Legal Case For NSA Program Weak, Ex-Justice Dept. Official Says

A specialist in national security law who was formerly a Justice Department official early in the Bush administration is weighing in on the extra-legal NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.

A former senior national security lawyer at the Justice Department is highly critical of some of the Bush administration's key legal justifications for warrantless spying, saying that many of the government's arguments are weak and unlikely to be endorsed by the courts, according to documents released yesterday.

David S. Kris, a former associate deputy attorney general who now works at Time Warner Inc., concludes that a National Security Agency domestic spying program is clearly covered by a 1978 law governing clandestine surveillance, according to a legal analysis and e-mails sent to current Justice officials.

Kris, who oversaw national security issues at Justice from 2000 until he left the department in 2003, also wrote that the Bush administration's contention that Congress had authorized the NSA program by approving the use of force against al-Qaeda was a "weak justification" unlikely to be supported by the courts...

Kris's views are contained both in a 23-page legal analysis that he provided yesterday to journalists and in a series of e-mails that he sent in December to Courtney Elwood, an associate counsel to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. The e-mails were released yesterday by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which obtained them as part of ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation...

"In sum, I do not believe the statutory law will bear the government's weight," Kris wrote in his paper, dated Jan. 25. ". . . I do not think Congress can be said to have authorized the NSA surveillance."

Even when the authorities try to keep to the letter of the FISA law, problems do arise, according to a new FBI IG report:

The FBI reported more than 100 possible violations to an intelligence oversight board over the past two years, including cases in which agents tapped the wrong telephone, intercepted the wrong e-mails or continued to listen to conversations after a warrant had expired, according to a report issued yesterday.

In one case, the FBI obtained the contents of 181 telephone calls rather than just the billing records to which it was entitled. In another, a communication was monitored for more than a year after eavesdropping should have ended -- although investigators blamed a third-party provider for the mix-up...

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Fine's report "is yet another vindication for those of us who have raised concerns about the administration's policies in the war on terror."

"Despite the Bush administration's attempt to demonize critics of its anti-terrorism policies as advancing phantom or trivial concerns, the report demonstrates that the independent Office of Inspector General has found that many of these policies indeed warrant full investigations," Conyers said.

Today's New York Times features an editorial about the shameful way in which the Republicans have destroyed the Senate Intelligence Committee in order to protect the administration:

It's breathtakingly cynical. Faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate sets up a panel to watch him do it and calls that control. This new Senate plan is being presented as a way to increase the supervision of intelligence gathering while giving the spies needed flexibility. But it does no such thing.

One would hope that the concerned citizens of the United States are fed up enough with all the Republican malfeasance to vote them out in this year's mid-terms.

The actions of Republican politicians, from the president on down, tell me that I may be mistaken.

The Republicans are acting like they already have future elections "in the bag", by hook or by crook.