General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: FISA & EPCA the facts & nothing more [View all]Monkie
(1,301 posts)im sorry, but i am a little disappointed, you claim expertise in legal matters, claim to represent just the facts, then accuse greenwald of "flat out distorting" while ignoring something, a basic fact, that anyone with even the most basic "armchair" knowledge of the legal profession would know.
if there is ambiguity in the language used to define law, then lawyers will use this ambiguity to claim the right to bend the law, or break the spirit of the law, and judges will allow this, if this whole process then takes place in secret, and when one of the basic checks and balances a democracy has, the oversight of the public, or a free press, is missing, then there is a real danger for abuse.
now i am not a lawyer, but i work with language in other ways, PR and advertising is where my experience of this ambiguity comes from.
and when the law contains phrases such as " not intentionally" and "reasonably believed", well, this is so ambiguous i could not only drive a bus through it, i could turn the bus around in it.
you also make claims about the retention of documents, where you yourself are being disingenuous, to put it politely, because this is the quote from the official interviewed by the guardian:
A senior US intelligence official told the Guardian: "Under section 702,
~edited out the fluff to get to the relevant part~
These procedures are approved on an annual basis by the Fisa court.
i think this proves my point about lawyers and busses, the quote from the official is, these procedures are approved on a annual basis, that is something completely different from "a warrant is only good for a year", it has already been shown/proven that other blanket fisa warrants that had a time limit of 3 months have been renewed every 3 months for the past 7 years, so who is the person that is flat out distorting, you, or greenwald and the other lawyers he quotes?
now maybe you are right, and greenwald is wrong, in saying the fisa court is not a rubberstamp, but you dont provide the actual data we have seen, which is how many times the government has ben reigned back by this court, which i think is quite a important metric when judging if the court is "rubber stamping" or not. of course you could argue that this means the law is being applied correctly, but i dont think you really want me to dig up examples where this is not the case, we only have so much time in a day, or not?
lastly, you wave away the rest of the article as hearsay and speculation, but lets look for a minute who it is that is doing the "speculating", on the one hand we have you, a anonymous expert, and on the other we have greenwald, a lawyer, jameel jaffer, deputy legal director at the ACLU, and jack balkin, professor of constitutional law at yale university, and i dont think anyone else has any doubts regarding who's appeal to authority is more convincing here.
i do welcome a discussion, and i think i have covered most of what you claim, but to me your post does begin to look like cheerleading and a lot less authoritative and balanced than your original post on this subject implies.
i dont mind "giving" you the point that there is _some_ tiny amount of oversight of the program by the FISA court that greenwald does not acknowledge, but this is so minor. i am most disappointed that someone that claims legal expertise and balance would try to deny or ignore the obvious ambiguity in the wording of the law, something that i would think is a basic requirement to be a expert, recognising dangerous ambiguity.
and when we couple this with the fact that someone else already showed that you were wrong about the law as it pertains to email, i think it is fair to say that your claims of authority and fact have been debunked.