(1)  I’ll just let Greenwald speak for himself on the subject of GOP disillusionment with the sudden Bush reversal on FISA oversight:

If you were a Bush follower, and you were told (and, of course, by definition, believed) that the President’s violations of FISA were not just legal but critical to our Survival and Ability to Defeat The Terrorists, and then suddenly one day, the administration, once Democrats took over Congress, announced that they could, after all, comply with FISA, wouldn’t you feel betrayed, too, as though everything the administration was telling you all along about what is vital for our security was . . . . completely false and insincerely expressed?

For Bush followers who kept insisting that (a) The New York Times "blew the cover" on a vital national security program and (b) our ability to stop The Terrorists would be impeded by compliance with FISA, where does this leave them?

Greenwald points to a clearly disillusioned Captain Ed, longtime supporter of Bush’s warrentless surveillance program:

This change of policy will surely raise a few eyebrows. One of the arguments the Bush administration made was that it could not reach accommodation with the FISA court on expedited authorizations for wiretaps on international conversations with one point inside the US, on phone numbers already flagged as potentially related to terrorists. It discouraged Congress from drafting legislation mandating a process for such actions, stating that the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) granted them all of the authorization needed for such surveillance.

…Now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has done what the Bush administration said they could not do, which is to construct a process for expedited requests with FISA — and they’ve already used it once.

On one hand, having this process remain in our counterterrorism arsenal is great news. However, for those of us who supported the White House on this contentious point, the speed in which they reached accommodation with FISA will call into question that early support. By my count, we’ve had ten entire weeks since the midterms and they’ve managed to scale a mountain that they claimed was insurmountable for the previous five years.

Perhaps more explanations will be forthcoming. I, for one, will be waiting…

(2)  But there is a note of caution as Greenwald writes about here.  Simply put, all we know is that the Bush Administration has agreed that their warrentless surveillance program is subject to approval by the FISA Court, and the FISA court has given its approval.  But, what does this mean?  Nobody can say.  In any event, there seems to be growing doubt that the Bush Administration is in full compliance with FISA.

For example, Prof. Orin Kerr has suggested that perhaps the FISA court has simply given "blanket approval" to all warrentless wiretaps without required individual inspection and consideration of each one.  If this is the case, then the Bush reversal isn’t a reversal at all, and the same concerns about invasion of privacy exist as before.  As Greenwald says:

If what happened here is what Kerr is [speculating] — some sort of agreement to give broad authority to the President’s plainly illegal program — then that is an agreement which would be plainly inconsistent with both the letter and spirit of FISA.

In another post, however, Kerr offers an alternative theory about the FISA court, i.e., that the judges have agreed to approve "anticipatory warrants" — warrants that become valid when certain triggering factors occur:

An anticipatory warrant lets the government conduct surveillance when a specific set of triggering facts occurs. The judge agrees ahead of time that if those facts occur, probable cause will exist and the monitoring can occur under the warrant. The idea is that there isn’t enough time to get a warrant right at that second, so the warrant can be "pre-approved" by the Judge and used by the government when the triggering event happens.

I am less troubled by this, although I would hope that there is some "back end" review to make sure that the government isn’t abusing this "conditional approval", and that the triggering events did, indeed, occur.

Anyway, this may be a story where the details are never know.  Let’s hope not.  As the Carpetbagger says:

Just to be clear, I’m encouraged by what we learned yesterday, and I’m not suggesting that the news is necessarily some kind of charade. The administration did back down, almost certainly for political reasons, sidestepping a fight the Bush gang was probably going to lose.

But some of these unanswered questions need answers. Rep. Wilson told the NYT that “Congress needed to investigate further to determine how the program is run.” Sounds like a good idea.