to spy on in security cases.

“The executive has to fight and win the war at all costs,” he said. “But judges understand the war has to be fought, but it can’t be at all costs.” He added: “We still have to preserve our civil liberties. Judges are the kinds of people you want to entrust that kind of judgment to more than the executive.”

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth of federal district court in Washington, said it was proper for executive branch agencies to conduct such surveillances. “But what we have found in the history of our country is that you can’t trust the executive,” he said at a convention of the American Library Association.

Bush domestic spying program flawed, former FISA court chief says
By Greg Gordon McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Sat, June 23, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The former chief judge of a secret national security court took a swipe Saturday at the administration’s recently halted domestic spying program and said he insisted from the outset that the information gleaned must not be co-mingled with intelligence gathered under court warrants.

Lamberth declined to say whether he believes the National Security Agency’s wiretap program was illegal.

But he said he has "never seen a better way" to conduct domestic spying than under the national security court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The court secretly approves warrants for wiretaps and searches in counterterrorism and espionage investigations.

"I’ve seen a proposal for a worse way," Lamberth said. "That’s what the president did with the NSA program."


When the NSA program to monitor overseas calls was first proposed in late 2001, Lamberth said, he had "many discussions" with Attorney General John Ashcroft and John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer whose legal opinions argued that the president has expansive emergency powers during wartime.

"My primary motivation was, if the president was going to assert this authority … that it be done totally separately," he said. "If anything was presented to the FISA court that came from that program, the FISA court had to be told about it. Then we had to rule on whether it was illegally obtained or not."