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Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Here's why Alito believing in the unitary executive is important
Posted by Jill | 6:51 AM

Scary shit:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

[snip]

"We'd chase a number, find it's a school teacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former FBI official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."


In other words, if you want to give the Administration the benefit of the doubt and believe that this practice really is about finding terrorists and not about sniffing out dissenters and other people they deem a threat to their power, the Administration has the NSA running dragnets of the communications of huge number of American citizens in the hope that maybe there'll be a terrorist somewhere in there. Does this sound like the most effective way of fighting terrorists? And in the case of the theoretical schoolteacher, a FISA warrant would have permitted the very same interview that would result from this kind of a dragnet.

It's possible, though hardly likely, that this practice really is designed to apprehend potential terrorists, in which case it demonstrates stupidity and ineptitude of the highest order. The more likely explanation is that this Administration is compiling dossiers of people who they deem likely to kick up a fuss after Bush declares martial law right before the 2008 elections so that he can remain president for life.
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