Mike Mukasey tows the line.

I hate to keep picking on Mike Mukasey, but he really has proven himself to be just about as loathsome as Gonzales, maybe more so, considering the fact that he was generally accepted as being somewhat competent when he was appointed AG, as opposed to Gonzo, who was clearly never more than a bootlicking toady of Bush, dating back to his Texas days. Mukasey's tearful performance in San Francisco last week, in which he decried any attempt to curtail the administration's ability to eavesdrop without legal warrant, and insisted that the telecommunication companies who broke the law by acceding to the administrations illegality should be protected at all costs was nothing more than a pack of brazen lies. But the lies were obscured by Mukasey's use of the 9/11 card, which trumps all facts and reason and launches the player of the card into the stratospheric level of sympathetic martyrdom.

The WSJ wasted no time in breathlessly praising Mukasey's speech, calling him an Attorney General "worthy of the current moment":

He also offered a perspective, partly personal as a former Mahattanite, on the necessity of warrantless antiterror surveillance. Before 9/11, Mr. Mukasey said, "We knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. We've got" -- here he paused with emotion -- "we've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that."

The AG also addressed why immunity from lawsuits is vital for the telecom companies that cooperated with the surveillance after 9/11. "Forget the liability" the phone companies face, Mr. Mukasey said. "We face the prospect of disclosure in open court of what they did, which is to say the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence against foreign targets." Al Qaeda would love that. The cynics will call this "fear-mongering," but most Americans will want to make sure we don't miss the next terror call.

Except, that as Glen Greenwald points out, any third grader who has been paying attention just a little bit can call bullshit on Mukasey's entire premise. The FISA laws, as they existed on the books since 1978 provide the administration the ability and the right to eavesdrop on any call coming into the states from outside the country, and further the existing emergency measures within the 1978 FISA bill grant a 72 hour grace period that allows for warrantless wiretapping until a warrant can be secured. Which brings up the more problematic issue with Mukasey's statement, to wit: if they identified a call from a safehouse in Afghanistan, why didn't they wiretap it, in accordance to the laws as they have existed since 1978?

Even under the "old" FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it's really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have -- and should have -- eavesdropped on that call and didn't need a warrant to do so. So why didn't they? Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.

Independently, even if there had been a warrant requirement for that call -- and there unquestionably was not -- why didn't the Bush administration obtain a FISA warrant to listen in on 9/11-planning calls from this "safe house"? Independently, why didn't the administration invoke FISA's 72-hour emergency warrantless window to listen in on those calls? If what Muskasey said this week is true -- and that's a big "if" -- his revelation about this Afghan call that the administration knew about but didn't intercept really amounts to one of the most potent indictments yet about the Bush administration's failure to detect the plot in action. Contrary to his false claims, FISA -- for multiple reasons -- did not prevent eavesdropping on that call.

But either way, Mukasey really wants to make the point that the telecoms must be protected at all costs, or "We face the prospect of disclosure in open court of what they did, which is to say the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence against foreign targets." Except....not really. As Greenwald explains:

Mike Mukasey was a long-time federal judge and so I feel perfectly comfortable calling that what it is: a brazen lie. Federal courts hear classified information with great regularity and it is not heard in "open court." There are numerous options available to any federal judge to hear classified information -- closed courtrooms, in camera review (in chambers only), ex parte communications (communications between one party and the judge only). No federal judge -- and certainly not Vaughn Walker, the Bush 41 appointee presiding over the telecom cases -- is going to allow "disclosure in open court of . . . . the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence." And Mukasey knows that.

So, to recap, Mike Mukasey seems to be an Attorney General 'worthy of the current moment' because of his willingness to blatantly lie and shamelessly exploit 9/11 in defense of the Bush administration's gross incompetence and willful disdain for the laws and the principles upon which the country was founded.

UPDATE: Uh Oh....Keith Olberman picks up on this story, and Rachel Maddow agrees that if Mukasey isn't lying, his ass ought to be sworn in to explain what in the world he is talking about...stay tuned.