California Conservative

Today, it’s House Minority Leader Pelosi’s turn to be the gift that gives to Republicans. Here’s some laughable sections of her interview with the AP:

“I would not want any president, Democrat or Republican, to have the expanded power the administration is claiming in this case,” Pelosi, (D-CA), said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Ms. Pelosi is obviously ignoring the five cases decided on the issue or warrantless wiretaps. If you want to know more about these cases, do as Hugh Hewitt recommends: Search Powerlineblog by typing in NSA.

Pelosi did not say the NSA’s surveillance program was illegal. But she said the administration should follow the procedures in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows government lawyers to ask a secretive court for warrants for surveillance in the United States during national security investigations.

If they aren’t doing anything illegal, and time is precious, then why go through the FISA process? Everyone talks about how easy it is to get a FISA warrant. That’s nonsense. According to Victoria Toensing, the paperwork for a FISA warrant is usually 2-3 inches thick. Think of how much time that’d take to fill out. That’s alot of paperwork. (For more on the FISA warrant issue, there’s no better roundup than Ms. Toensing’s Opinion Journal article from last Sunday.)

What Ms. Pelosi is attempting to do is to say clearly that the administration didn’t break the law while implying that the administration broke the law. Getting away with that duplicitousness isn’t easy.

“If you say…this is for a narrow universe of calls, there is absolutely no issue with getting a FISA warrant for that,” said Pelosi, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and has been involved for the past 13 years in overseeing U.S. intelligence agencies. “It is when you go beyond that, that it becomes a challenge,” she said in the interview Friday. “The president says he is not going beyond that, so why can’t he obey the law?”

Forgive me but I don’t believe a word she said there. This is just more of her ‘guilt by innuendo’ campaign. I’d just point her to Victoria Toensing’s article as refutation on the subject. Here’s how Ms. Toensing described her familiarity with FISA:

As chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1981 to 1984, I participated in oversight of FISA in the first years after its passage. When I subsequently became deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, one of my responsibilities was the terrorism portfolio, which included working with FISA.

In other words, she’s an expert on FISA.

The Justice Department, in the administration’s most recent defense of the NSA program, issued on Friday a six-point “Myth vs. Reality” rebuttal of criticism leveled against Bush’s action. It claims that Bush has legal authority through his position as commander in chief as well as through a congressional resolution passed shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The administration also resists descriptions of the program as domestic spying, arguing that the communications under surveillance involve an overseas party. And it contends that the program is consistent with FISA, which the administration suggests moves too slowly for some monitoring.

I hope President Bush takes enough time Tuesday night to fully explain the NSA intercept program for everyone to hear. It’s time to tell Democrats to shut up on this fake issue. If Democrats don’t get serious about national security, then they won’t have a shot at taking the House or Senate, no matter what the Kossacks tell them.

One last thing: If Dems want to be taken seriously on national security, John Murtha isn’t the way to get there.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Homeland Security, Pelosi, Terrorism, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.