Morning News Roundup (09 Feb)

• President Bush today is revealing details of a thwarted al Qaeda plot in 2002 (BBC):
  

  Mr Bush said the plotters, thwarted in 2002, planned to use shoe bombs to storm the plane cockpit.The attackers would have flown the plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles, California.

  I'll post more details on this as they come through. And I'm guessing the NSA might have had a hand in this thwarting...
  
  
• The FISA Court (which administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which BushCo has been skirting with its warrantless wiretaps) was warned by Justice Department lawyers that The Program (as it's referred to in James Risen's book, State of War) "may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court" (WaPo):
  

  The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.

  Conservative blogger/blowhard Hugh Hewitt complains that both these Clinton-appointed judges are taking the nation's intelligence matters into their own hands.
  
  
• Those darn Democrats continue to politicize the "terrorist surveillance" program... whoops (Raw Story):
  

  Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has issued 51 questions to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on President Bush's warrantless wiretap program.
  [...]
  

  Strikingly, the letter to Gonzales quotes Harvard University professor Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional scholar who testified at unofficial hearings held by ranking Judiciary Democrat John Conyers (D-MI). In a letter to Conyers, Tribe wrote that the taps "far from being authorized by Congress, [fly] in the face of an explicit congressional prohibition and [are] therefore unconstitutional."

  Writes Sensenbrenner: "Do you agree that FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) 'expressly prohibits' the specific activities under this program?"

• Another BushCo budget tidbit--proposal to cut back on energy conservation efforts (call it Cheney's Revenge); via ENN:
  

  Particularly perplexing to energy conservation advocates are the administration's proposal to cut back on the government's "Energy Star" program that promotes energy-efficient products -- from appliances to entire houses -- and to slash funding for a program that helps poor people weatherize their homes.

• Another hidden budget tidbit discovered by Newsweek's Allen Sloan--Social Security privatization is included:
  

  His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.

• Finally, check out this tale of Seahawks fervor gone madly over the top, via Facade Friend Kat.