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FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism. The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling. The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities. But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample. FBI officials said the results confirmed what agency supervisors and outside critics feared, namely that many agents did not understand or follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensitive and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the National Security Letter, or NSL. Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to nonnegotiable demands for personal information -- demands that are not reviewed in advance by a judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially eased the rules for issuing NSLs, requiring only that the bureau certify that the records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."....
Repeal Second Amendment, Analyst Advises The Second Amendment guarantees the right of an individual to own guns and for that reason should be repealed, according to a legal affairs analyst who opposes gun ownership. "The Second Amendment is one of the clearest statements of right in the Constitution," Benjamin Wittes, a guest scholar at the center-left Brookings Institution, acknowledged in a discussion Monday. "We've had decades of sort of intellectual gymnastics to try to make those words not mean what they say." Wittes, who said he has "no particular enthusiasm for the idea of a gun culture," said that rather than try to limit gun ownership through regulation that potentially violates the Second Amendment, opponents of gun ownership should set their sights on repealing the amendment altogether. "Rather than debating the meaning of the Second Amendment, I think the appropriate debate is whether we want a Second Amendment," Wittes said. He conceded, however, that the political likelihood of getting the amendment repealed is "pretty limited." Wittes said the Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms meant more when it was crafted more than 200 years ago than it does today. Modern society is "much more ambivalent than they [the founders] were about whether gun ownership really is fundamental to liberty," he said. "One of the things that they believed was that the right of states to organize militias, and therefore individuals to be armed, was necessary to protect the liberty of those states against the federal government," Wittes said. "This is something we don't really believe as a society anymore." But challenging the Second Amendment on the basis that society's circumstances have changed since the drafting would similarly open up to question all other constitutional rights, according to Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett, who also participated in Monday's discussion....
Terrorists claim CIA files seized Terrorist groups, including Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees, have seized large quantities of CIA security files stored at major compounds of militias associated with the U.S.-backed Fatah organization of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, terror leaders told WND today. The terror leaders claimed the files contain, among other information, details of CIA networks in the Middle East. "The CIA files we seized, which include documents, CDs, taped conversations and videos, are more important than all the American weapons we obtained the last two days as we took over the traitor Fatah's positions," said Muhammad Abdel-El, spokesman for the Hamas-allied Popular Resistance Committees terror group. The Committees has been accused of carrying out anti-U.S. attacks, including a 2003 bombing of an American convoy in Gaza that killed three U.S. contractors. Hamas has the past few days taken near-complete control of the Gaza Strip, advancing on the vast majority of Fatah security buildings and positions in the northern, southern and central sections of the territory....
Federal Court Rules in Favor of 'Enemy Combatant' A federal appeals court today ruled that the U.S. government cannot indefinitely imprison a U.S. resident on suspicion alone, and ordered the military to either charge Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri with his alleged terrorist crimes in a civilian court or release him. The opinion is a major blow to the Bush administration's assertion that as the president seeks to combat terrorism, he has exceptionally broad powers to detain without charges both foreign citizens abroad and those living legally in the United States. The government is expected to appeal the 2-1 decision handed down by a three-judge panel of the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which is in Richmond, Va. The appeals panel said President Bush overstretched his authority by declaring Marri an "enemy combatant," because the Constitution protects both U.S. citizens and legal residents such as Marri from an unchecked military and from being detained without charges and a fair trial. The court rejected the administration's claim that it was not relevant that Marri was arrested in the United States and was living here legally on a student visa. "The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention," the panel found. "Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them 'enemy combatants.' "....
Ruling on detainees reignites debate The decision by US military judges Monday to dismiss the war crimes charges against two detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has reignited a debate over how to try those accused of terrorism, prompting members of Congress to challenge the Bush administration over a legal system they say denies proper rights to detainees and has yet to bring a single case to trial. In dismissing the charges against detainees from Canada and Yemen, the judges ruled that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 lacked jurisdiction because that law limits cases to those who are deemed "unlawful enemy combatants." Because a tribunal had officially deemed both men enemy combatants, the letter of the law did not allow the detainees to go to trial, the judges determined. Prosecutors say they hope to try about 80 of the 380 detainees still at Guantanamo, but all such cases are now on hold. There long have been bipartisan calls to shut down the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, but congressional efforts instead have aimed at fixing a legal system there that some consider broken, but inevitable. Members of Congress who have opposed the commissions act renewed their calls for a new system, either demanding that the detainees be moved to US federal courts or that the law be rewritten to grant detainees important rights, such as habeas corpus. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee and an outspoken opponent of the Military Commissions Act, said yesterday that legislation he and Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, have sponsored to restore habeas rights will be taken up by the committee this week. Both senators have argued that the law is dangerous because it suspended habeas corpus, or the right of detainees at Guantanamo to challenge their detention in federal courts....