Informed Speculation

It seems like ages ago that the arcane topic of domestic surveillance was all the rage in the blogging world.  Overnight, we all became experts on the FISA courts, despite the fact that the day before we’d never even heard of them.  That’s life in the world of blogs.

Well, in a curious about-face, all that verbiage appears to have been for naught, as the endless arguments have been rendered moot by executive decision:

The Justice Department, in a major revision of a Bush administration policy, said Wednesday it had decided to give an independent body authority to monitor the government’s domestic spying program.

The Bush administration secretly began the surveillance program in 2001 to monitor international phone calls and e-mail messages to or from the United States involving people suspected by the government of having terrorist links.

In a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said this authority had been given to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and that it already had approved one request for monitoring the communications of a person believed to be linked to Al Qaeda or an associated terror group.

The court orders approving collection of international communications — whether they originate in the United States or abroad — were issued Jan. 10, according to the two-page letter.

“As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” Gonzales wrote in the letter.

You might supposed that people would wonder why we could do today what we insisted was out the question yesterday.

You’d be right to do so.

Not only is the decision getting hammered from the left (Glenn Greenwald: “Why couldn’t the new rules simply have been instituted years ago, as part of a newly amended FISA (which the administration requested and obtained from Congress in 2001 and which Congress repeatedly asked to do multiple times both prior and subsequent to revelation of the President’s lawbreaking)?”), but some voices on the right are pretty upset as well:

Is there no principle subject to negotiation?  Is there no course subject to reversal?  For the Bush administration to argue for years that this program, as operated, was critical to our national security and fell within the president’s Constitutional authority, to then turnaround and surrender presidential authority this way is disgraceful. The administration is repudiating all the arguments it has made in testimony, legal briefs, and public statements.  This goes to the heart of the White House’s credibility.  How can it cast away such a fundamental position of principle and law like this?   

My, my, my…I suspect we’ll be revisiting this subject soon…