All Terra, All The Time (updated)

I think National Intelligence Director (an ironic job for this man if ever there was one) Mike (“Ooga Booga!”) McConnell must think we’re as dumb as he is.

As noted by Editor and Publisher here…

McConnell confirmed for the first time (in an interview with an El Paso, TX newspaper…gotta keep this away from the New York Times, I guess) that the private sector assisted with President Bush's warrantless surveillance program. AT&T, Verizon and other telecommunications companies are being sued for their cooperation. "Now if you play out the suits at the value they're claimed, it would bankrupt these companies," McConnell said, arguing that they deserve immunity for their help.

Oh sure, act on a bogus lead from AT&T or Verizon phone records, break into the home of an elderly couple instead of an alleged “terrist,” either the man or woman is shocked into having a heart attack and dies for the screwup, and either one of the two companies ends up not being liable because they have immunity from prosecution?

I don’t think so (Update 8/26: Based on the New York Times editorial below, though, it would seem the telecoms have that immunity now based on the Dems' caving in the latest FISA nonsense, but McConnell wants some kind of retroactive immunity as well). Also…

McConnell said it takes 200 hours to assemble a FISA warrant on a single telephone number. "We're going backwards," he said. "We couldn't keep up."

Yeah, well, that may be how long it takes to do the legal prep work before submitting the warrant to a judge, though now that is overseen through McConnell and Abu Gonzales, with the Dems claiming that this utterly bogus arrangement will be revisited when this temporary law “sunsets” in six months, and I’ll believe that when I see it, boys and girls.

My point is that, since he and Abu G. oversee the warrants anyway, what is McConnell complaining about here? Or is this just some kind of pre-emptive PR strike anticipating that the Dems may restore the rule of law to this nonsense?

Also, McConnell gives the misleading impression that he must wait for surveillance to be approved by a court, when in reality (as noted by Wikipedia here)…

…The President may authorize, through the Attorney General, electronic surveillance without a court order for the period of one year provided it is only for foreign intelligence information [7]; targeting foreign powers as defined by 50 U.S.C. §1801(a)(1),(2),(3) [8] or their agents; and there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.[9]

And as Glenn Greenwald reminds us here (regarding Bushco’s claim that FISA is out of date and some relic of the rotary-phone era)…

That FISA was substantially expanded in October of 2001 -- at the administration's request -- is one of the central (and often overlooked) facts illustrating how severe is the corruption and dishonesty which lies (still) at the heart of the NSA lawbreaking scandal.

The same President who demanded changes to FISA in light of the terrorist threat, who received all the changes he demanded, and who then assured the nation he had all the surveillance tools he needed under the law, then proceeded -- the very same month -- to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of that law. Then, once caught, he sought to excuse his lawbreaking by claiming that the law (which his own administration re-wrote and heralded as sufficient) was somehow inadequate.

And with typical understatement, McConnell communicates the following in the El Paso story…

Even as he shed new light on the classified operations, McConnell asserted that the current debate in Congress about whether to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will cost American lives because of all the information it revealed to terrorists.

"Part of this is a classified world. The fact that we're doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die," he said.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Oh, excuse me for a moment, I need to stop and take a drink...there, that's better.)

Once more...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is it possible for you to stop with the fear mongering and act like an intelligent adult here, Mr. National “Intelligence” Director? I mean, it is your job to protect us, isn’t it? And isn’t that last sentence a tacit admission, then, that you don’t know what you’re doing?

O, to be ruled by adults again…

Update (as noted above): This editorial appeared in the New York Times today...

After more than a year and a half of administration stonewalling on President Bush’s illegal domestic wiretapping, it was nice to see Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, finally unburden himself in a newspaper interview. It would have been nicer if Mr. McConnell had really wanted to enlighten the public.

Take, for example, his disclosure that the government has eavesdropped without warrants on thousands of telephone calls in which one party was outside the United States. He said the government got warrants to continue spying on the person in the United States only “100 or less” times.

This was supposed to make us feel better. It did not.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to intercept communications between people in the United States and people abroad without a warrant. That is a violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.

Now we know the law was broken thousands of times. In 100 or so cases, the unlawfully intercepted calls led agents to believe that the person in the United States was a bad actor (Mr. McConnell implied, sort of, that they were terrorists), and the government’s lawyers obtained a warrant. We are still looking for that loophole in the Fourth Amendment.

Mr. McConnell told The El Paso Times that it was necessary to rush through major changes to FISA before Congress went on vacation because warrants require pesky paperwork — 200 hours’ worth each.

Really? The government applied for 2,181 FISA warrants in 2006, which the blog Threat Level translated to 436,200 hours. Figuring a 40-hour workweek with two weeks off, that’s more than 218 top-secret-cleared officials doing nothing all year but writing out FISA applications.

Mr. McConnell said telephone companies turned over call data to the National Security Agency without a court order, which may be illegal. He revealed this while praising Congress for giving the telecoms immunity from lawsuits or criminal sanctions if they continue doing that. Now, he said, Congress should absolve the companies retroactively. That would be a nice twofer: protect a deep-pockets industry that may have broken the law, and cut off judicial scrutiny of Mr. Bush’s decision to ignore FISA in the first place.

Other parts of Mr. McConnell’s interview were bewildering, like his claim that debating wiretapping in Congress will cause American deaths. It was odd that he spoke at all about matters the intelligence community still considers classified. But there was a secret Mr. McConnell was determined to keep. He was asked why the White House bitterly fought reasonable Congressional proposals to give spies a bit more needed flexibility to use modern technology. Mr. McConnell said there was “untenable” language in the bills and lawmakers refused to fix it. The White House then stampeded Congress into passing a bill it wanted, one that shredded FISA.

What was the language? Sorry, that’s classified.

This seems like as good a time as any to stick in a plug for the ACLU and its efforts to hold "the Democratic leader-sheep" accountable, so...