First, the story:
A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.
House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other government sources familiar with the decision.
The decision was both a political and practical blow to the administration, which had long held that all of the National Security Agency's enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal. The administration for years had declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and after it finally did so in January the court ruled that the administration's legal judgment was at least partly wrong.
And now the headline:
Ruling Limited Spying EffortsMove to Amend FISA Sparked by Judge's Decision
So a FISA court judge has ruled that a key piece of the administration's wiretapping program was illegal. You'd think that would be big news. You'd think that might even be worthy of a headline. Apparently you would be wrong to think such things.
Instead, the Washington Post has decided to frame the story as a decision that has "limited" the government's ability to spy. Which, surprisingly enough, is the spin that Rep. Boehner and his fellow Republicans have put on the story:
"There's been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States," Boehner told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto in a Tuesday interview.
"This means that our intelligence agencies are missing a wide swath of potential information that could help protect the American people," he said. Boehner added that some Democrats are aware of the problems caused by the judge's restrictive ruling and the problems it has caused for the administration's surveillance of terrorism suspects.
The Bush administration has long claimed that its actions were legal, and that those of us who questioned their actions were un-patriotic, un-American, terrorist loving traitors. We now know, however, that their actions were in fact illegal. The Bush administration broke the law, and they did so willingly. But never mind that. What matters here is that they cannot continue their illegal activities, because - heaven forbid! - a judge stepped in and applied the law as it was written.
Am I missing something here? At what point did presidential lawbreaking become an unimportant story?
UPDATE: Two additional aspects of this are worth noting:
First, the only reason we even know about this court decision is because Boehner accidentally discussed it on FoxNews. You would think that it would be big news when the House Minority leader reveals classified information on national TV. But you know what? Think that way and you would apparently be wrong.
Second, as Anonymous Liberal reminds us tonight, this program, along with the one that Alberto Gonzales recently alluded to when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, are both part of a much broader set of programs that are so secret even members of Congress cannot know about them. There is, of course, one major problem with that. Over the course of the past two years, the administration has consistently used one word above all others when defending the TSP: "limited." As many of us have long suspected, and as all of us are now learning, the word "limited" was being used in a severely limited way. They made it sound like it was the scope of all of the programs that were "limited," but as it turns out, that word was really meant to apply only to the limited number of programs that had already been revealed.
In other words, by limiting the discussion to a small subset of all of the secret - and we now know illegal - programs, they could claim that the scope of the programs being discussed was limited. Brilliant, eh?
But the larger point is still the same. The FISA Court has ruled the administration's programs illegal. Right now everyone is rushing around trying to provide a 6 month "reauthorization" (never mind that it was never actually authorized by Congress in the first place) for a set of programs that until recently we were told didn't even exist. They're doing this, it seems, because they are about to head out on August recess. The President wants the Attorney General to be given final say over the program. For now, it appears congressional Democrats are going to stand firm and require that it be reviewed by the FISA Court. Either way, when they return from break, they damn well better get on with the business of investigating just what precisely was illegal about the previous program, and just who should be held accountable for that.
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