A question for the Right about Bush's domestic spying program

[jmowreader]

George Bush says his domestic spying program is intended to combat foreign terrorists operating on US soil.

All well and good...I guess...foreign terrorists are bad people and They Must Be Stopped. And obviously it's okay to spy on foreign terrorists.

But now we're learning that the program started well before 9/11--when Bush didn't care about foreign terrorists.

Now! If this program is about terrorism and it was started before terrorism was an Administration priority, is it really about terrorism? Or is it something else?

[elehhhhna]

1. It's all about terrorism...

Them terrorizing us.

FULL DISCLOSURE NOW

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Something else.... remember what John Ashcroft was doing

just prior to and perhaps during 911.... tracking down hookers in New Orleans.... that is where their priorities were... shoulda listened to BC's guy, what was his name? Sandy Berger?


http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020812/story.html
Long before 9/11, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda. By the time they decided, it was too late. The saga of a lost chance
By Michael Elliott


Posted Sunday, Aug. 4, 2002; 2:31 a.m. EST
Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it.

One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.