Judges to be Briefed; "Impeachment" No Longer a Dirty Word?

Judges on the secret FISA court will be briefed by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on the NSA spy program:

Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.

"The questions are obvious," said U.S. District Judge Dee Benson of Utah. "What have you been doing, and how might it affect the reliability and credibility of the information we're getting in our court?"

...U.S. District Judge George Kazen of the Southern District of Texas said in an interview yesterday that his information about the program has been largely limited to press accounts over the past several days.

"Why didn't it go through FISA," Kazen asked. "I think those are valid questions. The president at first said he didn't want to talk about it. Now he says, 'You're darn right I did it, and it's completely legal.' I gather he's got lawyers telling him this is legal. I want to hear those arguments." Judge Michael J. Davis of Minnesota said he, too, wants to be sure the secret program did not produce unreliable or legally suspect information that was then used to obtain FISA warrants. "I share the other
judges' concerns," he said.

But Judge Malcolm Howard of eastern North Carolina said he tends to think the terrorist threat to the United States is so grave that the president should use every tool available and every ounce of executive power to combat it.

"I am not overly concerned" about the surveillance program, he said, but "I would welcome hearing more specifics."

Like most of us, I think the judges' concerns are not over the program so much as the secrecy with which it was implemented, and the deliberate decision that was made to bypass the FISA court.

A couple of paragraphs in the article also shed light on the nature of the NSA program:

The NSA program, and the technology on which it is based, makes it impossible to meet that criterion because the program is designed to intercept selected conversations in real time from among an enormous number relayed at any moment through satellites.

"There is a difference between detecting, so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important to note the distinction between the two," Bush said Monday. But he added: "If there is a need based upon evidence, we will take that evidence to a court in order to be able to monitor calls within the United States."

The exact nature of the program remains unknown, but this information-and President Bush's comments-do give credence to the idea that it's some sort of massive data-mining operation, that focuses not so much on specific communications by specific persons, but sifting through a massive amount of communication for anything that hints at possible terrorist operations or connections.

Dan Froomkin also writes in the Washington Post about the return of impeachment. Obviously, no one seriously thinks that Bush is going to be impeached anytime soon. But the word is no longer being bandied about only on liberal blogs:

The revelation that President Bush secretly authorized a domestic spying program has incited a handful of Congressional Democrats to discuss his possible impeachment. And while continued Republican control of Congress makes such a move extremely unlikely, the word is reemerging into mainstream political discourse.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) sent a letter on Monday to four unidentified presidential scholars, asking them whether they think Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic spying amounted to an impeachable offense. Boxer wrote that her interest was sparked after former Nixon White House counsel John Dean said the surveillance order was an impeachable offence. "I take very seriously Mr. Dean's comments, as I view him to be an expert on presidential abuse of power. I am expecting a full airing of this matter by the Senate in the very near future," she
wrote.

Ron Hutcheson writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers that "some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.

"(TM)'The president's dead wrong. It's not a close question. Federal law is clear,' said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and a specialist in surveillance law. 'When the president admits that he violated federal law, that raises serious constitutional questions of high crimes and misdemeanors.'

Again, it's obvious that unless control of the House shifts there will be no impeachment. But the fact that it's even being discussed shows how far Bush has fallen, and as with all media memes it's self-perpetuating, and discussion of it tends to propogate further discussion. The longer it lasts, the greater the chance that discussion will end in actual impeachment.