President Odubya Gets Slapped Down

A federal judge has indeed found the Bush warrantless wiretapping program, continued under President Obama, as patently illegal.

In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.

The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration’s claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans’ international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.

The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.

The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”

That position, he said, would enable government officials to flout the warrant law, even though Congress had enacted it “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”

I've said time and time again that this program needed to end immediately.  It was patently illegal when Bush ran it, it was patently illegal when Obama continued to run it, and it was the worse abuse of Presidential power in decades.  It's also the one thing I agreed with both the Jane Hamshers and Teabaggers on:  it is a massive violation of the rights of American citizens.

Having said that, it's far past the time this program needs to be utterly dismantled, and immediately.  Both people on the left and the right should be overjoyed at this ruling:  the Left because it's a clear violation of civil liberties, and the Right because a Democratic President has control over the apparatus now.  They should be thrilled to see a blow struck against Obama's "tyranny", yes?

So no, the Eric Holder DoJ should not choose to appeal this, and they should as a result make a detailed effort to take this dark machine apart for good.