I have taken to reading some of the right wingnutosphere blogs just for shits and giggles. I guess I find ignorance hysterically funny. When it comes to heads-buried-in-their-asses Bush apologists, you would have to look hard to find a group funnier and more full of it than the folks over at Powerline, especially their head goon John Hindraker (some call him Ass Rocket or Ass Missile, I prefer Shitlaser).
Recently, Shitlaser has been playing fast and loose with common sense in defense of the NSA spying scandal. His latest effort surrounds the questions about the Bush Administrations repeated avoidance of the FISA court to spy on Americans (yes, Americans. It has become clear that the NSA hasn't been playing sneak-a-peek exclusively on foreign calls and e-mail). Powerline has apparently been besieged by intelligent people (liberals) asking why the Bush Administration avoided the requirement of warrant authorization up to 72 hours after the fact.
He writes:
We've been getting emails from liberals demanding to know why we haven't written about the 72-hour provision of FISA, which, they say, definitively proves that there couldn't possibly have been any need to go outside the FISA structure for purposes of speed. Actually, there are quite a number of FISA provisions that we haven't written about, but, since the left seems to be putting so much emphasis on this one, here goes: why the 72-hour clause doesn't eliminate the problem of FISA delay.
He pastes the relevant section of the FISA law, then states:
So this is the Left's argument: the speed problem is solved. All the government has to do is begin the electronic surveillance immediately; notify the court; and the government then has 72 hours to get the necessary paperwork in front of the FISA judge, and get the judge to sign the FISA order.
Simple? Not exactly. FISA applications are detailed and require considerable time to prepare.
Let's stop for a moment and review. First of all, Shitlaser claims that all the NSA did was "go outside the FISA structure for purposes of speed", which the average person (i.e. not completely fucking moronic) would interpret as breaking the law because they believed it was inconvenient. And why is it inconvenient? Because, Shitlaser asserts, all the paperwork is just too darn complicated for those poor, hard-working NSA spooks, that's why. He then lists the FISA requirements. All eleven of them. What Shitlaser fails to realize is that there are teams of NSA personnel and Justice Department lawyers who could bang these documents out in 15 minutes while our super spies are listening to Osama bin Laden's personal chef get a good humus recipe from his aunt in Detroit. He must believe that a bunch of incompetent boobs are protecting our nation from terrorists.
Then he cites a 2002 Byron York article from National Review about how tough it is to get an warrant from the FISA court. York claims that it takes "days and weeks".
From the York article:
People familiar with the process say the problem is not so much with the court itself as with the process required to bring a case before the court. "It takes days, sometimes weeks, to get the application for FISA together," says one source. "It's not so much that the court doesn't grant them quickly, it's that it takes a long time to get to the court. Even after the Patriot Act, it's still a very cumbersome process. It is not built for speed, it is not built to be efficient. It is built with an eye to keeping [investigators] in check."
So, the problem isn't the courts, but the pencil pushers inability to assemble to application?! What are we paying these people for? I would suggest Shitlaser take his revelation to the people at Justice and the NSA and ask them if they are truly this fucking incompitent. So incompitent, in fact, that they have to break the law.
If it takes "days, sometimes weeks" to assemble a FISA application, then 72 hours is not long enough to be confident the process can be completed. Anyone who thinks that it is easy for multiple lawyers and officials to collaborate on a set of documents, present them to a federal judge and have the judge sign the order within 72 hours has, I'm afraid, no experience whatever at obtaining orders from federal judges.
I'll admit, I have never had to obtain an order from a federal judge. But I also never had access to them any time of the day or night, as they sit on emergency standby, with a full 72 hours to get my shit together.
Nowhere in the section of the York article Shitlaser pasted is the issue of the 72 hour after-the-fact, emergency request. Judges of the FISA court are available 24 hours a day for such applications. So, Shitlaser assumes that when one of our secret wiretaps picks up Ayman al-Zawahiri giving orders that Disney World be nuked at noon tomorrow, and one of our spooks wakes up a FISA judge at three in the morning to get after the fact approval for the tap, the hard working FISA jurist will insist on clearing the backlog of work on his desk before considering the warrant request.
Shitlaser sums up his ode to why the Constitution is no better than toilet paper by pulling this scenario out of his ass (note: edited for brevity).
Now let's apply that standard to what must be a common situation where electronic surveillance is important: our forces capture a terrorist overseas who has a cell phone. Let's pretend that there are no procedural problems with the 72-hour provision, and that our soldiers can immediately begin intercepting communications to that cell phone in expectation of a warrant to be issued later. That won't do them a lot of good. There may be some incoming calls, but there will be no conversations to monitor since presumably our soldiers won't be answering the phone. So what they will be able to obtain is a list of phone numbers--numbers taken from incoming calls, and numbers recorded on the cell phone as having been called by the terrorist before he was captured. What we really need to do, to roll up the cell of which the captured terrorist was a member, it to begin monitoring those other phone numbers. But, as far as I know, the fact that a particular phone called a terrorist's (or suspected terrorist's) phone does not provide probable cause to believe that the owner of that phone is the agent of a foreign power. Our soldiers could, of course, try to use means other than electronic surveillance to find out who owns the incoming and outgoing phone numbers; determine where those people are; follow them around and investigate; and perhaps, in some cases, after a lengthy delay, satisfy the FISA court that they have probable cause to believe that the person in question is the agent of a foreign power. That delay would have severe consequences. The optimum time to mine the phone numbers, and begin intercepting calls, is as soon as possible after capturing the original terrorist. But it isn't possible if probable cause for each phone number has to be proved to a FISA judge.
So, in Shitlaser's scenario, we catch a terrorist and his cell phone but we can't start tracking the numbers on its call log?! Huh? Of course we can start tracking those numbers. The NSA can even tap those numbers right away. This nation spends a half trillion dollars every year on the military and our intelligence agencies, and he thinks we can figure out how to track a phone number in the United States?! The point is not tapping the calls, it is getting the approval from a judge up to 72 hours after the tapping begins, something that the Bush administration is either too lazy or too arrogant to bother with.
This is the kind of elementary school logic we are dealing with from the right. It would be funnier and not as terrifying if Shitlaser's ability to reason was not so similar to those who run our government.