Over at The Washington Post's Early Warning, William Arkin sniffs:
Come on. The government is not just repeating the targeting of political opponents a la J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon. It is not picking out a Seymour Hersh or a Cindy Sheehan to find their links to foreign influences nor seeking to ruin their lives by developing incriminating evidence on them.
Okay. So uh, why couldn't the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Courts be told about the wiretapping then?
See, the problem for Arkin, and Powerline, and all the other apologists is that "the President's program" (and yes, it was really called that) is distinguished from normal intelligence operations by one simple fact: Bush's unilateral decision to deny disclosure to classified oversight courts. Courts that exist solely to verify that the president is going after the Mohammad Atta's rather than the Cindy Sheehan's of the world. So Arkin, if he wants to uphold this argument, needs to find an answer to this question: why did Bush decide that the historically deferential Federal Intelligence Surveillance Courts would prove fatally harmful to his activities?
