A Voice Of Reason

A federal judge who used to authorize wiretaps in terrorist and espionage cases criticized President Bush's decision to order warrantless surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Royce Lamberth, a district court judge in Washington, said over the weekend it was proper for executive branch agencies to conduct such surveillance. But the judge disagreed with letting the executive branch alone decide which people to spy on in national security cases. "What we have found in the history of our country is that you can't trust the executive," he said at the American Library Association's convention.

"We have to understand you can fight the war (on terrorism) and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war," said Lamberth, who was appointed by President Reagan.

Lamberth was the chief of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court until 2002. The court, established in 1978 after a series of domestic spying scandals, meets in secret to review applications from the FBI, the National Security Agency and other agencies for warrants to wiretap or search the homes of people in the United States in terrorist or espionage cases.

Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush authorized the NSA to spy on calls between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists abroad without FISA court warrants. The administration said it needed to act more quickly than the court could and that the president had inherent authority under the Constitution to order warrantless domestic spying. After the program became public and was challenged in court, Bush was forced to put it under FISA court supervision this year. The president still claims the power to order warrantless spying.

Lambert also criticized FBI Director Robert Mueller for allowing the agents in charge of all 56 FBI field offices to approve National Security Letters. These allow agents to demand information from phone companies, Internet service providers and corporations without court warrants in national security cases.

The Justice Department's inspector general recently estimated there were 3,000 violations of law between 2002 and 2005 in the FBI's use of National Security letters.

"Once they saw how the field offices had screwed this all up, I thought that would be a good time to centralize the approvals" in one Washington office that could enforce the rules uniformly, Lamberth said. "Unfortunately, Mueller and (Attorney General Alberto) Gonzales did not do that."