Letters to the Editor
kovie
Published Letters: 641
-
NoOilforPacifists
[Read the article: Yesterday's ruling on NSA warrantless eavesdropping]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wow, where do I even begin to address the nonsense that is your self-imagined smackdown of this suit. You could have stopped at standing, where you at least--forgive the pun--had a leg to stand on. But you had to then go and claim that "No plaintiff in the case was wiretapped by the NSA" and "Plaintiffs were never tapped nor threatened with being tapped", which you have no way of knowing--and which even Batchelder admits is "speculative", and which is thus a specious assertion on your part. It all went downhill from there.
You then go on to cite a number of court rulings that were either prior to FISA's passing and thus superceded by FISA, or after FISA but lower court rulings, without citing what happened on appeal. But you really took the cake when you actually had the temerity to cite the Article II argument that nearly every respectable legal scholar from the right to left to Timbuktu has laughingly dismissed as patently absurd--especially given that SCOTUS has never actually struck down FISA as unconstitutional, so even if it was unconstitutional according to this reasoning, it hasn't been found to be so, and thus still stands. What next, you're going to cite some crank Bushie from Pepperdine?
Why do you even bother posting your crap here? I'm not a lawyer (as you no doubt can tell) yet I can see the holes on your reasoning a mile away. Look, I know that you guys get off on defending this "Unitary Executive who is the only thing standing between us and the evil Islamofascists who would utterly destroy western civilization" shiite amongst yourselves. But please, keep it out of the non-loonie BS-hating wing of the blogosphere. We're NOT INTERESTED.
The actual lawyers here are more than welcome to have a go at it on more technical legal grounds. Looks like there's a vast trove of stuff to pick through and have fun with.
-
engsoc
[Read the article: Yesterday's ruling on NSA warrantless eavesdropping]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]His "reasoning" goes a lot further than this single argument, which is actually relatively reasonable compared to his others. Take a look at his extended post on this and the people and opinions he cites (Hugh Hewitt, Ann Althouse, Orin Kerr, the WSJ) and see for yourself.
In any case, the point of the ACLU suit was that, because the plaintiffs claimed to have nothing to do with terrorism and thus would have no reason to believe that they would have been spied on had the NSA strictly adhered to FISA, it is the very fact that FISA was NOT being adhered to (and even now might not be, despite the administration's claims to the contrary, because there is no way to verify this at present) that gave them understandable reason to fear that they WERE being spied on UNLAWFULLY because they made calls to the mideast. That is the whole gist of their standing argument.
So while one could reasonably argue that this still might not rise to a legally sufficient level of standing, one cannot argue that their fear was not legitimate, because it clearly was, nor that it couldn't have had a chilling effect on their international communications and thus business activities, because it clearly could have and did.
It is the very arbitrariness of this program, because it was not (and I would guess still is not) subject to FISA, and the reasonable suspicion that it is being specifically targeted at people who are of mideast descent, or who communicate with people in the mideast (among others, say, political dissidents, journalists and opposing politicians, who in the past have clearly been spied upon by previous warrantless programs), that quite reasonably makes the plaintiffs fear that they are being spied, whether or not they actually are.
This is what happens when laws are brazenly broken by people in power, in secret. It sends a chill throughout the entire populace, and understandably so, because no one can know whether they have been the victims of these crimes (and they are, clearly, crimes, no matter what these constitutionally-challenged wingnut authoritarians claim in their hoary reasoning, who quite hypocritically tend to suffer spasms of apoplexy whenever it's a Democrat who does such things--Lincoln Bedroom! Travelgate! Illegal blowjobs!), and to what extent and effect. It might not give specific people standing, but it is clearly a harm done, that has to be addressed, ASAP.
Their arguments have no merit, and are merely them talking to themselves, chanting to themselves "We are right we are right we are right..." to make the evil liberal bogeyman go away. Swat at them like flies but otherwise pay them no heed.