One More example of Hold 'em hokum

Al Gore gave a speech yesterday. He was joined by Republican Bob Barr in an event in which the two called for a special counsel to investigate potential violations of the law by the current administration. Al Gore knows something about independent investigators, as one dogged his boss for the better part of a decade.

Starting on the right foot, Hold 'em blogger Peter DiGaudio calls our former Vice President, who served a long and distinguished career in Congress prior, Algore and says he fell out of a tree to give his speech. Oh. It hurts. The laughter. It hurts. Then,

Algore is referring to, of course, the NSA wiretapping and electronic surveillance of suspected Al Qaeda operatives inside the U.S. while in contact with foreign terrorists. Of course, Algore conveniently neglects to mention the NSA's Echelon program, conducted under the Clinton administration, or the equally invasive Carnivore program, proposed by the FBI under Clinton. I will have more information on these two programs in a separate entry.

Let's do this slowly: Clinton never violated FISA under Echelon. George Tenet, whom the right grants sainthood for his work under Bush, said "We do not target their conversations for collection in the United States unless a FISA warrant has been obtained from the FISA court by the Justice Department" when he testified before Congress in April 2000. That's a fine distinction, since Bush admits to bypassing FISA. Carnivore searches were all conducted with probable cause and warrants, at least as of 2000, before Bush took over. Who knows what's happened since. Peter would like to equate the warrantless wiretaps with two programs that were conducted with warrants. That's apples and cockroaches, man.

Peter then recounts some standard talking points, leading to

While we are at it: I am sick and tired of the MSM's deliberate mischaracterization of this as "domestic spying." It was not domestic spying; ordinary Americans were never in danger of having their privacy invaded by Big Brother, and no domestic phone calls were monitored.

Peter wrote this yesterday, before today's New York Times story (none of the authors has a book deal, so there goes the easy out). The gist:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. [. . .]

Under a presidential order, the agency conducted the domestic eavesdropping without seeking the warrants ordinarily required from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles national security matters. [. . .] Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming into and going out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up. [. . . I]n bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

So yes, Peter. This was domestic spying, tracking down people and contacts in the US who were not agents of a foreign power or bent on any plot more sinister than than a thin crust with pepperoni.

Peter then, in his own words and those of boor Neal Boortz, offers rapid-fire lie after lie. There's the "Gorelick Wall" lie, in which he tries to pin 9/11 on a minor Clinton administration official; there's the "Buddhist temple/ 'No controling legal authority' " lie, in which he reminds us of one of the right's most sinister stories about Gore and ignores the results of a Republican-led investigation into the matter that cleared Gore. He ends with the "Aldrich Ames warrantless search" lie, which ignores the fact that physical searches were not illegal under FISA until 1995, after the Ames searches. Oh, wait, Peter (quoting Boortz) actually said that Clinton wiretapped Ames without a warrant. That, too, is a lie: "[T]he Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued orders authorizing electronic surveillance of Ames's office and residence"--or so said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in November 1994.

In the end, Peter declares that "The decline of this man into utter madness would be sad, if it weren't so doggone funny." It would certainly be funny, if any of it were true. I wish Peter allowed comments, so I could debunk there, and not here. Alas, his readers will probably keep believing the hokum.

Update: I could have just let Al Gore respond.