Fighting Senility
When one speaks of failed presidents, often the first name that comes to mind is Jimmy Carter. Rarely does a president fail in both foreign AND domestic policy. Yet Carter managed to do it. Now somehow he believes that a new generation might be too young to remember that he was a complete failure.
So he goes around blasting his country’s government for its treatment of enemy combatants, of its environmental policies, of economic policies (that one in itself is just laughable), and now, he has the gall to come out and rebuke the President for domestic spying:
Under the Bush administration, there’s been a disgraceful and illegal decision — we’re not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we’re spying on the American people.
Now, whether or not the current NSA wiretapping issue is legal or not is not the subject of this post. The subject is that past precedent for domestic wiretaps without court warrants was set by Carter himself. According to the Washington Times,
in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam.
The article goes on to say,
The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men’s rights.
In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the “inherent authority” to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is “conducted ‘primarily’ for foreign intelligence reasons.”
[ Carter Allowed Surveillance in 1977 ]
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