Administration flipflop on domestic surveillance

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Wednesday January 25, 2006 · 7:31 PM PST

2006/01/25 · 19:31

Coming soon from the Los Angeles Times(not online yet)

WASHINGTON -- Four years ago, top Bush administration lawyers told Congress they opposed lowering the legal standard for intercepting the phone calls of foreigners who were in the United States, even while the administration secretly adopted a lower standard on its own.
The government's public position then was the mirror opposite of its rationale today in defending its warrantless domestic spying program, which has come under attack as a violation of civil liberties. Government wiretapping -- and who sets the rules -- has emerged at the center of a growing debate between the White House and Congress since the disclosure last month of the administration's warrantless spying program.

This certainly undermines Attorney General Gonzales' rationale justifying the wiretaps.

Can these guys possible be more dishonest?

They complain the Senate proposal would be illegal while they were secretly conducting a program even MORE questionable, to say the least.
The Washington Post also has its own version of this story coming, but the LA Times one was better written.
More from LA Times:

Justice Department spokesman confirmed Wednesday the administration opposed changing the law in 2002 in part because it did not want to publicly debate the issue.
``There was a conscious choice not to have a public discussion about it. It could have exposed the program. This was a military defense intelligence program,'' said the spokesman, who asked not be named because of the sensitivity surrounding the still-classified presidential order on wiretapping.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., accused the administration of having tried ``to paper over the legality of a secret, spying program. If they really believed the current law is too burdensome, the Bush administration should have asked Congress to change it, but they did not. Instead, a top lawyer in the Bush administration did just the opposite.''
Timothy Edgar, a lawyer on national security policy for the American Civil Liberties Union, also accused the administration of ``remarkable duplicity'' for having testified in public against the legal change while carrying it out in private. ``It seems they were being incredibly deceptive,'' he said.

Remarkable duplicity indeed. More from LA Times:

``The administration at this time is not prepared to support it,'' the Justice Department's James A. Baker said of the DeWine amendment in congressional testimony. As counsel for intelligence policy at the time, he headed the office that sought search warrants from the secret FISA court that meets inside the Justice Department.
The administration now defends the constitutionality of the warrantless domestic spying program and says it is necessary to avoid the ``cumbersome'' process of getting a warrant from the FISA court.
But in 2002, Baker told Congress it was not clear ``whether a `reasonable suspicion' standard for electronic surveillance would ... pass constitutional muster.'' Baker also said the current legal standard was not a problem.

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Administration flipflop on domestic surveillance

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