Democrats question credibility, consistency of DNI McConnell

[ck4829]

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.

McConnell faces the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, following appearances last week before the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees and the previous week before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. As director of national intelligence (DNI), he is leading the administration’s push to make permanent the temporary surveillance law that Congress hurriedly passed in early August.

Democrats on the Intelligence and Judiciary panels are working on an alternative bill that they plan to introduce in October.

The interim bill amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by authorizing the administration to conduct warrantless eavesdropping of foreign targets whether or not they were communicating with Americans, as long as the target is “reasonably believed” to be abroad. Under FISA, a secret court had to issue warrants if the communications involved anyone within U.S. borders, whereas the new law required that the DNI and the attorney general authorize the warrantless wiretapping. For its part, the FISA court may only conduct a procedural review after the fact. Democrats want to restore the court’s role as the exclusive authority in granting warrants for foreign-intelligence gathering inside U.S. borders.

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.

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/democrats-question-credibility-consistency-of-dni-mcconnell-2007-09-25.html

[rodeodance]

1. as my dad used to say " He is a crook"--I do not trust this man at all.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. Fool Me Once, Shame On You. Fool Me 3,579 Times, Shame On...

At this point, if the Congressional "Democrats" haven't realized that anyone who serves at Bush's pleasure is a serial liar, then they are either as dumb as Fred Thompson, or they're playing some sort of destructive political game.