FISA Court Required Warrants For Spying on Iraqi Insurgents?

[babylonsister]

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004222.php

FISA Court Required Warrants For Spying on Iraqi Insurgents?
By Spencer Ackerman - September 18, 2007, 2:37PM

Here's something unexpected. During the hearing, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) asked to see the FISA Court rulings from earlier this year, in closed session, that McConnell and Wainstein and others have said required a probable-cause based warrant for purely foreign-to-foreign communications, prompting the August revision to FISA. McConnell's lawyer, Benjamin Powell, said that as the rulings compounded this year, the intelligence community found itself "in a place" where more and more foreign communications became covered by FISA, contrary to the original language and intent of the act.

Then McConnell dropped a bombshell: the rulings required the NSA to get a warrant before listening in on the communications of Iraqi insurgents who kidnapped U.S. soldiers.

Video at this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azra2yBf0oo

The ACLU has filed motions with the FISA Court to obtain those rulings. If the court ultimately rules in the ACLU's favor, we'll be able to see whether this extreme claim -- it's safe to say no one thinks the NSA needs warrants to conduct surveillance on Iraqi insurgent communications -- is based on an explicit order of the Court or on a lawyer's interpretation of a FISA Court ruling. Or, for that matter, whether McConnell has, again, said something about surveillance that just isn't true.