  Saturday, March 11, 2006  The law as "an important tool"  By
Anonymous Liberal  Defenders of the NSA warrantless surveillance
program want to have their cake and eat it too. They insist that
the NSA program is legal but are entirely unwilling to
acknowledge the logical consequences that necessarily follow.
Once you've dispatched with the specious argument that the AUMF
somehow provided the president with the authority to bypass FISA
--an argument which David Kris' memorandum definitively puts to
rest--you are left with a simple, undeniable truth: either this
program is illegal, or FISA is unconstitutional.  The Bush
administration and its apologists, however, are simply unwilling
to acknowledge this. In Friday's USA Today, the loathsome
Senator Pat Roberts wrote the following in an op-ed on the NSA
controversy:  While Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act to establish procedures for foreign
intelligence surveillance, this law did not, indeed cannot,
extinguish the president's constitutio