Domestic Spying Update

It's hard to keep up with all the news that's coming out about the NSA domestic surveillance program. I've pretty much resigned myself to blogging about it every few days and just including links to all the recent articles. That said, here's what's come out in the past few days.

Bush continues to defend his order:

"I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking, and that's what we're doing," Mr. Bush told reporters in San Antonio as he visited wounded soldiers at the Brooke Army Medical Center.

"They attacked us before, they'll attack us again if they can," he said. "And we're going to do everything we can to stop them."

Pretty standard boiler-plate language I'd say. What else would he'd say? But he is having a little trouble keeping the facts about the program straight:

Mr. Bush also emphasized that the program was "limited" in nature and designed to intercept communications from known associates of Al Qaeda to the United States. He said several times that the eavesdropping was "limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States."

This assertion was at odds with press accounts and public statements of his senior aides, who have said the authorization for the program required one end of a communication - either incoming or outgoing - to be outside the United States. The White House, clarifying the president's remarks after his appearance, said later that either end of the communication could in fact be outside the United States.

And opposition to the program grows even among some in President Bush's own party:

Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has already pledged to make hearings into the program one of his highest priorities. In a letter to Mr. Specter on Sunday, Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who is also on the committee, said the panel should also explore "significant concern about the legality of the program even at the very highest levels of the Department of Justice."

The NY Times also reported yesterday that the program initially faced resistence among members of the Justice Department, including Ashcroft himself apparently:

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.

Accounts differed as to exactly what was said at the hospital meeting between Mr. Ashcroft and the White House advisers. But some officials said that Mr. Ashcroft, like his deputy, appeared reluctant to give Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales his authorization to continue with aspects of the program in light of concerns among some senior government officials about whether the proper oversight was in place at the security agency and whether the president had the legal and constitutional authority to conduct such an operation.

So it appears that Bush administration officials were hardly united in their opinion as to the legality of the program. Certainly the Bush administration made an effort to provide for some type of oversight of the program. Such oversight measures were probably part of an effort to make the program more politically palatable, either to other administration officials or in the future in case word of the program got out. Of course if you're truly cynical, you might be inclined to think that the measure were taken to color the program with the appearance of effective oversight. Of course, given that we don't know what those measures were, or exactly how the NSA decided who they could and could not listen in on, there's really no way for us to judge independently whether even this limited oversight was any oversight at all. Of course, all of this is mooted by the fact that the entire program, oversight and all, is of questionable legality and constitutionality, and it hardly makes any difference if one had knows what the other is doing when they're both up to no good.