This still remains the big question about the NSA domestic, um, terrorist surveillance program run by the administration over the last 5 years. Why? I speculated on the reason a few weeks back and I would have suspected that the truth would have come out by now, but the story seems to boggled down in a political muddle.

The administration wants you to believe that they are only monitoring terrorists and that if you are against this program, say like a Democratic leader, you are unpatriotic or possibly a traitor.

But if we are only monitoring terrorists, why make an end run around the FISA court? Surely they would rubber stamp the wiretapping of any evenly closely questionable requests. They almost never turn down a request.

The answer the administration gives is that the needed to move fast, but this is an unsatisfactory answer because FISA allows for retroactive warrants as long as they are brought to the court within 24 hours.

Then there is this post on Unclaimed Territory from the amazing Glenn Greenwald:

So as of June, 2002 -- many months after the FISA bypass program was ordered -- the DoJ official who was responsible for overseeing the FISA warrant program was not aware (at least when he submitted this Statement) of any difficulties in obtaining warrants under the FISA "probable cause" standard, and for that reason, the Administration would not even support DeWine's amendment. If - as the Administration is now claiming - they had such significant difficulties obtaining the warrants they wanted for eavesdropping that they had to go outside of FISA, surely Baker - who was in charge of obtaining those warrants - would have been aware of them. And, if the Administration was really having the problems under FISA, they would have supported DeWine's Amendment. But they didn't.

You really should go over to Glenn's site and read the whole post, but the gist of it is that the administration's oft repeated justifications for their FISA bypass program are being undermined, not surprisingly, by facts.

Sadly, this story is too nuanced for the media to cover. The media has fled headlong into Bush's black and white, right or wrong, with me or against world, in which, in order to kowtow to an increasing ignorant audience, they distill stories like this to the lowest common denominator, allow comment from both sides to pass through the airwaves without being challenged, even when those comments are patently false and basically render themselves meaningless.