More Leaks To Come - Flopping Aces

So now it appears Bush has agreed to brief the full Intelligence Committee on the NSA wiretap program:

Reversing course, the White House has agreed to brief congressional intelligence committees on highly classified details of President Bush’s controversial monitoring program as part of a newfound openness with lawmakers.

Senior Bush administration officials spent weeks insisting they would not provide the program’s details to more than a select group of eight lawmakers. Briefing the full intelligence committees, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a recent PBS interview, is “not a good way to keep a secret.”

And I’m afraid the secret will not be kept by the members of the Intelligence Committee. Expect leaks to be spread throughout the MSM soon about the operational side of this program, further endangering our intelligence gathering capabilities. We know for a fact that these elected leaders in Congress cannot keep secrets, and it will be no different this time.

But on the bright side, the Democrats no longer will have a beef with this program. First they tried to say that Bush did this all in secret, but then news leaked that in fact 8 members of Congress were kept abreast of the program, doh!

Then they tried to portray this as a “domestic” spying case, with horrible results of course since the American people are not dumb. They are in favor of listening in on Al-Qaeda calling the states. doh!

Now they want to be “in the loop” about the program, and Bush has relented, Which has already paid dividends:

After the four-hour House Intelligence Committee session, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), R-Mich., said as part of the eight, he still knows more about the program than the rest of the committee. But, he said, “there is very little left to the imagination” of those members who attended Wednesday’s meeting.

At least one Democrat left saying he had a better understanding of legal and operational aspects of the anti-terrorist surveillance program. But he said he still had a number of questions.

“It’s a different program than I was beginning to let myself believe,” said Alabama Rep. Bud Cramer, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee’s oversight subcommittee.

Of course the Washington Post left out a sentence that was in the AP report:

?This may be a valuable program,? Cramer said, adding that he didn?t know if it was legal. ?My direction of thinking was changed tremendously.?

Just more proof of the bias in the MSM. But I digress.

In other news, our Democratic friend, Arlen Specter, wants to push through legislation about the program, which I fully support. Please pass this law Specter. I would love the Supreme Court to get the opportunity to bat it down and prove once again that the President has the authority to conduct these kind of surveillance’s against our enemy. The secret program is already out of the bag so we should ruthlessly push this through the courts and allow the highest court in the land to tell the Democrats what blathering idiots they are.

The other big news is that a leftist judge on the FISA court has been setting rules on the intelligence gathering operations ON HER OWN, without any kind of review or the input from the fellow judges on the court:

So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone’s calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully “tagged” as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said.

According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge.

So here we have another activist judge trying to shape intelligence rules by herself. No one can see a problem with this?

Hugh Hewitt has some background on this liberal judge:

Judge Kollar-Kotelly has been on some very high-profile cases, such as the Microsoft Antitrust action, the review of the FEC’s McCain-Feingold rules, and one of the cases involving the Gitmo detainees.

From the latter case:

“[T]he Court, in its discretion and pursuant to this authority, finds that Petitioners are entitled to counsel, in order to properly litigate the habeas petitions presently before the Court and in the interest of justice,” and further “that the Government’s proposed real time monitoring and classification review procedures for legal mail and attorney notes impermissibly burden the attorney-client relationship and abrogate the attendant attorney-client privilege.”

The October 2004 decision was a sweeping victory for the detainees, and contrasts sharply with the opinion in another detainee case, issued by her colleague on the federal trial bench in D.C., Judge Richard Leon.

As Hugh later expounds on, a Judge should never legislate from the bench and this is apparently what she has done here. She felt the program wasn’t right so she decided on her own to make changes to existing procedures on the court, without any kind of appellate review. Typical behavior from a Clinton appointee.

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Curt

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