Powerline has an interesting give and take between Bob Casey and the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The telling part of the exchange is first where the Inquirer illustrates their total ignorance of FISA and the NSA’s mission overseas to monitor terrorists. Here is the part that I am talking about:

Casey: You know very well that Senator Specter has worked very hard on this to try to get this right and I think with bipartisan cooperation, working with people like Senator Specter, as I know I can, that we can get this right. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t see what the…

Inquirer: It’s a real simple question. Do they need to go through the FISA Court as the FISA law has said since 1973 or don’t they? They say they don’t. We [Inquirer] say they do. What do you say?

Casey: I think it’s worked well.

Casey may not be articulate, but he is smart and he doesn’t like to misrepresent facts. I am guessing he has researched this and knows more than Inquirer – by a long shot. Here are the facts:

(1) The NSA monitors terrorists overseas and catches all their communications. This may include, from time to time, a communication with someone in the US or a US citizen.

(2) Under the current post 9-11 laws, these communications within the US or with a US citizen are passed to the FBI for investigation. The monitoring of the terrorist overseas continues and any more contacts between the terrorist and those in the US or US citizens continue to get swept up.

(3) The FBI investigates the lead, and if there is probable concern, they take the matter to FISA so the person in the US (or the US Citizen) will be fully monitored under FISA warrant.

Now this is the current approach. Prior to 9-11 the NSA would just throw the lead away because FISA refuses to consider leads from the NSA as probable cause. Got that? If the NSA caught Bin Laden himself calling for a strike by US based terrorist teams, the FISA court would refuse to use that as probable cause to investigate. And after 9-11? Still the same. The only difference is the FISA court allowed the FBI to investigate the lead and establish independent evidence. The two presiding chief justices of the FISA court agreed to this arrangement and were reported by the Washington Post to have stated that an NSA lead cannot ever, to this day, be the sole evidence for a warrant.

So the Inquirer is 100% wrong in their concept the President can get a FISA warrant for the NSA to listen on terrorists (here or overseas). Just plain wrong. Casey seems to know that the current arrangement is the best there is if we do not want to just throw out leads to terrorist cells active here in the US. The courts ‘purity’ concept is mind numbingly stubborn because it says the NSA is less scrupulous than the FBI (both staffed by Americans trying to protect us). The NSA has no legal jurisdiction whatsoever, so this concept seems backwards. But that is as far as the deaths of 3,000 Americans would push the judges to adapt to the current threats. They will only consider warrants if the FBI can confirm the risk related to an NSA intercept. The NSA is just doing its job monitoring our enemies overseas and trying to pass on critical information when it trips over it. And this is what the Inquirer ignorantly wants to stop.

And liberals complain everyone thinks they are not smart enough to defend this nation? The NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program is proof they are not smart enough. They don’t even read the reporting out there to see the complete picture. Next time someone claims the NSA can get a warrant from FISA, laugh them off. They have no clue what they are talking about.

Sadly for Casey, this will probably deflate his support from the far left.