The
Weekly Standard has an online posting that makes the only remotely convincing I have seen that Bush may be in the clear legally on the NSA spying case. Bush critics need to have a clear rebuttal, which is why I am posting it here. Talk it through...
The author of the WS article, Edward Morrissey argues that the media has been incautious in its portrayal of the New York Times article that broke the secret program:
Since the Times story broke, the public has received varying descriptions of what the paper actually reported, with the bogus charge that the NSA had spied on American citizens getting the most repetition. Of course, that allegation never appears in the Times article. Reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau carefully avoided making that charge, and it makes a difference:
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
Morrissey then suggests that the individuals that the NSA spied on were not American citizens, even if they were in the U.S., so they were not protected by the warrant provisions of FISA:
If someone resides in the United States on a visa and not a green card, they do not qualify, nor do they qualify if they get a green card under false pretenses. But the targets within the United States were identified through intelligence developed through captures of al Qaeda agents and their equipment. Most al Qaeda assets enter countries on student visas, which does not qualify them as a U.S. person under FISA--and therefore does not extend them the protection of warrants prior to or during surveillance.
He then questions the Times' motivations in running the story and suggests that Bush's response has turned the tables on them,
It had to dismay the editors at the Times, then, when an angry President Bush came out the next day, the day after that, and the day after that to take personal responsibility for the NSA effort. Bush called the Risen/Lichtblau bluff. Had there been any scandal, the president would hardly have run in front of a camera to admit to ordering the program. He changed the course of the debate and now has the Times and his other critics backpedaling.
The timing and questionable news value of the story opens the question about the motivation of the Times's editors. Has the Times allowed its anti-Bush bias to warp its judgment so badly that it deliberately undermined a critical part of America's defenses against terrorist attack to try to damage the president?
I'm not trying to ruin anyone's holiday here, but this guy seems to have a better argument, if his facts are correct, than the WH has produced to date. I've got some rebuttals to his arguments, but they are mostly indirect. Who can definitively blow this guy out of the water?