Congress’s research department, the Congressional Research Service, yesterday released a report indicating that President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of American citizens “rests on questionable legal grounds,” according to Eric Lichtblau’s and Scott Shane’s account in the New York Times. Specifically, and most strikingly, the analysis disputes President Bush’s position that Congress “authorized or acquiesced” the surveillance activities.
Thomas H. Kean, the Republican chair of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, spoke for the first time on the issue, saying that the Bush administration had failed to inform the commission about the warrantless surveillance and that he “doubted the legality of the program.” “We live by a system of checks and balances,” Kean told the New York Times. “And I think we ought to continue to live by a system of checks and balances.”
In an even more disturbing development, Representative Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) released a letter stating he was “actively misled” by the director of the National Security Agency (NSA). Holt said that he attended a 6 December 2005 privacy briefing in which NSA director Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander assured him that surveillance of American citizens was being carried out only under warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
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