Brazen Dishonesty From The Wall Street Journal (warrantless wiretapping)

[babylonsister]

http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2009/01/brazen-dishonesty-from-wall-street.html


Friday, January 16, 2009
Brazen Dishonesty From The Wall Street Journal
The Anonymous Liberal


I know, I know. It really shouldn't surprise anyone at this point that the Wall Street Journal would use its editorial page to, yet again, brazenly mislead its readers, but it still bothers me. The headline of the editorial is "The Wiretap Vindication" and it begins with this:

Ever since the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program was exposed in 2005, critics have denounced it as illegal and unconstitutional. Those allegations rested solely on the fact that the Administration did not first get permission from the special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Well, as it happens, the same FISA court would beg to differ.

As I explained yesterday, the court did no such thing. The lengths to which right wingers are going to try to spin this opinion as "vindication" of Bush's law-breaking is reaching comical heights. Consider the claim above that the allegations of law-breaking by Bush's critics "rested solely on the fact that the Administration did not first get permission from the special court." This is almost true except, of course, for one key detail: the reason it was problematic that Bush didn't first go to the FISA court was because the law, at the time, made it a felony not to do so.

Let's keep in mind the general timeline of events here:

1) From 1978-2006, there was a law in place that said "don't do X; if you do X, it's a felony."

2) The Bush administration secretly did X.

3) When it was caught doing X (a felony under existing law), it argued that it had the "inherent authority" to do X regardless of what the law says, a claim that has no support in constitutional case law.

4) This "inherent authority" argument was emphatically rejected by the Supreme Court in the Hamdan case in 2006 in a virtually identical context, causing widespread wailing and gnashing of teeth among right wing true believers (see McCarthy, Andrew).

5) The Bush administration, after a series of adverse court rulings, was finally forced to go to Congress in 2006, and Congress amended the law to expressly allow the Bush administration to do X.

6) Now the FISA Court of Review has ruled that Congress was within its authority to pass that law and so the Bush administration is free to do X.

7) Vindication!

No, it doesn't make any sense. But that's the parallel universe where most right wingers are living at the moment. Somehow when a court declares that a law passed by Congress is constitutional, this vindicates brazen violations of a prior version of that law.

[spanone]

1. rupert murdoch has turned it into another of his tabloid rags

[babylonsister]

2. I just hope people keep calling them out. nt