Mr. Leak is at it again.

“WASHINGTON, July 26 ‚Äî Senior Bush administration officials said Wednesday that it would be impractical for them to obtain individual warrants every time they needed to eavesdrop on a conversation suspected of involving Al Qaeda. They urged Congress to approve a proposal that critics said would give the president broad, unchecked powers.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, called the proposal, developed by Senator Arlen Specter and the White House, “a great opportunity” to modernize intelligence-gathering procedures in a way that would “protect our liberty and security.”

General Hayden’s testimony, and that of two other senior officials, amounted to the administration’s first pitch for the Specter-White House agreement. Under the proposal, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secrecy to rule on usual government requests for warrants in intelligence cases, would decide whether the administration’s program of monitoring international communications of Americans without warrants is constitutional.

But critics attacked the agreement Wednesday as abdication to the White House. Mr. Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the Judiciary Committee, appeared particularly stung at the hearing when a civil liberties advocate, James X. Dempsey, told him he would prefer to see no legislation at all, allowing the National Security Agency to continue wiretapping Americans without warrants, than Congressional approval of procedures outside the scope of the 1978 law that created the secret court.”

Lichtblau ought to knock off the “spying on Americans without warrants” crap. Like it’s wide spead. which it isn’t. Again, the “warrantless wiretapping” began long before the current administration, yet it didn’t prevent 9/11 did it? Bush shored up what was needed and we haven’t had an attack since.

The fact that the critics “assume” that the Bush Administration is using the lawful authority (and it is legal) unlawfully, which they have yet to even slightly prove. For all the rambling not one person has stepped forward and said they were harmed. A whole lot of people can stand today because in spite of people like Lichtblau and his rag the NYT, the program works, and when you get to the root that’s what bugs the hell out of Lichtblau and the rest of the left.

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