Bush has been claiming that he was authorized by Congress, under the war powers granted him to fight the War on Terror™, to fight that war within the borders of the U.S., and therefore his authorization of eavesdropping in the U.S. was legal.

Except now it has become clear that he’s lying, again. The administration actually asked Congress to include the words “in the United States” to the war powers act, and Congress refused to do so. Tom Daschle wrote:

This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas — where we all understood he wanted authority to act — but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

Legally, that amounts to a prohibition against what the Bush administration claims it was expressly allowed to do. And since they asked and were turned down, they can’t claim that they assumed the U.S. was in-bounds for them.

Another lie is that the secret eavesdropping has been responsible for there being no terrorist attacks over the past four years. How so? The U.S. was not attacked by foreign terrorists between the 1992 World Trade Center bombing and the Millennium attacks–that’s eight years of no attacks, without the illegal wiretapping. Was Clinton an anti-terror genius? Certainly no convincing evidence (if any at all) has been forwarded to suggest that the illegal spying resulted in any safety gains.

Then there’s the case which Bush cited, saying that FISA restrictions caused them not to be aware of certain intel that could have stopped 9/11. Complete bull–FISA would have approved, had they been asked. It was the Bush administration that failed to go after the intel in the first place.

…And on a different topic but similar theme, as a reader of Josh Marshall points out, what happened to all the terror alerts? There were frequent terror alerts all the way up to the 2004 elections… and since then, not a single one. Golly gee, I wonder what’s up with that?