The Last Refuge of the Truly Guilty

Semantics.

They're actually pushing back at calling this domestic spying because the call would be charged at an international rate. This is The Chewbacca Defense to the nth degree.

I guess that's because Glenn Greenwald nailed them to the fucking wall yesterday.

In June, 2002, Republican Sen. Michael DeWine of Ohio introduced legislation (S. 2659) which would have eliminated the exact barrier to FISA which Gen. Hayden yesterday said is what necessitated the Administration bypassing FISA. Specifically, DeWine's legislation proposed:

to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to modify the standard of proof for issuance of orders regarding non-United States persons from probable cause to reasonable suspicion. . . .

In other words, DeWine's bill, had it become law, would have eliminated the "probable cause" barrier (at least for non-U.S. persons) which the Administration is now pointing to as the reason why it had to circumvent FISA.

And the executive branch blocked this amendment in a summary which said, among other things, that the FISA court was working just fine, and that modifying the standard of proof wouldn't "pass constitutional muster."

Lies and the lying liars. Read the whole post. Or, you can just read your local paper, which will likely have this story in it tomorrow, thanks to one intrepid blogger who tracked this down in the Congressional Record. But wait, I thought no truth came from the blogosphere! I thought it was all a Wild West show!