http://ga3.org/campaign/fisa

I have blasted all local San Francisco Bay areas activists, Open Gov groups and local journalists about Feinstein’s Terrorists Duck on FISA.

Congress wants to have the civil suits heaved out of court because they don’t want the public to know that the civil remedy is illusory. It’s not they’re afraid of telecoms losing the suits or state secrets being revealed, the game is rigged so neither of those two events can happen. What Congress is afraid of is the public realizing the remedy is hollow and the game is rigged.

It might be rigged, but we’re a small step toward the goal

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.

The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07…..ref=slogin

OTOH, I do think he just showed some snappy leadership talent by coming out for a second press conference today on Iraq, and saying he never changed his plan to withdraw from Iraq in 16 months, and that McCain just misinterpreted his earlier press conference.

“Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I’ve chosen to support the current compromise. I do so with the firm intention — once I’m sworn in as President — to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”

Glenn Greenwald debunked exactly this bogus justification. The so-called “important surveillance tools” are the orders allowed under the Protect America Act (PAA), which will begin expiring in August. But the PAA was a bogus, corrupt, tyrranical disaster, which Congress passed only because of White House intimidation last year. Barack voted against PAA, as he said in the HuffPo comment. Now he wants to preserve the illegal orders that PAA allowed.

Barack is just talking out of both sides of his mouth. It gets worse the more he repeats this shit.