Thursday, February 09, 2006

Dirty Little Secret

Of all the things at which the Bush administration is inept, keeping secrets is not one of them.

Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.

The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.


Of course, there is nothing the judges could actually do about it. The established media needs to stop playing a balancing act - lawyers for the ACLU say it is illegal while lawyers for the Bush administration say it is legal - and provide us with the truth. Just like Stephen Colbert. If the media does not know how to accurately report on fact and fiction, then at the very least it should stop hurting this country. Like Tucker Carlson's bowtie.

The pain!!!

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