The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court does not need fixing ("Time to fix this secret court," July 14). It needs eliminating.
Far from revisiting its structure and mission, Congress needs to acknowledge the horrific error it made in creating this monster in the first place. The very idea of a secret court, a Star Chamber if ever there was one, is abhorrent in any society and particularly so in one that likes to pretend it is the "greatest democracy on Earth."
It is painfully clear to anyone with the wits to see that the judges who sit on this court are little more than lickspittles for the federal prosecutors who appear before them. How then does this secret court that permits only testimony from the prosecution differ from those that delivered such terror in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and any other dictatorships? Small wonder the opinion of the United States is at record lows around the world.
By their own admission, the federal bureaucrats who run these programs have lied over and again, including under oath before Congress, about the scope and purpose of the programs approved by this rubber-stamp court. In the face of such overwhelming evidence, it is way past time that elected officials like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and dozens of other members of Congress stopped fawning over and defending these egregious violations of our civil and constitutional rights and started defending the rights themselves. And it is way past time as well that the justices of the Supreme Court acted like the independent branch of the government the Founding Fathers intended them to be and reasserted their proper role of mitigating the excesses of the other two branches.
Tim Murphy
Ballston Lake