A federal judge in the Northern District of California has ruled in favor of a challenge to the Bush Administration's terrorist surveillance program, saying that the Executive branch has no authority to conduct warrantless surveillance except under the conditions set forth by Congress in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The lawsuit, brought by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Muslim charity, alleged that the National Security Agency violated the FISA Act when it secretly monitored the foundation's communications under the controversial program. The judge ruled that FISA is the "exclusive" means of conducting such surveillance and agreed with the foundation's complaint.

"Congress appears clearly to have intended to - and did - establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted. Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch's authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities."

The Bush Administration has consistently argued that the president's authority to order the surveillance stems from his inherent power as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. It says that enemy surveillance is a function of war fighting and not subject to congressional or court oversight. The Administration also argues that the terrorist surveillance program is legal since it monitors only communications in which at least one of the parties is outside the United States.

The judge's ruling in the case seems to run afoul of Constitutional law. Constitutional powers cannot be "limited" by statute, only by an amendment to the Constitution. Just as a presidential Executive Order declaring that Congress cannot pass a law raising taxes would be unconstitutional, it is similarly unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law limiting the president's authority to command the armed forces in war time. Supporters of the terrorist surveillance program argue that the war on terrorism trumps Congress's intent in the 1978 FISA Act, while the program's detractors say that FISA is the legitimate governing standard. Whatever the opinions of the opposing sides, this case seems destined to one day be decided by the Supreme Court.

With little fanfare and scant media attention, the Bush Administration released a new report on progress in Iraq to Congress in May. The report concludes that the Iraqi government has made "satisfactory" progress on 15 of 18 benchmarks established by Congress and the Administration. That is double the number of satisfactory marks the Iraqi government received in a similar report one year ago, as the troop surge was being fully implemented. The remaining benchmarks that Baghdad still has work to do in order to meet are the hardest, including disarming militias and distributing oil revenues. Still, the sheer number of benchmarks showing progress compared to a year ago is another confirmation of the success of the Bush Administration's troop surge.

Democrats in Congress do not see it that way, however. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that Iraq would have made more progress if the United States had withdrawn, rather than add, troops. "The administration...has repeatedly missed opportunities to shift this burden to the Iraqis and appears willing to do so again," he said. "[T]here is broad consensus that there is no military solution and only a political settlement among the Iraqis can end the conflict." But the Iraqi government is increasingly providing that political solution, thanks in no small measure to the security improvements brought about by the troop surge and the growing capabilities of Iraqi Army and police forces.

Perhaps the best indicator of progress in Iraq is the slight but perceptible shift in Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's position on the war. His top foreign policy adviser, Susan Rice, said in an interview yesterday that Obama will listen to the counsel of the commanders in Iraq, if elected, and declared the candidate's pledge to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration a "timetable" as opposed to a deadline. That slight softening of Obama's position on the war reflects the growing realization that conditions in Iraq are different and that the American people realize that there is a chance for a real victory there.

A 700-page study of the Iraq war and its aftermath by the United States Army released yesterday concludes that the post-war occupation phase of the conflict suffered from under-staffing and from incorrect assumptions by commanders as to just what the Army's role would be.

"Few commanders foresaw that full spectrum operations in Iraq would entail the simultaneous employment of offense, defense, stability, and support operations by units at all echelons of command to defeat new, vicious, and effective enemies.

[The] post-war situation in Iraq was severely out of line with the suppositions made at nearly every level before the war."

That means that the Army was operating in a "liberate and go home" mindset in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad, and expected Iraqis to take control of the country in very short order.

Critics of the Bush Administration's pre-war planning will seize on the report's conclusions as proof that the president led the nation to war without adequate preparations for the aftermath. That charge is necessarily informed by hindsight, however. Everyone agrees that the post-war occupation plan turned out to be insufficient to handle the conditions in the country, but that is not proof that there was no plan.

President Bush announced today that the United States will drop North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for the communist regime's cooperation in the Six Party Talks. After months of stalling and diplomatic wrangling, North Korea turned over a declaration of all its past nuclear activities today to China, the host of the Six Party Talks, which will share the information with the U.S, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. The de-listing of the North as a terror sponsor clears the way for food and fuel aid, desperately needed by its impoverished people, to be delivered. Until today, North Korea had been resisting releasing the new declaration, saying that it had already made a complete declaration of its nuclear activities at the end of last year. The Bush Administration disputed that and insisted that the North provide more details about its clandestine nuclear programs. It appears that Kim Jong-Il, the North's reclusive and eccentric leader, gave in to that demand today.

At the White House today, President Bush said that the new developments were the "beginning of a process of action for action."

"If North Korea continues to make the right choices, it can repair its relationship with the international community. If North Korea makes the wrong choices, the United States and its partners in the six-party talks will act accordingly.

If they don't fulfill their promises, more restrictions will be placed on them."

Critics of the announcement said that the North had routinely violated international agreements, including with the United States, and could not be trusted. Former Assistant Secretary of State and United Nations Ambassador John Bolton declared it, "shameful," saying the deal represented, "the final collapse of Bush's foreign policy."

Bolton is right to be suspicious, and it may well be that the agreement will not be able to be fully judged for several years and without full verification in the form of inspections. But the Bush Administration is content to call this a major diplomatic victory and is optimistically looking forward to putting the United States on firm footing with respect to the threat from North Korea before the president's term expires.

In a first of its kind ruling, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned the detention of a Guantanamo Bay detainee, ordering the government to give him a new hearing or release him. The detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese Uighur captured in Afghanistan, has been held at Guantanamo for more than six years on suspicion of joining a Chinese Muslim group and attending an al-Qaeda training camp. The court's ruling was handed down last Friday.

Parhat petitioned the D.C. Circuit court under the protocol established by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional last week. Under the act, the D.C. Circuit is the court designated by Congress to review so-called combatant status review tribunals. In its ruling, the Supreme Court said that Congress had improperly suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the case of the detainees, granting them access for the first time to U.S. civilian courts. But Parhat's case seems to confirm that the process set up by Congress in the act can indeed work; and that the Supreme Court's decision to essentially shut down the review process was premature.

David Remes, a lawyer representing several Guantanamo Bay detainees, said that the decision would be significant in the cases of other detainees pending before various federal courts. "[The decision] makes clear that the government can be required to transfer or release an individual if it is determined that the individual has been improperly classified as an enemy combatant." This is what Congress intended in setting up the review system. But the decision may also, ironically, be the last of its kind, as no one is really sure what form the new court review process mandated by the Court will take. The Supreme Court, in attempting to extend more legal rights to Guantanamo Bay detainees, may have actually brought a system capable of impartially weighing the evidence against them to a screeching halt.

If you're considered a "wacko," a "wack job," or a liberal, the Justice Department in 2006 likely had no interest in you working at the agency.

The Justice Department's inspector general today released a report that found that the DOJ, under President Bush, inappropriately injected politics into hiring programs. Problems were found in hiring practices during 2002 - when John Ashcroft was attorney general - and in 2006, under Alberto Gonzales. 2006 was apparently full of many more flagrant violations of the law and department policy.

"We found that in 2006 the Screening Committee inappropriately used political and ideological considerations to deselect many candidates," the report states.

The AP has a quick hit on the report, which said members of a screening committee were asked to weed out "wackos" and ideological "extremists" trying to get accepted into a competitive honors program for entry-level attorneys or as summer interns. The committee rejected applicants with liberal or Democratic affiliations at a much higher rate than those with Republican, conservative or politically neutral backgrounds. AP notes that one candidate, a top Harvard student fluent in Arabic, was put in a "questionable" category evidently because of his membership in the Council on American Islamic Relations.

This only adds fuel to the fire still blazing over the U.S. attorney firings, for which several officials, including Gonzales, are still under investigation.

Some juicy highlights of inappropriateness I picked out of the report after the jump.

Anbar Province, once Iraq's wild and lawless west, is about to be handed over to Iraqi security forces by the U.S. military. Anbar is the largest of Iraq's 18 provinces and the home of some of the fiercest fighting of the war and the insurgency. Cities like Ramadi, al-Qaim, near the Syrian border, and Fallujah were once virtual no-go zones for U.S. military personnel. Now they are deemed peaceful enough to entrust their control to the rapidly improving Iraqi Army and police forces.

The U.S. poured resources into Anbar as part of the troop surge, aiming to break the Sunni-led insurgency there and in Baghdad. They found local tribes increasingly more willing to work with government and coalition forces, after years of brutal domination by al-Qaeda linked foreign militants in the region. Dubbed the "Anbar Awakening," the tribes' turn toward the coalition continues and is largely responsible for breaking the back of al-Qaeda in Iraq and for the reduction in violence throughout the country.

The handover is more evidence of the success of the Bush Administration's troop surge. Violence against U.S. personnel and Iraqi civilians has come way down in recent months, helping to secure not only Iraq, but funding for the war through 2009. Iraq has been surpassed by the economy and especially high gas prices as the main issues in the presidential race as coverage has faded from the national news and cable shows due to the improving situation there. There is still much work to be done in Iraq, reports indicate that four Americans, two troops and two civilians, were killed this morning in Baghdad. But despite these isolated incidents, it is increasingly clear that Iraq is on the right path toward relative stability and responsible governance.

Via RedState's Moe Lane: Sen. Russ Feingold will not filibuster FISA. As Lane points out, Feingold is a star in the McCain constellation, having co-sponsored the famous, or infamous, Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold.

Senator Feingold promises the FISA compromise won't pass quickly, but not that it won't pass. He refers to the surveillance program of the last six years as misstep, and is seeking a commission to assess our surveillance needs, but the former McCain ally won't be filibustering. That's something I file under: Hmm. Interesting.