Thursday, January 12, 2006

Warrantless NSA spying illegal -- more scholars and former officials weigh in

Top constitutional scholars and former high-level U.S. government officials explain to Congress why by spying on domestic-overseas phone calls without warrants, the U.S. National Security Agency is breaking the law. They observe the Department of Justice letter "fail[ed] to to offer a plausible defense" of the NSA's organized criminal activities. This is quite a statement -- in the U.S. legal world, there is a plausible argument for almost any position. It further demonstates that as I have observed the Justice Department has in a very self-serving manner misled the President and is now misleading the American people about what the law is. Look for the Justice Department to mislead the Supreme Court on this issue in the future, as they have done with other issues of executive power in the past, even before Ashcroft and Gonzales headed that department which we are supposed to be able to trust with federal law enforcement.

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