Spencer Ackerman has a useful article on TNR Online debunking the Bush administration’s deceptive claims about its lawless wiretapping program:

If there’s one point the administration and its allies have labored to emphasize, it’s that the program only spied on people clearly connected to terrorism. In a press conference last week, President Bush insisted that warrantless surveillance applied to “people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.” Gonzales said that for surveillance to go forward, “we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of Al Qaeda, affiliated with Al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with Al Qaeda, or working in support of Al Qaeda.” Later, Senator John Cornyn of Texas insisted that “in fact, this was narrowly applied to agents of Al Qaeda operating in the United States.” Bush cited the ease with which two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi, escaped surveillance as justification for circumventing the FISA court.

Don’t believe them. As many have argued since the story broke, if the administration truly possessed “reasonable basis” that the targets of such surveillance were connected to Al Qaeda, it could have obtained warrants from the FISA court, which has rejected only a handful of warrant requests in its entire history. And as the Los Angeles Times pointed out, the failure to track Al Mihdhar and Al Hazmi was a failure of bureaucratic coordination between the NSA and the FBI, not a result of the FISA court setting the probable-cause bar too high. So why would the administration choose for four years to shunt the deferential FISA court aside if it could connect surveillance targets to Al Qaeda? The program only makes sense if the administration doesn’t have the “reasonable basis” for searching that Gonzales insists it always does. That was the contention that one administration official made to The Washington Post on Thursday. “For FISA, [the administration] had to put down a written justification for the wiretap,” the official told the Post. “They couldn’t dream one up.” According to the paper, “the goal is to listen in on a vast array of communications in the hopes of finding something that sounds suspicious.” In other words, contrary to everything the administration has said about the program, the warrantless surveillance only makes sense if the administration is casting a massive electronic net for anything that
sounds remotely suspicious.

Indeed. As I wrote, the FISA court’s unprecedented resistance to administration wiretap requests means that the evidence backing them up is essentially nonexistent.

Meanwhile, the ACLU ran a tough ad in the New York Times today criticizing President Bush’s deceptive rhetoric about wiretaps, which I highlighted last week:

Let’s hope public pressure forces an investigation soon.