Last week, Michael Mukasey was on a fear tour during Congressional recess, and gave a much publicized and tearful speech that seemed to boil down to "we owe it to the people who died on 9/11 to give the telecoms who spied on you retroactive amnesty."
He also dropped a bit of a bombshell in that speech, that Greenwald picked up on immediately. Here's the full Mukasey quote:
Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."
Setting aside the outright lie Mukasey tells, that a warrant would have been required for that target outside the United States, there's the "startling new revelation", as Glenn says, about this pre-9/11 intelligence failure that as of yet has gone unreported. It wasn't included in testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Glenn:
Even under the "old" FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it's really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have -- and should have -- eavesdropped on that call and didn't need a warrant to do so. So why didn't they? Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.
Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrant to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration knew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.
Olbermann has picked up on the story, questioning whether Mukasey is confused about details, and making this story up out of whole cloth, or whether this is yet more indication of the incompetence of the Bush administration, or whether it is actual willful negligence on the part of the administration.
I tend to lean toward incompetence, but I wholeheartedly agree with Olbermann and Greenwald and others who have called attention to this assertion by Mukasey that Congress needs to get his ass in a chair before a committee or two to testify about this. And that should happen before any legislation regarding intelligence, particularly FISA, is acted upon.
As a bit of an aside, let's go back to what was happening prior to the attacks on 9/11, presumably when the intelligence community was somehow grappling with a phone call--that most certainly could have been legally monitored--from Afghanistan. We know Bush was in Crawford, and we know that's where he received the infamous August 6 PDB: "Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.", the PDB that was ignored. But what else was the administration grappling with that summer? Here's one small thing that we now know was occupying the administration, thanks to Eric Lichblau's newly released book, Bush's Law.
A Washington reporter for another major newspaper drafted a story that was set to run on September 12, 2001, disclosing the unusual arrangements that the Secret Service had made allowing one of President Bush's underage daughters--Jenna Bush, then nineteen--to make a bar-hopping trip south of the border.... The timing of the south-of-the-border drinking jaunt was particularly rich because it came less than a week before Jenna Bush was to appear in court in Austin, Texas, on a charge of underage drinking; in Mexico, the drinking age was only eighteen. As drafted, teh story detailed how American and Mexican government agents, working together in a remarkable diplomatic collaboration, managed to pull off the trip from a base at a Mexican Best Western, with the security and logistics for Jenna Bush and her friends arranged at high levels of each government. (p. 13)
That's what at least part of our government was focused on, "security and logistics for Jenna Bush and her friends" on a drinking binge. Which leads us back to both incompetence and negligence.
*Note: Eric Lichtblau will be liveblogging about his new book here, on Sunday at 7:00 p.m. EDT.