The headline and the content show us just how pathetically impotent our Congress really is

Senate Votes To Expand Warrantless Surveillance
White House Applauds; Changes Are Temporary

By Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 4, 2007; Page A01

The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.

naturally, the wapo story blathers on and on and on about the "clashes" between the white house and the democrats, portraying the whole thing as some sort of petty partisan quarrel where the dems, unconcerned for the safety of their country, only want to make life difficult for bush and his cronies, and, in the process, manage to ignore most of the context that the average citizen should know about this awful measure... thank god we have alternative sources like TPMmuckraker...

[U]nder the bill, the primary role for the FISA Court is in issuing generalized surveillance warrants for "persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States." Those warrants don't have to name their targets, nor locate where the surveillance will take place if the attorney general shows that the surveillance methods used will mostly exclude U.S. citizens and residents. Such warrants will be approved, according to section 105(c)(1)(C), if the FISA judge determines that collecting "foreign intelligence information" is merely a "significant purpose" of the AG's request.

What happens to U.S. persons who may be tapped? There isn't any requirement for a probable-cause-derived warrant to continue surveillance on them. Instead, the attorney general would only have to create "guidelines" for surveillance on people in the U.S. as the result of one of the aforementioned warrants. Every 60 days the Justice Department's inspector general would have to report to the FISA Court and to the Congressional intelligence committees on compliance -- including handing over a list of names of those U.S. citizens and residents under surveillance during that time period. Nothing in the bill indicates any power for either the court or Congress to do anything about any American caught in the surveillance web.

Additionally, for reasons that aren't explained, the attorney general gets one last dalliance with warrantless surveillance: he can authorize surveillance for up to 15 days after the bill's passage if he says there's an "emergency situation," and the court can bless an extension of not longer than another 30 days.

after all that's come out, it's completely astonishing to me how the dems - or the r's either, for that matter - can go along with this... we know our president is a liar... we know alberto gonzales is a liar... we know that the white house has no respect for the rule of law... we know that the bush administration has, for all practical purposes, neutered the constitutionally-mandated separation and balance of powers... we know that warrantless domestic surveillance circumventing fisa has been taking place for years... what in god's name is the white house holding over the heads of our congressmen of both parties that gets them to go along with this kind of abomination...? it must be some shit, that's all i have to say...

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