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There's something else about the Bush/NSA warrantless, oversight-less spying on Americans that doesn't make sense. The case Bush cited yesterday - of two San Diego based hijackers al Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and their overseas communications -- as a justification for going around the FISA court to use the NSA to spy on Americans making calls overseas -- really makes no sense.
Why?
Because it's pretty clear if you were tapping Mr. Al Mihdhar's calls to Germany and Mr. Al-Hazmi's calls to Germany and Afghanistan, that pretty soon, you would want to tap their calls to each other, in San Diego, or their calls with Mr. Atta, who was in Florida.
In other words, you would want to tap the calls between US based persons.
Why? Because what you're really worried about is what those potential terrorist cells are planning to do in the US.
So presumably, you would have to go to the FISA court at that point. (Bush hasn't admitted to the NSA being used to tap US to US calls -- yet).
But that's not how it worked. The way Bush did the NSA warrantless spying on Americans was no fine instrument. It was a blunt instrument. As the NYT reports today (Sunday), Bush ordered every communication to and from Afghanistan monitored by the NSA after September 11:
So presumably, that includes Peter Bergen calling his sources, and the NYT Washington bureau checking in wth its Afghan correspondent. That includes humanitarian aid groups, and the State Department calling their staff. All of it without oversight, without warrants, free for the administration to use however it sees fit. So what is it doing with all of that information? Are there files on all of those people? Kept, without oversight, forever in US government data bases? And what probable cause does the Bush administration have against Mr. Bergen? Well, none, but perhaps they're interested to see what he's learning.In the days after the attacks, the C.I.A. determined that Al Qaeda, which had found a haven in Afghanistan, was responsible. Congress quickly passed a resolution authorizing the president to conduct a war on terrorism, and the security agency was secretly ordered to begin conducting comprehensive coverage of all communications into and out of Afghanistan, including those to and from the United States, current and former officials said.
OK. So things were dramatically expanded as the war on terror was expanded from Afghanistan globally. So who else is being monitored, under what parameters, and what is done with their files once they've begun to be monitored -- again, without oversight?
It's not much of a stretch to imagine there are plenty of files opened on people of all sorts of political stripes. I imagine, it's not just the anti-war groups monitored by the Pentagon who have reason to wonder, if they're being monitored by the full technological apparatus of the US foreign intelligence system. It's a very blunt instrument, and there's a "and then they came for me" aspect to all of this, that conservatives shouldn't be so quick to dismiss.
In fact, what starts out as one thing might very quickly have become something else. There's no evidence of any court cases that have resulted from Bush's illegal unauthorized warrantless NSA spying on Americans. As I wrote earlier, presumably even the Bush administration hasn't figured out a way to use secretly, illegally obtained evidence against the accused in a court of law. Cases where it's tried to declare the accused has some extra legal judicial status have virtually all collapsed. No successful terrorism prosecutions, no al Qaeda cells wrapped up domestically. So what has it been used for?