It's easy to like Judge Royce Lamberth, former presiding judge at the secret FISA court. He's a big man bursting with Texan bonhomie. Quips come easy to him. What doesn't, it seems, is skepticism. At least not when it comes to the government's pitiful track record of spying on American citizens without warrants. Lamberth on Saturday told a packed room at the American Library Association's national conference that he'd "seen no evidence of government wrongdoing" He said it a couple times. It sounded funny.
As has been well documented, the Bush administration ran a complete end-around on FISA and the court that is supposed to approve warrants for domestic surveillance (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, over which Lamberth presided from 1995 to 2002). And last week, An internal FBI audit of the NSL program that covered 10 percent of the national security investigations since 2002 turned up over 1,000 instances in which the FBI may have broken the law. In 700 of those, telecoms and ISPs gave the FBI information the bureau didn't request. Instead of destroying the information, the FBI kept it and filed more NSLs, which don't require any judicial oversight.
If that's not wrongdoing, what is? The government has generally chalked up what can only be described as profound and sustained abuse to lax oversight and confusion. Lamberth more or less concurred.
"Bungling," he called it. "They didn't cross all their 't's or dot all their 'i's."
That's putting it mildly. Lamberth's presentation had a mildly discordant element to it, with the judge stressing the importance of proper procedure in national security investigations then giving the administration a pass for ignoring it. He thought the FBI should have centralized the NSL process instead of farming it out to field offices
(where clueless agents ran amok). He said President Bush's NSA spying program was a "worse way" to deal with terrorist threats than adhering to FISA's requirement for warrants. He didn't agree with some Patriot
Act provisions. But in the end, the judge's assessment was clear:
"No government wrongdoing."
But federal agencies designed to protect Americans that end up spying on them without "evil intent" (to use Lamberth's words) is no cause celebre. This is what we've been getting for years: the clucking and shaking of heads, followed by a joke, as if this were all a romp in a constutional kiddie pen.
Lamberth also offered up a few snippets of his experience at the court--government agents showing up at his house in the middle of the night to get court orders signed; the embassy bombings in Africa;
having to deal with bad affidavitsin an al-Qaeda case that may have encouraged the Bush administration to forgo warrants; driving to the Pentagon just as the plane went into it on 9/11. By the time he got home that night, the government had every hijacker identified, Lamberth said
"I was privy...to every deepest darkest secret our country had."
And he knows how to keep them. Asked several times for his opinion of our illustriously impaired Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Lamberth hemmed and hawed his way out of the room. And everyone left feeling the same way they came in -- wondering and worried.
