The Ashford Zone Blog

A little more than a week ago, the right-wingers heralded the results of a poll that they claimed showed a majority of Americans supporting Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping policy. Here’s what that poll found:

Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States.

Michelle Malkin used the poll results to suggest “America Is OK With NSA.” Redstate and the National Review also celebrated the results.

But there was a big problem with the poll question — it failed to say that President Bush was conducting the wiretapping without a warrant. Today, a new AP poll was released showing what Americans truly think of Bush’s policy:

56 percent of respondents in an AP-Ipsos poll said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

A Congressional Research Service report "concludes that the administration’s justification for warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments," the Washington Post reports.

The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001… The report also concluded that Bush’s assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force.

Powerlines’ John Hindrocket again displays his flair for sheer stupidity, trying desparate to argue that the CRS does not say what it says:

The CRS report, which you can access here, is 44 pages long. Yet the Post, apparently not wanting to confuse its readers by exposing them to the actual report, rather than Democratic politicians’ interpretations of it, quotes only two sentence fragments:

"It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here," the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration’s legal justification "does not seem to be . . . well-grounded," they said.

The Post’s coverage of the CRS report is deeply misleading. In fact, the CRS concluded:

Whether an NSA activity is permissible under the Fourth Amendment and the statutory scheme outlined above is impossible to determine without an understanding of the specific facts involved and the nature of the President’s authorization, which are for the most part classified.

So is the Post misleading, or is Hindrocket?

Hindrocket is misleading.  The sentence he quotes ("Whether an NSA activity is permissible…") is not the conclusion of the CRS report (as Hindrocket says) , but the beginning of the analysis in an introductory form.  In that quote, the authors are speaking in generalities (i.e, "whether an NSA activity is permissible" as opposed to "whether the NSA activity is permissible").

Unlike the introductory sentence, the immediately following sentences address the issue at hand:

If the NSA operations at issue are encompassed in the definition of "electronic surveillance" set forth under FISA, it would be consistent with Congress’s intent that such surveillance must be in accorandance with FISA procedures.

Then the coup de grace, in the next sentence:

Although section 109(a) of FISA does not explicitly limit the language "as authiirzed by statute" to refer only to Title III and to FISA, the legislative history suggests that such a result was intended.

After all the analysis, the report then concludes with the statement given in the Post, which reads in full:

From the foregoing analysis, it appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here.

So, rather than quoting the conclusion of the report, Hindrocket merely quotes the FIRST sentence of the analysis, and passes it off as the conclusion.

If a report said:

"Whether it is day or night depends on the time of day.  If it is after 7:00 p.m., it is night.  Our analysis indicates it is 11:30 p.m. Therefore, it is night."

Hindrocket would write:

The report was inc0nclusive as to whether it was day or night:

"Whether it is day or night depends on the time of day."

John Hindrocket, who purports to be an attorney, is either acting stupid or being venel. 

RELATED:  Glenn Greenwald also rips apart another recent Hindrocket post.

Apparently, the controversy has forced the NSA to respond.  According to what the agency told CNN, nothing happened.

A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Thursday that the National Security Agency did not target CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour or any other CNN journalist for surveillance.

The senior official said that from time to time NSA surveillance overseas "inadvertently" acquires recordings or copies of communications involving Americans — or what the government calls "U.S. persons," which includes most U.S. residents and employees of American companies. By law, however, such materials are required to be erased or destroyed immediately, the official said.

Okay.  So there it is.  If Amanpour communications were inadvertently picked up, the administration was required "by law" to destroy the information.

Of course, we given this administration’s views of the "law" and the occasions on which it is circumvented, I hardly find this reassuring.  Remember, Bush once assured a crowd that ALL wiretaps were obtained by warrants.  And he clearly was lying.

The Left Coaster has a handy compendium of the right-wing talking points regarding the illegal NSA wiretapping, and demonstrates why each is false.