Danger: Right-Wing Spin Machine Dead Ahead

Wingers will undoubtedly try to make hay of this revelation that the FISA court modified a substantial number of warrant requests coming out of the Bush Administration. No question they'll use the information to argue that the FISA court was obstructing ongoing terror investigations, and therefore needed to be circumvented. But that only makes sense if you read just the headline and not the article.

Here are the actual details:

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps has approved at least 18,740 applications for electronic surveillance or physical searches from five presidential administrations since 1979.

The judges modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. In 20 of the first 21 annual reports on the court's activities up to 1999, the Justice Department told Congress that "no orders were entered (by the FISA court) which modified or denied the requested authority" submitted by the government.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004 -- the most recent years for which public records are available.

The judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection in the court's history.

For one thing, this "obstructionism" resulted in the FISA court modifying 3.2 percent of the requests it received, and rejecting 0.1 percent. A rubber stamp by any other name is still a rubber stamp.

But here's the more important point. 173 of the 179 modifications occurred in 2003 and 2004. This is well AFTER the President, by executive order, authorized the secret NSA wiretapping program. There can be no cause and effect here, since the order came BEFORE the Administration got any resistance from the FISA court.

It's crucial to set the record straight here. The President broke the law, and subsequently got used to the law being broken, such that only AFTER the executive order did the FISA court start getting suspicious of warrant requests, and seek to modify them.

This is an incredibly important distinction to make and we need to focus all our energies on it. The right-wing narrative will now be "FISA wasn't a rubber stamp, they were trying to stop effective combating of terrorism, and Bush had no choice to do what he did." This is NOT the case. Media outlets need to hear from their readers and viewers to ensure that they don't buy the GOP spin.