Originally posted by Joseph_Botwinick:
If the attack were to occur while the president was seeking said warrant, you would be complaining about why it took him so long.
Joseph Botwinick
Well said! I have had enough of these flag burners and Ramsey Clarks and other defense attorneys for Saddam and Islamofascists. These Baptists will be taking up a collection for Islamofascists who had their "rights" violated next. What a bunch of nonsense on stilts that the President of the United States cannot act to defend this great nation.
Now it has been posted that Bush was legal but the law is wrong. Brother, psychotropic drugs might not cure that even if one took them as prescribed.
The first significant judicial decision issued after FISA, United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, 629 F.2d 908 (4th Cir. 1980), actually applied pre-FISA standards to review warrantless electronic surveillance conducted before the statute's enactment. See id. at 914 n.4, 915. The court in Truong upheld the use of warrantless electronic surveillance, concluding that "the needs of the executive are so compelling in the area of foreign intelligence * * * that a uniform warrant requirement would unduly frustrate the President in carrying out his foreign affairs responsibilities." Id. at 913. The court identified three reasons for that conclusion: "the need of the executive branch for flexibility, its practical experience, and its constitutional competence" as the "pre-eminent authority in foreign affairs." id. at 914.
The court in Truong held that "the executive branch should be excused from securing a warrant only when the surveillance is conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons." 629 F.2d at 915. By "foreign intelligence reasons," the court meant reasons other than conducting a criminal investigation or prosecution. Thus, the court upheld the electronic surveillance in question because its purpose "was to determine Truong's source or sources for government documents" so that the U.S. government could stanch the flow of classified information to the government of Vietnam. Id. at 916. The court held, however, that warrantless surveillance was not permitted "once surveillance becomes primarily a criminal investigation," or "when the government is primarily attempting to form the basis for a criminal prosecution." Id. at 915.1
1 The court in Truong did not distinguish between ordinary prosecutions (e.g., of an ordinary American citizen for homicide) and prosecutions of an agent of a foreign power to protect against espionage or terrorism. See 629 F.2d at 916. However, the court also did not explicitly reject such a distinction. On the contrary, although Truong involved a prosecution for espionage, the court never discussed the government's motives for the prosecution, and from all that appears the government never advanced the idea that a purpose to obtain evidence for an espionage prosecution can itself be a "foreign intelligence" purpose. Attorney General Griffin Bell, who testified at the suppression hearing in the district court, described prosecution only as an "incidental" by product of a non-criminal counterintelligence investigation: "Let me say that every one of these counterintelligence investigations involved, nearly all of them that I have seen, involves crime in an incidental way. You never know when you might turn up with something you might want to prosecute." Id. at 916 n.5.