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<p>When the IG Report was issued last year detailing the NSL abuses, this is what <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030902356.html"><i>The Washington Post</i> reported</a> about prior DOJ denials:<blockquote>The findings by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine were <b>so at odds with previous assertions by the Bush administration</b> that Capitol Hill was peppered yesterday with retraction letters from the Justice Department attempting to correct statements in earlier testimony and briefings. [AG Alberto] Gonzales and other officials had <b>repeatedly portrayed national security letters as a well-regulated tool necessary for the prevention of terrorist attacks</b>.</blockquote>But by that time, it was too late and it no longer mattered. Those false denials to the public by the DOJ and Specter gave Congress the cover it wanted to renew the NSL powers under the Patriot Act. Today, of course, we hear that there is no need to worry at all about warrantless surveillance because the Bush administration and Jay Rockefeller assure us that it is "a well-regulated tool necessary for the prevention of terrorist attacks." </p>

<p> * * * * </p>

<p>Apparently, as it turns out, the mere fact that government officials -- even the really upstanding ones in the Bush administration who Fight the Terrorists and the independent, trustworthy U.S. Senators like Arlen Specter -- deny wrongdoing and assure us that their powers are being exercised in secret only for our own Good -- to Protect Us -- doesn't actually mean that this is true. Maybe the only way to ensure that vast surveillance powers aren't abused is to have something like an independent check on how those powers are exercised -- a check from, say, one of the branches other than the one exercising those powers. </p>

<p>It's understandable that our Congress hasn't yet decided that this is necessary because the whole "checks-and-balances" concept is quite new, just a <a href="http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm">couple hundred years old</a>:<blockquote>TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that <b>its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places</b></blockquote>And then there was this <a href="http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=12">new exotic theory</a> that recently emerged:<blockquote>I shall undertake, in the next place, to show that unless these departments be <b>so far connected and blended as to give to each a constitutional control over the others</b>, the degree of separation which the maxim <b>requires as essential to a free government, can never in practice be duly maintained</b>.</blockquote>After the IG published its March, 2007 Report detailing the FBI's abuses of the NSLs, all sorts of dramatic speeches were made in Congress. This was all outrageous, a horrendous abuse of power, something that would not be tolerated! </p>

<p>Five months later, in August, 2007, the same Congress passed the Protect America Act, which gave the President vast new powers to spy on the telephone calls and emails of Americans without warrants or any oversight. This week or next, they're going to make those same powers permanent, while killing the only remaining mechanism for finding out how the Bush administration for years secretly exercised those unchecked spying powers -- the pending telecom lawsuits. </p>

<p>At some point -- many, many years from now -- there will be some report issued by an executive agency or a Congressional Committee finally describing the nature of the illegal spying programs implemented by the Bush administration and detailing all of the abuses. And the same members of Congress who looked the other way and then voted to legalize these programs will express all kinds of outrage and surprise. If we vest unchecked powers in government officials to spy on Americans, they'll abuse those powers, all while falsely denying that they're doing so? Who could have known?</p>

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