All of our emails and calls are giving Democrats in Congress the backbone to say NO to Bush's demand for warrantless wiretapping power.
So to avoid defeat, the Busheviks are once again playing their ace-in-the-hole - the Big Lie - which is being stovepiped into Congress through Rupert Murdoch's lie-filled NY Post.
On May 15, Spc. Alex Jiminez (left) and six other soldiers were on lookout in the Triangle of Death when insurgents attacked, killing 4 and kidnapping 3, including Jiminez.
While U.S. troops began a highly-publicized manhunt, NSA lawyers struggled to find a top Justice Department official to get an emergency warrant for a wiretap (of what I don't know - did the insurgents leave behind a cellphone or their personal address book?).
But it took them 10-12 hours because
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was out of town; Deputy AG Paul McNulty had resigned already; Solicitor General Paul Clement "had left the building"; and the other responsible official, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein was not yet authorized to approve the emergency order.
As Kagro X says,
It was the unprecedented level of corruption and idiocy in the United States Department of Justice that ground things to a halt. Everyone who hadn't yet been drummed out of government for their crookedness was just plain AWOL. And George W. Bush wants you to believe what was at fault was the only arm of government still at its post: the law itself. (Though they're trying to kidnap that in the pre-dawn hours, too.)
That's yer tuff-on-terrah pretzelnit for ya, ladies and gents. Unitary executivin' to th' max! Unless a lawyer shows up. Yikes!
And so, yet again on the FISA issue, total b.s. that has nothing to do with anything will be used to try to wrangle out a spineless surrender of everything the rule of law is supposed to mean.
When Congress held hearings on this event, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell lied to Congress - as he has now done several times.
A knowledgeable government source says the account Admiral Mike McConnell gave to the House intelligence committee about the procedure for wiretapping Iraqi insurgents earlier this year is "really terrible."
McConnell told the committee today that restrictions derived by the FISA Court this year on wiretapping foreign-to-foreign communications that pass through the U.S. prevented the NSA from surveilling Iraqi insurgents who had kidnapped U.S. soldiers for 12 hours. But the source, who is privvy to the timeline of the incident, says "internal bureaucratic wrangling," and not court-based restrictions, were responsible for the lag time. "To get an emergency warrant, you just have to believe the facts support the application that someone is an agent of a foreign power," the source says. "That takes approximately five seconds to establish if you're going after an Iraqi insurgent."
So the whole story is a Big Lie. Email and call your Representatives and tell them impeachment, not immunity:
http://democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/114
Update 1: Atrios nails it:
Republicans, as they often do, are going to rely on that tried and true rhetorical technique known as "lying." The Democrats can:
a) Use this to show how genuinely serious they are by pointing out that, once again, this administration is dangerously incompetent.
b) Use this to show how "serious" and "tough" they are by caving in to a bunch of lying bullies and handing the dangerously incompetent administration even more unchecked power.
.
