Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."
The law governing these things in force at the time was FISA.
1. The FISA law did not require a warrant for this situation.
2. Even if it did, why did not the Bush administration apply for one?
3. FISA also provides for a "wiretap now, get warrant later". If there was some misunderstanding about points 1 & 2, why did not point 3 apply?
Either the Attorney General is lying or Bush & Co demonstrated frightening incompetence at stopping the 9/11 plot. If the Attorney General is speaking the truth, then the 9/11 Commission and its report are a joke.
To quote Glenn Greenwald:
Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.
Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrant to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Mukasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration knew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action.
PS: Mukasey is the one who despite a hundred years of precedent, could not answer at his confirmation hearing whether water-boarding constitutes torture. His nomination to AG would have been held up but for the two great Democratic Senators, Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer.
But what should really give people pause is that there are hundreds if not thousands of such people in high positions available to be nominated to the highest posts in government. People with not a scintilla of integrity. Like plaque in the arteries that cannot be removed, such folks slowly but surely kill the nation.
