I've unhooked the leash; sic'em boy!

Full accounting for willful misinformation is exactly what was needed in 2002/2003. Thanks GG for showing the rest the way.

I haven't read Klien's article and didn't read your responses but I am convinced of one thing after listening to the Democrats for the last several years. We cannot trust their judgement in matters of public safety

This illustrates nicely why the issue is important. The Democrats cannot be trusted....particularly if you don't pay attention. It is precisely the people who can't be bothered with details and simply operate on impressions who are most susceptible to the sort of tactics being employed by Joe and his cohorts.

This needs to be pushed back hard, often and occasionally rudely.

With the FISA bill, the Congress should decide what the limits should be, and hand it to the intelligence people instead of negotiating with them. Once the law has been laid down, the intelligence people will work with what they have. Establish your freedoms first, then ask the problem solvers to work with what is left over. Anything else is asking spooks to tell right from wrong -- not really what they do for a living.

This is a lovely sentiment, and unworkable. The perfect example being the restriction of hearing foreign to foreign communications that pass through the US. One would think it was an obvious flaw easily overlooked, but a judge ruled it operative. Exactly like the possibility that every overseas person who can potentially speak to a US person can be protected by the fourth amendment. It is very easy to say that won't happen, but obviously a judge can decide the scope of a phrase, contrary your assurances. Once a law is written it's can mean virtually anything a judge decides.

Meanwhile, any law requires it's object to make decisions about it's scope. It was the interpretations of the FISA law (in the wake of being slapped down for improper applications) that led FBI headquarters to block local investigations. It was law that required a decision of whether to follow criminal or FISA procedures since they were mutually exclusive. To we lay people, that mutual exclusivity is a philosophical absurdity. Having to stop listening to people discussing a crime like murder while eavesdropping on a FISA warrant may be theoretically ideal but as a practicality.... just nuts.

When you're actually looking at data, actually going over how scenarios unfold, actually talking to people who do data mining surveillance for terrorism, what it looks like when you look backward in time is that it should have all been so obvious, if only this or that. When you look at the same system looking forward in time, nothing presents itself, there might be a feeling, or some vague warnings going off, but not a direct line that could have been changed with one decision.

This makes a very good expression of how we went to war in Iraq.

I'm more inclined to see fault with Rice for demoting the counterterrorist czar and believing that no non-state actor could be a legitimate threat to the U.S. And I found her insistence that the August 6 PDB didn't have to do with impending attacks in the U.S. ludicrous. And I do know they got warnings from several foreign governments, and that there were untranslated messages that had intelligence, and that for 14 years they had overlooked the right people in Afghanistan.

Even the government has limited resources and has to decide where the threat is greatest. As for the PDB there were some 36 similar warnings from 1997 on; and the 70 continuing investigations mentioned in said PDB. The FAA also issued multiple warnings to the airlines. Did you want martial law to be announced?

But that doesn't mean that if all the things I like to wonder about had been done right, it might not have slipped through just as unnoticed.

Quite so. The ultimate flaw the hijackers succeeded through, was the assumption that hijackings were part of a negotiation.

With the FISA bill, the Congress should decide what the limits should be, and hand it to the intelligence people instead of negotiating with them.

And the circle continues. Another good example is the Torricelli theory that spies for us should be of good moral character. Philosophically lovely. As a practicality, just stupid.

This illustrates nicely why the issue is important.

-- Paul Dirks

Can you imagine posting a comment like the one rob cerra posted, and expect yourself to be taken seriously? It would be like saying, "My middle name is Joe Klein, and I have neither the time nor the legal background to figure out who's right".

I first started coming to UT in late 2005 around the time that Bush/Cheney’s violations of FISA came to light through the NYT article to get a better understanding of what I had thought was a “complicated” legal issue. What was making it complicated, I soon found out, were the Bush/Cheney loyalists and apologists trying to bend the Constitution and/or previously-enacted laws passed by Congress (AUMF in Afghanistan) into the shape of a pretzel in order to reach the truly radical conclusion that Bush/Cheney had the right to break any law they damn well please if they deemed that law to impede their “war on terrorism.”

One of the main things that has kept me coming here is Glenn’s consistency of position, and that consistency has never been better demonstrated than Glenn’s take on the overall straightforwardness the provisions of FISA and its descendants under current consideration. Klein, as Glenn points out, is essentially employing the obfuscation tactics of Bush/Cheney to support an untenable position.

Glenn has every right to be angry, even a bit obsessive, about seeing this through to some appropriate conclusion. He’s fighting the same fight as two years ago, not only with a radical administration and loyal followers, but also with a media figure who purports to be on “our side.” I have a feeling that many of us who are similarly sick and tired of seeing such laws passed based largely on media-assisted misinformation and propaganda and an executive branch that generally views law as something only to be imposed on political enemies may also be experiencing these emotional traits on a fairly regular basis.

If Klein is so misguided on this and cannot seem to find the time to read and understand the provisions of this relatively clear-cut law, it makes one wonder how many members of Congress who enact these laws and admittedly often don’t read them beforehand are voting based on similar, if not greater, level of misperception and/or political manipulation. Congress has admitted they may have gone too far and acted too fast on bills such as the Military Commissions Act and the reauthorized Patriot Act.

As Glenn also points out, Klein is not the disease, only evidence of the overall breakdown of the traditional media, and I’m afraid Congress, as effective bodies of oversight on the executive branch.