Common Dreams / Published on Wednesday, December 21, 2005 by Agence France Presse
A federal judge on a court that oversees intelligence cases has resigned to protest President George W. Bush's authorization of a domestic spying program, The Washington Post said.
US District Judge James Robertson resigned late Monday from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) on which he served for 11 years and which he believes may have been tainted by Bush's 2002 authorization, two associates familiar with his decision told the daily.
The resignation is the latest fallout of Bush's weekend public admission that he authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) -- the country's super-secret electronic surveillance arm -- to eavesdrop on international telephone calls and electronic mail of US citizens suspected of having links with terrorist organizations including Al-Qaeda.
Bush's statement on the weekend that the secret program did not require FISA court orders -- according to his reading of the Patriot Act passed after the September 11 attacks, has angered civil rights groups and lawmakers, some of whom have called for a congressional investigation.
The New York Times first revealed last week the secret NSA program that officials said has likely involved eavesdropping on thousands of people in the United States. Bush said he expected the Justice Department to investigate the leak of such sensitive information.
On Wednesday, The New York Times quoted US officials as saying that "a very small fraction" of those wiretaps and e-mail intercepts were of communications between people in the United States and were caused by technical glitches.
The revelation is likely to add fuel to the firestorm over the NSA spying program.
Robertson's associates said the judge - one of 11 on the FISA court -- in recent conversations said he was concerned that the information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have been used to obtain FISA warrants.
"They just don't know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants -- to kind of cleanse the information," said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants.
In a separate story, The New York Times Wednesday quoted congressional officials as saying that the White House's oral briefings to lawmakers on the secret NSA spying program may not have fulfilled a legal requirement that such reports be in written form.
Bush, on revealing his secret order to the NSA, said US lawmakers had been briefed regularly of the spying activity.
Congressional officials consulted by the Times said no more than 14 members of Congress have been briefed orally of the program since it began, but that no aides and note-taking were allowed during the meetings.
Consequently, the daily said, the lawmakers who attended the briefings have provided starkly different versions of what they were told at the sessions, which were almost invariably led by Vice President Dick Cheney and NSA director Michael Hayden.
In 2004 and 2005, Bush repeatedly argued that the controversial Patriot Act package of anti-terrorism laws safeguards civil liberties because US authorities still need a warrant to tap telephones in the United States.
"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order," he said on April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York.
"Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so," he added.
On April 19, 2004, Bush said the Patriot Act enabled law-enforcement officials to use "roving wiretaps," which are not fixed to a particular telephone, against terrorism, as they had been against organized crime.
"You see, what that meant is if you got a wiretap by court order -- and by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example," he said in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
"A couple of things that are very important for you to understand about the Patriot Act. First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order," he said July 14, 2004 in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin.
"In other words, the government can't move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order," he said. "What the Patriot Act said is let's give our law enforcement the tools necessary, without abridging the Constitution of the United States, the tools necessary to defend America."
The president has also repeatedly said that the need to seek such warrants means "the judicial branch has a strong oversight role."
"Officers must meet strict standards to use any of these tools. And these standards are fully consistent with the Constitution of the United States," he added in remarks at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy.
He made similar comments in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 20 2005.
Vice President Dick Cheney offered similar reassurances at a Patriot Act event in June 2004, saying that "all of the investigative tools" under the law "require the approval of a judge before they can be carried out."
"And similar statutes have been on the book for years, and tested in the courts, and found to be constitutional," he said in Kansas City, Missouri.
