Two presiding judges were made aware of the NSA Surveillance Program twice within the last 4 years by the Justice Department. Both of the judges apparently had serious misgivings about the legality of the program. They went so far as to tell DOJ that no evidence obtained through the program could be used as a basis to obtain a warrant from the court.
Of course that didn't stop DOJ from slipping one past them after they had been told not to use this information;
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, and her predecessor as presiding judge, Royce Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of telephone phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal.
The new report reveals the depth of their doubts and their efforts to protect the court from what they considered potentially tainted evidence, the newspaper said.
James Baker, a top lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, alerted Kollar-Kotelly in 2004 that the government's failure to share information about the domestic spying program had rendered useless a screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information, the Post said.
Kollar-Kotelly complained to Justice, prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program, the newspaper said, citing sources.
In 2005, Baker learned that at least one government application for a FISA warrant probably contained NSA information and that was not made clear to the judges, the newspaper said.
Here are some of the things I don't understand about the administration's and supporters of this program claim that this is legal;
I've heard a lot of talk around here about how the President doesn't have to obey any laws that "restrict his constitutional authority to wage war". I've also heard the terms "spy", "foreign agent", and "foreign enemy" used to describe the targets of the surveillance.
If it is true that any law that attempts to restrict his power to wage war are unconstitutional, then the entire FISA court is unconstitutional. Therefore, why is the Justice Dept and the FBI consulting with FISA at all?
Similarly, why did they go through the trouble of altering FISA, (through the Patriot Act)an unconstitutional law, while they were in the middle of a war?
If these people are truly spies or foreign enemies, then (according to some here) we are not obligated to utilize the court/legal system at all. So again, why are they bothering to ever go through this extremely arduous (they claim) process?
