Not the proof they intended

It was inevitable that the Wall Street Journal would try this line of argument. As widely reported, the Bush administration came close to a major crisis in March of 2004 when the Department of Justice refused to reauthorize the special National Security Administration surveillance program; this program was fairly clearly illegal, hence the reticence of the department.*

The Deputy Attorney-General from the time, James Comey, told the Senate how senior White House staffers, likely under orders from Dick Cheney, tried to circumvent his refusal to reauthorize by going to the hospital bed of Attorney-General John Ashcroft to get his approval, even though his incapacitation meant that his deputy had the final say. Bush renewed the program anyway without the approval, whereupon the deputy and several other senior law enforcement officials wrote resignation letters. Comey wrote his on the 10th of March, but like everyone else he came to the office on the 11th of March 2004 to hear of the Madrid bombings, and so held off, and Bush then altered the program to meet his objections.

With that prelude, here's the Journal spin (subs. req'd; alt. free link) --

By the way, March 10, 2004, the date of Mr. Comey's visit to Mr. Ashcroft's bedside is an historic day for another reason: It was the eve of 3-11 and the Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 and injured 2,000. It was, in other words, the kind of event that brings home the global nature of terrorism, as well as the sophisticated coordination required to execute attacks of such brutality.

So they has much as say (after resuming their idiotic American calendarisation of 11-M) that the occurrence of 11-M rationalised the existence of the surveillance program. Except that this entire controversy concerned the reauthorization of an already up and running program which did not detect any sign of 11-M before it happened. Indeed, the National Security Agency does all kinds of global surveillance that is unconstrained by any American laws, and there's no evidence that it detected any 11-M plotting either.

Much like the torture obsession of the right, the Journal has latched on to something that is ineffective and illegal, while sounding to them like a magic solution to the problem of global terrorism.

*Just to be clear, even the stripped down program is probably illegal too, given the absence of warrants, but the program that was apparently running before March 2004 was even more illegal.