MythDirection
Keep it secret, keep it safe

Back at Salon's War Room (which is one of my five fave blogs), Tim Grieve notes today's visit by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Heritage Foundation to rally the troops (as it were), warning of the dangers of nestling back into the "false comforts of the world before September 11th, 2001." Tim duly notes that the Bush administration was indeed in control of the government before September 11th and reminds us of a couple of items (Richard Clarke's unheeded warnings, a certain Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6th), then continues:

Cheney didn't say anything about any of that Wednesday. Instead, he defended all the things that the president and his administration began doing right after the terrorists struck. In the process, at least by implication, Cheney admitted that the administration's pre-9/11 efforts weren't good enough. Defending the post-9/11 executive order in which Bush authorized warrantless spying on American citizens, Cheney said, "If we'd been able to do this before 9/11, we might have been able to pick up on two hijackers who subsequently flew a jet into the Pentagon." The suggestion: The Bush administration was somehow powerless to listen in on the phone calls of would-be terrorists in the pre-9/11 days.

But as we've noted before, the Bush administration was indeed "able to do this before 9/11." If the administration wanted to listen in on the phone conversations of suspected al-Qaida members lurking in the United States before 9/11, all it had to do was ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant to do so. It didn't even need to ask first: The law allowed the administration to start listening first and seek a warrant after the fact.

Moreover, if the Bush administration's theory of presidential power is right, Bush had inherent authority as commander in chief to waive the warrant requirement whenever thought national security interests might justify doing so. That means he could have issued his executive order on Jan. 21, 2001, on Aug. 6, 2001, or on any of the 200 or so other days that passed between the afternoon he took office and the morning that the planes struck. He didn't.

Speaking of echoing falsehoods coming from the Right Wing Noise Machine, TalkLeft has a good debunking of several myths surrounding SnoopGate. Here are a couple of the ones (with supporting links) that jump out at me the most:

TALKING POINT: The 9/18/01 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) by Congress gave the President the right to order secret, warrantless wiretaps and searches on U.S. persons.
FACT: False, false, false and false. Further, as Glenn Greenwald has noted: "In the case of Breuer v. Jim’s Concrete of Brevard, 538 U.S. 691 (2003), the Administration vehemently (and successfully) argued in a Brief to the U.S. Supreme Court (.pdf), signed by Bush’s own Solicitor General, Theodore Olson, that a statute (such as FISA) cannot be "amended by implication" in the absence of clear Congressional intent to amend it."

TALKING POINT: Bill Clinton and Jamie Gorelick (who was in the Clinton Justice Department) argued that Clinton had the power to ignore FISA.
FACT: False and false. As Judd Legum (Think Progress) noted: "Both her testimony and in the Legal Times quote [sic], were about physical searches. In 1994, the FISA did not cover physical searches. She was explaining what the President’s authority was in the absence of any congressional statute. She wasn’t arguing that the President had the authority to ignore FISA. In 1995, with President Clinton’s signature, FISA was amended to include physical searches. That law prohibited warrantless domestic physical searches. No one in the Clinton administration, including Gorelick, ever argued that the administration could ignore the law, before or after it was amended."

TALKING POINT: Secret, illegal, warrantless spying on Americans enhances our national security.
FACT: Certainly no more than secret, legal, warrant-based spying; further, the illegal spying actually threatens America's national security because of the aid and comfort it gives to real terrorist supporters when they go to court (not Bush's kangaroo courts but the real court system in the United States). It also makes it easier to challenge Government prosecutions against alleged criminals.

TALKING POINT: Democratic leaders were aware of all the details of the illegal spying and they did not express any reservations.
FACT: False, false, false. Moreover, as Glenn Greenwald notes: "The Administration forced these Congressional Democrats to remain silent and are now using that forced silence as evidence of their approval of this program. That reasoning is appallingly corrupt."