At this point I'd like to thank Senators Schumer and Feinstein for giving us this asshat AG Mukasey. If it wasn't for you two dumbasses, he never would of been confirmed. Thank you once again.

I cheered when I saw the story about Congressional leaders demanding explanations from Mukasey. Your work is having an impact in the right places, Glenn--keep it going.

On the previous thread I put up a link to the Mukasey audio from the speech at the Commonwealth Club (h/t Minnesotachuck at Emptywheel).

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/08/08-03mukasey-audio.html

FISA discussion starts at 40 minutes and the key passage is at 50 minutes.

If they actually knew of a terrorist safe house in the middle east, the FISA court could surely have issued a warrant to intercept all calls coming from the homeland (gawd, I hate that term) to that house. And the 9/11 Commission and all of us should be able determine and discern if Mukasey's statement is credible. Reconvene the Commission.

Reading the 9/11 report it becomes clear that the problem was not a lack of information but a lack of urgency, organization and communication.

All these "solutions" such as FISA changes, Total Information Awareness, etc. are solutions to non-problems. Meanwhile the people who were responsible for the actual problems were mostly retained or promoted, while the few people who did make noise and take the circumstances around 9/11 very seriously were let go.

Rice is a perfect example of this. For her incompetent leadership as head of Nat. Sec. she was promoted to Sec. of State.

I've never understood if this administration is just too dense to realize that the solution to poor personel is to find better people or there is a concerted effort to expand government powers for their own sake.

Probably a little from Column A and a little from Column B.

What this episode shows is that once again the failure was people tripping over their own feet.

Way back when in college, I had a teacher who was fond of saying that ideas and facts are no good without each other. "We need ideas about facts", he would say.

We have in America an "intelligence community", not an "information ministry". Information is the thirst for knowledge run amok.

It's occurred to me some time ago (and likely has been obvious to many for a long, long time) that this administration has only two motivating factors when it comes to surveillance, and neither of them has to do with protecting America. Number One, of course, is the unchecked ability to monitor its political opponents and stifle dissent in Congress, in the media and among political appointees that still retain even the minimum of integrity. Number Two is the ability to avoid jail (or even just trial and exposure) for crimes committed in the early days since 9/11, when this government was desperate to show us that it was working to protect us and grabbing random people in an illegal fashion.

I would say that given the rapidly changing political climate, Number One is starting to matter less and less, while Number Two is starting to rise in prominence. These folks know that if they haven't lost yet, they will lose soon, and there's a good possibility that the Trial of the Century just might occur while they're still among the living. Hence the Gordian knot of laws, signing statements and executive orders that they hope will prove impossible to unravel for the next party in power. In other words, I believe very strongly that whenever this administration is demanding the legalization of something freaky, e.g. torture, warrantless surveillance, whatever, it means they already did it, they did it a lot, there is a paper trail and they want to make it legal retroactively so that they won't go to jail for it. Pure and simple.

allowing the Government to collect greater and greater amounts of surveillance data, with fewer and fewer safeguards, results in far less effective counter-terrorism efforts

This is of course quite clear to the small community who pay close attention to such things but it is also quite apparent that in both this debate and in the debate over Iraq, the administration relies very heavily (and I'm afraid reliably) on the unwillingness of the public to devote attention to such details.

If it hadn't been for Joe Lieberman stepping in McCain would still be out on the campaign trail asserting that Iran was providing direct aid to Al Qaeda in Iraq. It's more distressing to note that all this is taking place even after we've done extensive and fairly probing post-mortems on how the press got the WMD's in Iraq story so wrong.

Wow did I get 'socked' by Julie Anna on the other post. I am back to feeling like a silly novice and wearing blue booties.

With respect to everybody,

I'll just quietly 'no-comment' for awhile or annoy.

It will be a relief to only smile, and grant her/his wish.

I'd love to hush. Maybe my dream is to be in a barn stable, permanently?

It's always precious to be alive. So, for balance, no modicum of annoyance, for awhile.

For some, its a matter of misery likes company? Respect to Glenn, and Julie Anna's comment.

Perhaps "Professor" Yoo has written some secret memo on torturing reason and logic to its near death muddle. "The deceit here is manifest" and Orwell was an optimist.

JulieAnna apparently just lives to push the 9-11 conspiracy. That she would take out the frustration of being asked to refrain on you is unfortunate and inappropriate. Please ignore her complaint.

... it becomes more obvious that the Supreme Court needs to review the legality of certain actions by this administration; if not by several in the last decades.

But how? I can not prove that I have been injured to get standing to bring suit in the first place; nor can I afford to pay to be represented.

I have watched “my government” ignore the constitution most of my life; and yet, the Supreme Court is of no benefit to me in most instances.

As my Canadian friend loves to point out, the USA constitution is highly overrated.