| | Turley: FISA review court ruling 'wildly pro-government'
 In a ruling issued in 2008 but only revealed this Thursday, a secret federal appeals court upheld a 2007 law, the Protect America Act, which authorized the warrantless wiretapping of international phone calls and interception of emails, even when those communications involve American citizens.
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, "This opinion is wildly pro-government. It's astonishing how the court accepts all of the assertions made by the government."
"The court even went ahead and said, 'Look, there might be abuses, but there could be abuses under the warrant system,'" Turley continued. "There's one problem with that. When you are abused in the standard warrants, you know it. If you're abused by the FISA court, you don't. And the government has been successful in preventing anyone from challenging by saying, 'You can't prove that we actually intercepted you.' So it's a very weird decision."
Turley emphasized, however, that despite the way the decision is being generally reported, "for the most part, it says nothing about the criminal allegations against the president. This case specifically dealt with a law passed by Congress. It is not binding on the question of what happened before that law -- when the president went at it on his own."
As one legal blogger explains, "There is nothing at all in this ruling that offers any 'legal credence to the Bush administration's repeated assertions' that it had the power to order surveillance that violated statutory restrictions. Quite the contrary. From the moment the NSA program was first disclosed in December of 2005, the issue has always been whether the president has the 'inherent authority' to disregard a statute like FISA that purports to place restrictions on his ability to conduct surveillance of Americans. ... The court here has merely upheld Congress's prerogative to pass such a law. There's nothing here that lends any credence whatsoever to claims of law-breaking authority made by the Bush administration over the last few years."
The decision was issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which was created to hear rare appeals from decisions of the full FISA court. Turley said he sees this appeals court itself as questionable, because it "was created specifically for the FISA court, which itself is viewed by many, including myself, as being inherently unconstitutional. It was created for the purpose of circumventing the Fourth Amendment."
"This isn't even binding on the other circuits," Turley further noted, "and I expect many judges would strongly disagree with what this court said."
This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Jan. 15, 2009.
Download video via RawReplay.com
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