NSA live-blogging 2

Glenn Greenwald is great! He live-blogged the Senate NSA hearings and has the ability to make the key points clearly. He's "a litigator in NYC specializing in First Amendment challenges" and has become somewhat of a "go-to guy" during the outing of this scandalous behaviour on the part of the Bush cabal.

Some samples:

Can someone please tell Arlen Specter that even if they're only eavesdropping on Al Qaeda members talking to Americans, it's still against the law to do it without warrants, and that it's exactly then when it would be incredibly easy to get warrants from the FISA court?

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It's interesting how they keep having to "clarify" their statements because the statements they made ... were false.

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Leahy's anger is excellent, real and poignant. As always, the Administration wants to imply that only they care about 9/11 and remember it. Leahy has had enough of that - he works in Washington every day, was in the Capitol when 9/11 happened, and everyone should be sick of the Administration's exploitation of 9/11 to defend itself politically. It looks like Leahy is.

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Leahy makes another crucial point - FISA was amended by the Patriot Act based on the requests of the Bush Administration - Democrats and Republicans got together in the wake of 9/11 to give the Administration everything they said they needed in amended FISA - and then he went and violated it anyway.

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How funny that Orrin Hatch seems to think that Congress has no right to restrict the President's eavesdropping powers. I wonder why he voted in 2001 to amend FISA to define the restrictions on the President's eavesdropping activities if Congress has no right to regulate them. Voting for FISA seems to be an odd thing to do for someone who believes that Congress has no right to regulate the Executive's eavesdropping activities.

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He was also on C-SPAN and made a very articulate and reasoned case against the Bush law-breaking. He did so in response to a statement from a caller who John Amato at Crooks & Liars calls "batshit crazy". Poor soul was so confused by the wingnuts that she thinks "we" are trying to prevent NSA from eavesdropping on the terrorists. Have a listen... not to her, but to Glenn's reasonable and articulate statement.