OK, just one more

Since I can't sleep with this one chugging through my head, I'll hit one more topic tonight.

This report from truthout.org (admittedly a left wing site, although Matt Drudge, one of the more conservative voices on the net, lends it credence by posting it as well on his site) is pretty interesting.

If true, it appears that the NSA wire tapping of American citizens began well before 9/11. In fact, according to the article, longstanding NSA protocol held that if the NSA spied on American citizens, the agency was to black out the identities if it did not immediately destroy the information.

Bush and his Department of Defense changed that BEFORE 9/11, so that the NSA kept a running list of names of citizens it had spied on, and made those names available to the Administration.

Read the whole article. It seems that one of the Administration's arguments in favor of the President having the authorization to conduct these warrantless wire taps, that Congress granted it (even though they say they didn't) when they granted him the power to use force while fighting terror, may be deflating. After all, they can't claim no law was broken because Congress granted him that power, if he started the program before Congress passed the force resolution (or indeed before there was any reason for passing it).

Oh, and by the way, if this is true, it kind of puts lie to another of the Bush talking points of late: That if we'd had such a program in place before 9/11, we could have stopped the attacks. Never mind that we now know of over 50 different sources of information that pointed to such an attack which were ignored, and now nevermind that they actually HAD such a program and it DIDN'T stop the attacks.

I'll tell you what, the more we learn of this Administration and the nut jobs who have taken control of the Republican party and the Congress, the more the early theoretical papers of some of the founders of the neoconservative movement resonate. I'm still not ready to say any of them had a hand in 9/11... but I'm not prepared to come to their defense, either. At best, scholarly papers that say the best way to grab and hold power in a Democracy is to have a "Pearl Harbor-type event" and keep the populace afraid are coincidentally timed. At worst, given that the authors of those papers are now running the government, they seem ominous.

Liam.