"A Case Study in 8 Years of Lying and Ignorance"

Glenn gets it absolutely right.

Ever since The New York Times, on December 16, 2005, first reported that President Bush ordered spying on Americans without the warrants required by FISA, the clear illegality that was unveiled -- FISA said that X was a felony and Bush admitted to doing X -- was continuously obscured by a combination of deceit on the part of Bush followers and ignorance, sloth and confusion on the part of the media.  Beginning within the first days of the controversy, Bush followers who literally had no idea what they were talking about offered factually false claims and even distorted quotations from the statute to justify what was done.  Today is a perfect example illustrating how completely misinformed and/or deliberately deceitful right-wing advocates inject blatant falsehoods into these debates.  

Earlier today, The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau (one of the NYT reporters who originally broke the NSA story yet often mindlessly recites false Bush claims even on this issue) wrote a story which reported that the FISA Court of Review had issued a decision "validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a specific court order."  From start to finish, Lichtblau's description of the ruling was muddled and contradictory, even nonsensical in some places.  

Nonetheless, it was crystal clear even from Lichtblau's poorly written story that the court's ruling had nothing whatsoever to do with whether Bush acted legally or properly when he ordered warrantless eavesdropping on Americans from 2001-2006, when warrantless eavesdropping was a felony under FISA.  To the contrary, as I explained earlier today (here) -- and as Talk Left's Armando and Anonymous Liberal (both lawyers) also detailed --  the FISA court was addressing a totally different and much narrower question:  namely, whether the warrantless eavesdropping which Congress authorized in the 2007 Protect America Act was prohibited by the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. 

The ruling had nothing whatsoever to do with the central question at the heart of the NSA controversy:  namely, whether Bush committed felonies by ordering warrantless eavesdropping in the face of a Congressional statute that explicitly made such eavesdropping a felony.  

As predicted, the bad reporting on the part of Lichtblau that I wrote about here has been picked up by right wingers, and even some people who should know better, everywhere. Glenn documents the hay being made by pundits and bloggers declaring that Bush was vindicated in this ruling, that the review court says Bush's illegal and warrantless wiretapping wasn't illegal after all. Which wasn't what the review court said, at all. This was a very narrow decision, on whether Congress acted within its authority in passing the Protect America Actin August 2007--a law that is now long expired.

Not that that will stop the Bush apologists, rehabilitators and the Villagers who are nothing more than ready to turn the page on their complicity in all of the excesses of the Bush years. But I'm doing my part, as Glenn says, to stomp on this myth before it can take root.