http://prorev.com/2005/12/liberals-in-denial-part-2.htm
LIBERALS IN DENIAL PART 2
YESTERDAY WE POINTED out that the Progress Report offered substantially misleading information about the Echelon spy system in its effort to take the heat off Clinton for his role in moving America towards a police state. Progress Report also challenged Byron York's National Review article pointing out the Clinton role in warrantless searches.
In fact, the presidential assault on our liberties began long before Clinton as we pointed out in 1996: "The military's extraordinary role in contemporary civilian life can be traced back at least to the Carter administration. In a July 1983 series in the San Francisco Examiner, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Knut Royce reported that a presidential directive had been drafted by a few Carter administration personnel in 1979 to allow the military to take control of the government for 90 days in the event of an emergency. A caveat on page one of the directive said, 'Keeping the government functioning after a nuclear war is a secret, costly project that detractors claim jeopardizes US traditions and saves a privileged few.' According to Royce there was a heated debate within the Carter administration as to just what constituted an 'emergency'." And the unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was signed by Carter in 1978.
What is disturbing is that the liberal Progress Report apparently sees nothing wrong with warrentless searches as long as a they are approved by a secret court. This is an example of what we call America's creeping coup: instead of the Constitution being the standard, it has become a question of whether George Bush followed the right procedures in dealing with an unconstitutional secret court. It is precisely the acceptance of such procedures that helped us end up with Boss Bush in the first place.
The whole matter was well put three years ago in Slate:
SEVENTY-FIVE LITTLE REASONS TO BE TERRIFIED OF THE FISA COURT
DAHLIA LITHWICK, SLATE, AUG 29, 2002 - Congress, in 1978, enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allowing the executive branch to still conduct surveillance and searches for foreign security purposes, but only subject to the oversight of a supersecret FISA "spy court." First mistake: ensuring presidential openness and transparency by creating a secret court.
The FISA court permits warrantless government surveillance so long as the primary purpose is to obtain foreign intelligence information. Under FISA, the government needn't show probable cause that a crime has occurred; FISA surveillance orders are valid for 90 days as opposed to 30 days for ordinary search warrants; the target of surveillance is never advised of this surveillance; and the application itself and supporting affidavits are filed under seal so that neither the target nor his attorney can ever see the allegations against him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is comprised of 11 federal district court judges secretly selected by the chief justice of the United States. These judges preside in a secret windowless courtroom, behind elaborately locked doors on the top floor of the Department of Justice on Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue NW. . .
It seems that in September 2000, the government came forward and reported that it had made about 75 material misstatements of fact in its FISA applications, including a false certification that a FISA target was not under criminal investigation. Virtually every false statement involved misstatements about information-sharing between the criminal and intelligence divisions. These misstatements happened in the Clinton administration, not Bush's. Most troubling: Had the Justice Department not come forward, the FISA court would never have learned of these lies.
No one should be surprised that misrepresentations were made: The reason we have an adversarial system in the first place is to test the truth of prosecutors' claims. The only thing the FISA court proved was that when wolves are guarding the henhouse, they eat a lot of coq au vin. . .
The point of the warrant requirement was to keep the state from inventing - planting - hypothesizing evidence without allowing you to contest it. By putting probable cause on the record, testing it before a neutral judge, and advising the target of its existence, we guard the wall between reasonable searches and government harassment. And this is why the government's 75 FISA lies are so important: They are more or less an "I told you so" postcard from the framers. . .
The courts have tended to defer to the executive branch in wartime. But the courts also know why they are in business. And "secret courts" by their very nature undermine what's best about the judiciary: They do away with openness, legitimacy, published opinions, judges with names, and adversarial proceedings. Without open courts, you might just as well just flip a coin.