In Case You Missed It

Within the larger context of the administration seeking to "revise" the rules for domestic surveillance in front of a very skeptical the Senate Intelligence Committee, The New York Times is reporting this morning that:

Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.

Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.

As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.

But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.

Looks like we're back to someplace before square one. What is says is that basically while dubya's domestic surveillance had been brought under the legal structure of FISA as of January 2007, there's no guarantee that it will continue to be. Oh yea, and dubya still claims the Constitutional authority to ignore the law, even if he's not Constitutionally ignoring it now.

Here's the letter AG Gonzales sent to Congress outlining the change last January 17. His first paragraph:

I am writing to inform you that on January 10, 2007, a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued orders authorizing the Government to target for collection internal communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member or agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization. As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

But on whether the rules are "revised" the New York Times editorial board has an opinion. It's less of a revision, they write, than a gutting. They also lay out the reason dubya's pushing for it:

Mr. Bush’s motivations for submitting this bill now seem obvious. The courts have rejected his claim that 9/11 gave him virtually unchecked powers, and he faces a Democratic majority in Congress that is willing to exercise its oversight responsibilities. That, presumably, is why his bill grants immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated in five years of illegal eavesdropping. It also strips the power to hear claims against the spying program from all courts except the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret.

In case you missed it.