What Just Hit the Spinning Thing?
by ChrisDecember 21st, 2005 2:21 am
I wonder about the condition of the laundry that Judge James Roberson is walking out the door of the FISA court with and if we’ll ever be privy to any of it. I bet it smells something awful.
A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush’s secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.
Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court’s work
This resignation in protest will likely be easily dismissed as the politically motivated, spiteful actions of a Clinton appointee who is just out to get Junior. In a not so strange way, I have to admit that I wish that were true. I mean, if secret judges, serving on secret courts, approving secret warrants can’t stomach the NSA scandal, you can put good money on the odds that something truly awful has transpired. Every time we allow our nation to drift away from its founding documents and core principals, we lose ourselves. This is, in a word, unacceptable.
