Here is an interesting development in the FIS debacle: the FIS Court will be the one to decide if the surveillance they authorized the Telecom companies to embark on opens them up to civil suits:

Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said the White House seems willing to let the FISA court help determine whether phone companies should be shielded from litigation.
Hitherto, the White House has argued that courts should not be involved at all and that Congress should instead write litigation protection into law for companies that wiretapped consumers’ conversations.

Bond said: “I think we’ve come up with some things that would involve the court, but not get to a position where it would endanger the program or the carriers.”

White House spokesman Tony Fratto declined to comment.

Bond said the language, drafted with White House consent, represented a “new provision we’ve come up with” on immunity. He would not give details other than to say that the FISA court would have a role. It is unclear whether the new approach will gain approval from Democratic leaders and negotiators.

The Dems will resist, but this may be enough to pull the Blue Dog dems away from Pelosi and her trial lawyers to get the FISA fixes back on the books. Given this is an election year and al-Qaeda is itching for the chance to send another signal to America and the world, the crippling of FISA for the benefit of paranoid liberals and their greedy trial lawyers is a very dangerous game being played by Congress (which has plenty of extra protections against attack not available to us normal civilians).

I posted recently on the pending danger as AQ is attempting to recruit and support home grown terrorists here in America. And Jed Babbit also had a recent piece on this dangerous game.

The damage to US intelligence gathering has accumulated, and in August will become overwhelming. The FISA court orders which have enabled some intelligence gathering to continue despite the expiration of the earlier bill will themselves expire in August. At that point, Usama bin Laden can begin using pay phones.

The rumor is that the any new leads cannot be followed until the FISA laws are reinstated, something Bin Laden would know simply by reading the newspapers. It means we could be missing a pending attack at this very moment. Congress is already the least popular group in the government, polling two thirds below Bush in support. If an attack comes (and some say it is only a matter of ‘when’), even after FIS is fixed, it can be easily claimed Congress gave our enemies a window they did not have if not for their shortsighted push for political payback to a core special interest group.