With more revelations that's Bush secret spying program conducted by the NSA has ensnared domestic calls and emails and Tom Daschle coming out and saying that, contrary to administration claims, Congress never authorized the program of warrantless surveillance of Americans, it's interesting to read the following:

Americans expect NSA to conduct its missions within the law. But given the inherently secret nature of those missions, how can Americans be sure that the Agency does not invade their privacy?

The 4th Amendment of the Constitution demands it... oversight committees within all three branches of the U.S. government ensure it... and NSA employees, as U.S. citizens, have a vested interest in upholding it. Respecting the law is only a part of gaining Americans' trust.

The American people need to know, within the bounds of operational security, what NSA does and why they do it, and how they work within the Intelligence community and the Department of Defense to protect the Nation's freedom.

With each new day, NSA is writing new and unexpected chapters. The missions have never been clearer. The challenges have never been greater. The stakes have never been higher.

That pretty much settles the issue, right? And where did this statement come from? It's from the NSA's own website.

The big question now is what is the country, and by country I mean our elected representative who have the power to investigate this, going to do now that George Bush has admitted to violated the 4th Amendments rights of U.S. citizens guaranteed in the Constitution which he took an oath to protect.

What I, along with everyone else who's been following this story, really want to know, is what the fuck is going on here. If the President, under FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Survellience Act, can authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans as along as he gets retroactive approval from the FISA court within 72 hours, (mind you this court is a to surveillance target as a grand jury is to a ham sandwich) why not get the retroactive warrants?

Why not get the warrants unless the subjects of the spying were not terror subjects as they would have us believe, but something else entirely. Something like politicians, policitical activists, journalists or anything one else that the courst might look at speciously and question the legality of such activity. Unless it's just pure hubris of this executive not believing that any entity has the right to oversee their activities, which could be true, what else could it be?