Remarkable Duplicity

I would ordinarily say that this is unbelievable, except for the fact that, with the Bush Administration, it's par for the course.

A Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau article, In 2002, Justice Department said eavesdropping law working well, reports:

A July 2002 Justice Department statement to a Senate committee appears to contradict several key arguments that the Bush administration is making to defend its eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without court warrants.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law governing such operations, was working well, the department said in 2002. A "significant review" would be needed to determine whether FISA's legal requirements for obtaining warrants should be loosened because they hampered counterterrorism efforts, the department said then.

The article cites a piece from Glen Greenwald's blog, Unclaimed Territory, The Administration's new FISA defense is factually false, which details the 2002 DOJ Statement. Greenwald is very good and the whole piece is worth reading. As he notes:

By that time, the Administration had already been engaging in eavesdropping outside of the parameters of FISA, and yet the DoJ itself was expressing serious doubts about the constitutionality of that eavesdropping and even warned that engaging in it might harm national security because it would jeopardize prosecutions against terrorists. Put another way, the DoJ was concerned that it might be unconstitutional to eavesdrop with a lower standard than probable cause even as the Administration was doing exactly that.

In other words: We don't need to change the Law, we're already ignoring it.

UPDATE: The LA Times has also has an article on the subject, Words, Deeds on Spying Differed, which quotes an ACLU attorney's charge that the Bush Administration is guilty of "'remarkable duplicity' for having testified in public against the legal change while carrying it out in private."