But If We Define Stateless Terrorists As Foreign Armies, And Wiretaps As Free Cherry Pie Instead Of Searches….
By Don’t believe me about whether FISA authorizes warrantless wiretaps? Well, you may want to ask our famously libertarian attorney general what he thinks:
“Now, in terms of legal authorities, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provides — requires a court order before engaging in this kind of surveillance that I’ve just discussed and the President announced on Saturday, unless there is somehow — there is — unless otherwise authorized by statute or by Congress.”
I will concede that questions of what constitutes a civil libertarian have a certain Potter Stewart quality to them. But there are some easy cases. And once you’ve gotten to the point of being so desperate to cook up whatever half-assed results-oriented interpretation you can get your hands on in order to justify warrantless searches that you’re putting forward arguments that Al Gonzales finds too transparently wrong to endorse, you’re either not a civil libertarian, or you’re a hack. There is no third category, although there may be considerable overlap between the two categories.