FISA fix/mess: DNI McConnell Faces Senate Judiciary Committee Tomorow (Tuesday).

[chill_wind]

"As spy chief Mike McConnell faces another round of grilling on the Hill Tuesday to defend the new White House-backed surveillance law, Democrats are homing in on some of his recent public statements that have appeared imprecise, incorrect or contradictory".

From Capitol Hill article
By Helen Fessenden
September 25, 2007


Just a SMALL taste of the bag of old tricks from the junta. God, they never get smarter, and neither do we. We keep electing Dems who won't impeach the whole cabal, including ones like Feinstein who aggressivily defend this pack of lies.

McConnell, who had started his term this past winter with generally strong reviews, has seen some of his political capital erode in the wake of stumbles during recent testimony.

For example, McConnell told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Sept. 10 that the new law helped Germany disrupt a major terrorist plot on Sept. 2. After Democrats and others pointed out that the U.S.-German intelligence cooperation he was referring to occurred last year, well before the bill’s passage, he retracted that statement the next day.

His statements, taken together, have left open other gaps that Democrats have seized on. In an August interview with The El Paso Times and in subsequent testimony, he said that it took 200 man-hours on average for the FISA Court to issue a warrant for each application in 2006, as part of his argument that the traditional application process was cumbersome.

But that estimate was at odds with testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Sept. 18 by James Baker, former counsel to the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which oversees the FISA Court. Baker stated that the process could be as quick as minutes in “no-kidding” emergencies.

(snip)

“The general point is that we would lose out on a significant amount of intelligence,” said spokesman Feinstein when asked about the discrepancy.

Democrats have questioned McConnell’s commitment during the negotiations over the Democratic FISA bill that he ultimately turned down in August, before Congress passed the GOP alternative. In the El Paso Times interview, he said he hadn’t read the six-page Democratic draft bill. Under questioning by House Intelligence panel member Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) on Sept. 20, however, McConnell said he “personally skimmed it,” even though he “did not read it in infinite detail.” He explained that he rejected the Democratic bill on the suggestion of 20 lawyers who had already parsed the language.

Further clouding the picture, several Democratic sources say, is that McConnell had asked for, and received, three final revisions in the Democratic version before coming back to congressional negotiators with a wholly different draft — the one he deemed unacceptable.

“The DNI was straightforward with both sides in what we needed in the FISA modernization bill,” countered spokesman Feinstein.

(more)

a much longer low-down on the crap this guy has peddled at
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/democrats-question-credibility-consistency-of-dni-mcconnell-2007-09-25.html

[chill_wind]

1. Feinstein's position on this revulses me completely. The ends justify the means,

and lying to Congress, the media and the American people is OK in order to extort bills and gut FISA for the pleasure of the White House.

A page right out of the Straussians.