"I do not say a President must break the law, as you here claim. I'm saying he may if the defence of the life and liberty of American citizens requires it."

Of course, as long as he also bears responsibility like other citizens would be if he is wrong. All these discussions of illegal wiretaps, torture, etc. in clock-is-ticking type scenarios are actually valid in pointing out that there are contextual exceptions to motivate such normally illegal actions. However, they usually also miss the mark by not recognizing that someone making that decision still bears responsibility if they are wrong and violate an innocent's rights.

I see Man for All Seasons seduced not only Rick Giles, but also Mr. Bayne. Now at least I know where this baloney is coming from. I was scratching my head over that "Iraq War is illegal" nonsense.

Dunc, study up on intrinsicism, and why Objectivists are not intrinsicists. The law is not, as you would have it, The Law. It is not something intrinsic to the universe, a priori, laid down by God, immutable, to be mindlessly obeyed in all circumstances. You would have America blown up and The Law observed rather than the bomb-droppers pre-empted by an "illegal" action on the part of the President. That's just dopey, and the bit from Thomas More you just quoted (recited as a mantra by Mr. Giles) is about the dopiest expression of such a sentiment imaginable. This is war, declared by them, and war, in case you hadn't noticed, is an emergency. And war is not one discrete event—it's ongoing, till one side wins.

I do not say a President must break the law, as you here claim. I'm saying he may if the defence of the life and liberty of American citizens requires it. As I understand it, what is being sought here is the renewal of legislation that would make his actions legal, so you're at sixes and sevens with yourself here. You seem to be mixing up "illegal" with "warrantless but legal."

In any event, it's not the Senate that has been disgusting here, but the House. I am 100% in disagreement with you.

Actually, it seems the President is allowed to authorize FISA wiretaps without going through the FISC. In this case though, he was authorizing wiretaps of US citizens.

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FISA authorizes the President to approve wiretaps of non-US citizens only. Bush has been authorizing wiretaps of US citizens. This is quite simply illegal. No two ways about it.

If the Federal Government wants to wiretap US citizens on the authorization of the President & the FISC (which, as I stressed to Robert, I think is reasonable), then it needs to pass a new law, or an amendment to FISA. The President may not simply decide that he wants to exercise powers beyond those defined in law, and exercise them.

Of course, in an emergency situation, the President might be faced with allowing a terrorist act to happen, or authorizing a wiretap and facing the fallout (if any) later. In that situation, I'd be all for pardoning those involved. But this isn't an emergency situation; the President has been illegally authorising wiretaps on US citizens since 2002 (or 2000, depending upon whose reports you believe). He has systematically and intentionally violated the law over the course of six to eight years. If you have evidence to the contrary, then by all means post it.

You talk of the rule of men rather than laws while forgetting that laws exist for free men, not the other way round.

No, the laws exist for all men. If the President wants to wiretap someone, he must do so in accordance with the law – just the same as the men he sends to kill the terrorists he's wiretapped are required to act in accordance with the law.

If you are arguing that in order to fight Islamic terrorism the President must act outside the law, you are arguing implicitly that a society under the rule of law is impotent to fight evil. Or, perhaps, are you arguing that only certain individuals (highly-ranked politicians, soldiers and spies) and the companies who do their bidding should be beyond the law?

As Robert Bolt so eloquently put it:

And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's-and if you cut them down-and you're just the man to do it-d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Less poetically, but more directly, Rand wrote:

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures.

The President intentionally acted outside those objective rules for many years before being caught - and even then, he is in a sufficiently untouchable position that private litigants are going after the telcos rather than the primary culprit. That in itself should tell you something about the decline of the rule of law in the USA.

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I've watched the debate unfold on TV these last few days and concluded that what's disgusting is the House's failure to pass this bill. Not to protect companies from law suits from pomowanking traitors for assisting those charged with protecting liberty to track down foreign terrorists intent on blowing America up—and thereby ensuring those companies no longer assist—is what is disgusting.

Some of you guys are the real-life equivalents of Lenin's apocryphal "useful idiots" (I mean the saying appears to be apocrypha; the phenomenon is all too real). You haven't really taken on board the deadly intent of Islamofascists. You think the implacable can be placated. You think they'll come round if we play nice. You think we should be filling out forms in triplicate while they bomb and plot to bomb with impunity. You truly think—or behave as though you think—Bush and bin Laden are morally equivalent. You speak as though Islam's evil and America's mistakes are on a par. You think that because of America's War on Drugs western civilisation is not worth defending when it's in mortal peril. You talk of the rule of men rather than laws while forgetting that laws exist for free men, not the other way round. You're not in the real world. You're in some fucking Ron Paul wet dreamland, of no use to man but extremely useful to beast: the drooling beats of Islamofascism.

I'll go with this guy rather than Dem-scum Congressmen any day of the week.

FISC is sufficient for spying on the bad guys.  Bush's program is required for spying on everyone.  It is equivalent to placing microphones everywhere, and storing all the recordings for future use. 

It would be a great way to attack political adversaries also.  Not that Bush and his ilk would do that (Valerie Plame).

Okay - what level of oversight would satisfy you? Bear in mind that the operations involved are:

• highly classified, for a reason
• highly dangerous to all involved
• very important, in the sense that heavy casualties may result from a breach of operational security or outright failure

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Last year the remaining Congressmen who were unlucky enough to miss out on chastising Sportsmen for allegedly taking steroids got to review the wiretaps and found that the FBI had flubbed some of them.

But watching the watcher a year after the event is not good enough in my book. Especially when the watchers are partisan politicians.

With proper judicial oversight and a mandatory review of the need for the legislation every 2-years or so, I'd be happy with the measure.

Robert,

You're being too generous. The wiretaps in question though weren't even authorized by the FISC; Bush explicitly authorized the wiretaps without any judicial oversight.

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The most frightening thing about these wiretaps is the ethereal way they are regulated.

Were they warranted searches, but granted by judges in secret hearings with regular Congressional oversight I'd be less worried. If you need a judge at 3am in the morning, I see no reason why the government should not pay someone to be there. These guys funded a mission to the moon after all.

But they aren't. My objection to them rests solely on the fact that too much power is placed in the hands of one government department/official.

That is the antithesis of everything that is good and successful about the US system of government.

Depends what you mean by "making those wiretaps legal." If you mean retroactive laws legalising them, I'd be strongly opposed. Likewise, I'd be opposed to any law legalising wiretaps without judicial oversight.

However, I think there's nothing wrong with intelligence or law enforcement agencies obtaining warrants for wiretaps of US citizens. The issue here is that Bush authorised the NSA to wiretap without seeking a warrant from the FISC.

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The transition to the rule of man, not law, is nearly complete.

Yet I assume you'd oppose making those wiretaps legal?

But you'd support the proposition that the state must have the wherewithal to do the job of protecting the liberty of its citizens?

You'd say, one doesn't protect liberty by violating it?

But does liberty include the right to conspire, unmonitored, to blow people up?