This weeks Council winning post was from The Glittering Eye, Options on Iran II, in which the various options for dealing with Iran and their nukes, none good, are delineated. Second place goes to NY Times Confesses Truth About NSA

…it is also an enlightening look at the continuing 9/10 mindset of the Left. The ACLU is one manifestation of the Left’s mindset, the political considerations of the Democratic party and its reaction to the Iraq campaign and the Iranian threat are …

“The main source for Watergate “background” was a disgruntled FBI bureaucrat. The only difference is that today, we have blogs like yours to fill in lots of the blanks. Well done. ”

What a difference a generation or two of technology can make.

I hope they get that lazy leaker.

The New York Times would have us believe that slow, limited progress = failure:

[…] the results of the [NSA intercept] program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current an…

I have no problem with dissent, but if someone is using that as camoflage, it’s another thing.

I think a lot of folks in government don’t want to trample the rights of dissent, but they need to realize that there really are terrorists hiding in dissenting organizations to give themselves legal protection.

I’m sure you have links to this, AJ, the Colleen Rowley letter to FBI Director Mueller*? Her biggest complaint was that the FBI supervisor would not request a FISA warrant to search the Moussaoui computer – that would’ve been a day or so after his arrest August 22, 2001, and information on that computer could have pre-empted 9/11.

* Freeh, not Mueller, was Director prior to 9/11 – it seems like Mueller was appointed just two weeks or so prior to the attack.

In the letter, she alluded to the supervisor’s reluctance being about “career considerations.” I presume she was referring to an FBI “rising star” who was accused by a then-head judge on the FISA court (not the woman judge subsequently at its head) of falsifying something in FISA warrant requests – the judge called Janet Reno in and raised the roof, prohibited that FBI super from submitting any future warrant requests, and his FBI career was subsequently tanked.

But apparently the FISA court was something FBI superiors tried to avoid going to – Rowley was also incensed over re-writes of original FISA applications. Her reasoning may be valid and all, but if so many were intimidated by or pussy-footing around the court, that suggests to me that this was already a rogue court, even before Bush became CIC, and well before 9/11.

But pre-9/11, with the Gorelick wall intact, the FBI would not have been receiving NSA target information. Yet, the FISA court was apparently treating FBI warrant requests with suspicion if not outright contempt. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, but one of Freeh’s complaints in his book is about lack of serious consideration for the FBI counter-terrorism budget requests (budget wouldn’t be in the court’s domain, but it suggests a pervasive mentality, presumably from the left).

It seems pretty clear that even post-9/11, the court was fighting tooth and nail to retain the Gorelick wall, Patriot Act be damned.

Merry Whitney

It boggles the mind that the “professionals” of the MSM have so far been unable to connect the dots in the manner you have here. You may also find this year to year breakdown of FISA Court activity to be of interest. The first year of the Bush administration was one of the very few year to year decreases in requests, and 2002 and 2003 saw the greates rate of increase in the history of the court. All of which supports your thesis.

There are some other linkages that your work above have brought to mind, but I think I’ll have to keep those to myself.

Great work, thanks!

Out Here

AJ Strata laid the NSA/FISA story wide open today via this story in the NY Times that shows (now hold on to your seats) that a free flow of intelligence information shared between agencies actually stops terrorist attacks.