More Bush Deceptions about the NSA surveillance

Via the dailykos, I found this article in the New York Times.

It points out even more lies from the Bush Junta. On the one hand, our glorious leader has said that the NSA surveillance is "limited" but IN REALITY, the NSA has scooped up thousands of leads - so many leads, it seems, that the FBI investigators charged with following up on those leads were often overwhelmed by the numbers of them.

The Vice President (of torture) has said that the program has saved "thousands of lives" but IN REALITY the picture is vastly different.

But here's how the article begins:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

Hmm. Information collected about innocent Americans - what happened ot this information? Is it still in a government database somewhere?

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.Hmm.

I wonder if these "legal opinions" were written by the same political appointees who Ok'd the use of torture?

The bottom line is this: the NSA scooped up massive amounts of information on American citizens and then passed that information to a skeptical FBI who then investigated those leads - and virtually all of them were dead ends or innocent citizens.

And all this was done without warrants but with the OK of the president of the United States of America.

So not only is the program illegal but also it's a huge waste of time.

Do I really need to say it?

Yea, I guess I do.

IMPEACH