Glenn Greenwald, in full crow, writes of the re-connection of the President and FISA over the (remarkably) controversial NSA surveillance program: For those people (as opposed to the Bush followers who support anything the administration does no matter what and cheer on any expansion of power), this is going to be a hard pill to swallow and then digest. There is simply no way to reconcile (at least honorably) the

Even as a Washington Post/ABC News poll—in itself a bit deceiving (on which, more later)—reveals that 66% of Americans “said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made,” many of the usual suspects (be they Bush-haters angling to scuttle the Hayden nomination to DCI, or civil liberties absolutists looking to stroke themselves for an ostentatious “willingness” to surrender a bit of security for

More attempts by our “adversarial” press (and their leak-happy counterparts in the CIA) to gin up controversy, this time, presumably, to try to scuttle the appointment of Gen Michael Hayden as DCI. From USA Today: The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA

From AP/Breitbart, “Sen. Specter Threatens to Block NSA Funds”: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said Thursday he is considering legislation to cut off funding for the Bush administration’s secret domestic wiretapping program until he gets satisfactory answers about it from the White House. “Institutionally, the presidency is walking all over Congress at the moment,” Specter, R-Pa., told the panel. “If we are to maintain our institutional prerogative, that may

From Powerline, who posts more of the transcript, and AJ Strata, who concludes that It was not actually the fact that NSA bypassed FISA—it was actually that Bush was opening the NSA leads to FBI investigation which were making their way to the FIS Court—where these leads were being rejected by the head judges as ‘illegal’ leads! The so called ‘tainting’ of FISA some of the FIS Court judges complained

Both Powerline and AJ Strata are looking into an important NSA/FISA-related story that is (shockingly!) being interpreted differently by the NYT and the Washington Times.  First, here’s John Hinderaker: Yesterday, five former judges of the FISA court testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the National Security Agency’s international terrorist surveillance program. Some observers have alleged that the NSA program is illegal to the extent that it includes surveillance conducted

In a change of course, the Bush administration on Wednesday and Thursday offered new operational details to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on the NSA foreign intelligence surveillance program, with press secretary Scott McClellan suggesting on Thursday that the White House would listen to ideas that lawmakers have about legislation, but that the President would resist any move that threatened to compromise the program. According to CBS News: The

As a follow-up to their Thursday editorial calling for the abolition of FISA (which I commented on at length, then later updated to counter a charge characterizing my position on the NSA controversy as “separtation of powers is stupid”—the precise opposite of what I’ve been arguing), today’s WSJ once again gets right to the crux of the issue.  From “President Kollar-Kotelly”:

From today’s WSJ (subscription only). “Abolish FISA”: Whatever happened to “impeachment”? Only two months ago, that was the word on leading Democratic lips as they assailed President Bush for “illegal” warrantless NSA wiretaps against al Qaeda suspects. But at Monday’s Senate hearing on the issue, the idea never even made an appearance. The reason isn’t because liberal critics have come to some epiphany about the necessity of executive discretion in