Olbermann suggested this: Conyers Questions Mukasey on FISA Claim

[babylonsister]

Conyers Questions Mukasey on FISA Claim
By Paul Kiel - April 3, 2008, 5:45PM

It's gotten to be something of a pattern with administration figures of late: making sweeping claims about national security matters that do not stand up to scrutiny. Just Monday, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) complained that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell (who has something of a habit with this), had mischaracterized liberal opposition to retroactive immunity in the Senate as a bunch of impeachment-crazed loonies.

This time it's Attorney General Michael Mukasey who's catching flak. In a Q&A session after a speech last week, Mukasey said:

"{Officials} shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has 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."

The problem with this, as Glenn Greenwald at Salon has shown, is that nothing of this sort seems to have happened. Greenwald asked former executive director of the 9/11 Commission Philip Zelikow, who responded that he was "not sure of course what the AG had in mind" and came up empty guessing.

In a letter today, House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI) calls Mukasey's statement very disturbing and writes, "I am aware of no previous reference, in the 9/11 Commission report or elsewhere, to a call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States which, if it had been intercepted, could have helped prevent the 9/11 attacks." And anyway, he adds, there's no reason why the FISA law would not have served to intercept the call in this instance. So what's Mukasey talking about? he wants to know.

You can read the letter, which was also signed by fellow committee members Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Bobby Scott (D-VA), below. The lawmakers also ask, not for the first time, for a copy of the October 23, 2001 memo by John Yoo that declared the Fourth Amendment kaput (it had "no application to domestic military operations").

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/conyers_questions_mukasey_on_f.php

[annabanana]

1. GOOD! They can no longer be allowed to spute this BS unchallenged.

Letting these outrageously false statements stand allows the misinformation to seep into the public consciousness to the point where it becomes "conventional wisdom" or "accepted fact" without scrutiny or corroboration.

[Raksha]

2. Scary thought: Maybe it's NOT a false statement (LIHOP).

Either way, it needs to be looked into.