Liberals Kill Soldiers!!!!

Just so we can get out in front of the next breathless Fox News/Rush/Dennis Praeger/Glenn Beck news cycle, in which we will be told in no uncertain terms that Congress' delay in giving the Bush Administration blanket permission to sniff your underwear drawer led to the death of US soldiers in Iraq, Glenn Greenwald is nice enough to point out that it's all baloney.

As always, the Bush administration and their allies intend to play games with and nakedly exploit national security issues in order to obtain more unchecked power. Specifically, Roll Call reports today (sub. rq'd) that "Republicans are planning to use the kidnapping and subsequent murder of three U.S. soldiers in Iraq earlier this year to put a 'human face' on the [FISA] issue" -- referring to prior claims by Mike McConnell that delays in completing the forms for a FISA warrant prevented timely eavesdropping on Iraqi insurgents who had kidnapped those soldiers.

Like clockwork, the standard roster of GOP hacks -- The New York Post and Instapundit -- have their talking-point marching orders and are today promoting this dramatic tale. The Post article goes so far as to show a picture of one of the kidnapped soliders with his wife and repeatedly insinuates that the need to comply with FISA prevented the U.S. military from eavesdropping on insurgent calls and thereby prevented the military from saving this soldier.

As Spencer Ackerman previously reported, McConnell's claims in this regard are completely false, since their failure to eavesdrop right away was their own fault for failing to invoke FISA's emergency eavesdropping provision, whereby they are free to eavesdrop for 72 hours without a warrant. Just as importantly, the eavesdropping here involved foreign-to-foreign communications (i.e., Iraq-to-Iraq), which nobody in Congress believes ought to require a warrant.

This incident, then, has absolutely nothing to do with the pending FISA debate. But the administration and its standard, mindless followers nonetheless exploit -- as usual -- the U.S. troops who were killed by insurgents in Iraq for their own domestic political agenda.

I hadn't even heard the caterwauling from the Limbaugh crowd on this one before I read the article, but I'm sure that is only because I took a few days off from my usual self flagellation routine of tuning into the Big Talker, 1210 AM in order to do my oppo research. The truth of the matter is that FISA gives the administration broad and reasonable latitude with regard to policing international terrorism, and that at the heart of the "illegal wiretapping" debate is the brazen disregard for existing law that this administration embraced. FISA is the law of the land, and has been since 1978. If a republican administration and a republican congress, alongside a republican supreme court wanted to change this law after 9/11, they had every right to do so. They chose to break the law instead. At the end of the day, they do not believe that this is a country built on the rule of law and nothing proves that more clearly than this particular decision.