Top Cheney Aide: "We're One Bomb Away From Getting Rid" Of Wiretapping CourtBy Jeffrey RosenSep. 06, 2007 |
Palantir Exec: Pro-Palestine Protesters Are a 'Domestic Terrorist Movement'
Rep. Thomas Massie: 'We Should End All U.S. Military Aid to Israel Now'
Elon Musk: 'Trump is in the Epstein Files. That is the Real Reason They Have Not Been Made Public'
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt Demands 'Anti-Zionists' Be Banned Off Social Media 'Once And For All'
Three New Arrests in Killing of Infowars Journalist, Suspect Rapped About Murdering 'White Boy'
![]() Goldsmith emphasizes that he was not opposed to investigating the leak, which he agreed with President Bush did "great harm to the nation." In addition, he shared the White House's concern that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might prevent wiretaps on international calls involving terrorists. But Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, which was highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts. "We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court," Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004. In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: "They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations," he writes. Goldsmith's first experienced this extraordinary concealment, or "strict compartmentalization," in late 2003 when, he recalls, Addington angrily denied a request by the N.S.A.'s inspector general to see a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel's legal analysis supporting the secret surveillance program. "Before I arrived in O.L.C., not even N.S.A. lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department's legal analysis of what N.S.A. was doing," Goldsmith writes. Read the entire article. |