Who would have thought?
This is posted over at americaBlog (Thank you John) and quotes only part of a decent Wapo article here.
The idea: As recently as Monday, the first-rate, easily-recognizable, bordered-in-neon, and truly pre-teen deception continues unchecked: For the money quote, continue down....
The article is mainly about the ass-backward technique of trying to use evidence obtained via un-warranted tapping to obtain the necessary warrant, and the neuron-snapping logical backflips it conjures up.
However, deep in the article, we see the following:
Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court's probable-cause requirement, government officials said.
So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.
Get that: The government could never get the "probable cause" standard, so they went for the "reasonable belief is the same" tack. Convinced they cannot win, the merely unilaterally change the legal definition of phrases, and then pass it off as what they had always thought. I am sorry, but would you hire this guy to defend you? (Sorry, Abu, I realize that is a hypothetical question.)
The call is buried well in the Post article (possibly to get past the editor's pen).
The article continues with
Several FISA judges said they also remain puzzled by Bush's assertion that the court was not "agile" or "nimble" enough to help catch terrorists. The court had routinely approved emergency wiretaps 72 hours after they had begun, as FISA allows, and the court's actions in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks suggested that its judges were hardly unsympathetic to the needs of their nation at war.
What does it take for people to actually say "Geez, this emporer really has no clothes..."? (Sorry for the vomit-inducing vision of Bush the way Laura must have seen at least once in their marriage)