I included the URL to Benczkowski's "disingenuous" letter in a previous comment on this issue, here (in an off-topic thread) a couple of days ago, where I tried to make sense of the contradictions in the administration's statements:

http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/16/gah/permalink/27b83e8ecad6e527b45978f39b6e5b3c.html

I'd add to that comment by noting that Benczkowski's response to Reps. Conyers, Nadler and Scott, on behalf of Mukasey, carefully avoided using the words "phone call" to describe the phone call Mukasey publicly referenced; instead "communication" was the word the letter employed. I think my earlier comment may help explain why that imprecision was deliberately used by DOJ in a further effort to mislead and confuse the public about the facts under dispute.

In addition, although Casey/Whitehouse only refer to it obliquely toward the end of yesterday's very helpful letter, FISA itself - and thus its emergency provisions - is not implicated according to Mukasey and McConnell's own February letter, in the case of the phone call Mukasey brought up in San Francisco. To wit: "Finally, the [Mukasey & McConnell] February 22nd letter states that a Presidential Executive Order, not the FISA legislation, was the governing authority that supposedly frustrated interception of this pre-9/11 phone call." [The stored email problem, however, which Mukasey did not explicitly reference, is another matter, as I indicated in my earlier comment.]

Bamage (re the first comment on this thread) - Were you asking me a question about an earlier comment? With regard to Fenton's theory about Yemen being the location of the safehouse, I don't think anyone not privy to classified information can be sure. His educated guess is as good as any, though, and the specific foreign country involved does not change the analysis, and is not particularly material to the discussion at hand.

Good for Senators Casey and Whitehouse. They - and Glenn - are right that this is absolutely a case of advocacy by AG Mukasey and the DOJ, using manipulation of secret facts to misleadingly promote their own agenda, clarity and honest informing of the public debate be damned.

It's just another installment of the federal "protection racket" to which we have all been involuntarily subjected, helped along by many Members of Congress: In the name of "national security" they'll take our money and invade our privacy and limit our freedoms 'for our own good' - preferably in secret. We've really had our treasury, our privacy, our reputation, our Republic and Constitution "protected" by our federal government in the last seven years, haven't we? Save us all from such "protection" in the name of "national security."