As I reported yesterday, one of the amendments to the PATRIOT Act Harry Reid made sure wouldn’t get a vote pertained to making it clear how the government interprets the PATRIOT Act. Mark Udall and Ron Wyden wanted to force the government to at least explain how they were interpreting the law so constituents would [...]

Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have an amendment to the PATRIOT Act that makes it clear the Obama Administration briefed the Intelligence Committees in February on an intelligence collection program, conducted under PATRIOT authority, that interprets the language of the law so broadly as to mean something it really doesn’t say. The amendment reads, in [...]

There are a number of oddly coinciding legal issues that I wanted to pull together into one post. The Administration Fudges the War Powers Act First and most obviously, today is the day the 60-day grace period for Libya under the War Powers Act expires. Obama should, by law, have to go to Congress to [...]

This is the disrespect in which our Congress holds our Constitution: they will continue to chip away at the Fourth Amendment, by passing yet another extension of the PATRIOT Act without addressing the clear abuses identified since the last extension. US Congress leaders have agreed to extend for four years an array of counter-terrorism surveillance [...]

Become a Member of Firedoglake GOAL: 1,000 New Members by June 1st Support our one-stop shop for in-depth news coverage and hard-hitting activism.   Just over two years ago, right around the time I reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a month, many of you chipped into the “Marcy Wheeler fund” [...]

Teddy did a diary this morning on a newly-reported detail in the case of Mohamed Mohamud–the Portland man accused of attempting to set off a bomb. The FBI had contacted him a year earlier than originally disclosed. The first contact with Mohamud the complaint describes took place in June 2010, after Mohamud was prevented from [...]

This Time article is designed to be a swan song to Robert Mueller’s career; it builds over almost 6,500 words to the conclusion that, “Most people inside the bureau believe that the blown opportunities to head off 9/11 would not recur today.” Mueller, the article suggests, has fixed the problems that led the FBI to [...]

Apologies in advance. I’m going to be in the weeds reading the May 6, 2004 Goldsmith opinion for a little bit. In this post, I want to point to some details of timing that, I think, suggest that the changes DOJ made to Cheney’s illegal wiretap program in 2004 included, first, a limitation on collection [...]

As MadDog and I were discussing on this thread, the May 6, 2004 Jack Goldsmith opinion on the warrantless wiretap program references an OLC opinion that appears not to have been publicly released or, even in the course of FOIA, disclosed. Thus, this Office will typically construe a general statute, even one that is written [...]

A few weeks ago, I wondered whether Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a Saudi citizen arrested in Texas for purchasing the ingredients to build picric acid, would be our first Lone Wolf. Here was a non-US person, seemingly unconnected to any known terrorist organizations; the FBI obviously used his emails to indict him. So would he be [...]