The Dispute Over Bush's Domestic Spyig was about Data-mining

Data-mining on millions of people would be useless in tracking down terrorists. As a matter of fact, it would only make the task more difficult, if terrorists are really what the Bush government is looking for. Given that Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden and al Zawahiri, the men accused of masterminding and financing the attacks on September, 2001 are free as birds, I have a hard time believing that it's really al Qaeda the Bushites are oh-so interested in.

But The NSA's ability to data-mine would be a great political tool; from gathering information with which to micro-target voters, to, shall we say, embarrassing information on the political opposition, not to mention information which could be used to discredit dissidents.

Paranoid? Maybe.

Or maybe I just don't believe that anyone in their right mind should trust a group of people who have done nothing but lie to them from day one.

Notes Detail Visit to Ashcroft’s Hospital Room

By DAVID JOHNSTON and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 — John Ashcroft was “barely articulate,” “feeble” and “clearly stressed” as he sat in a hospital room chair in March 2004 when top White House aides unsuccessfully tried to persuade him, as the Attorney General, to sign an extension for warrant-less domestic eavesdropping on Americans, according to notes made by Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I.

Mr. Mueller’s notes of his visit to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room provide another eyewitness account of the dramatic confrontation over the secret surveillance program. They confirm an account of the encounter given by James B. Comey, the former deputy attorney general, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about it in May.

Mr. Mueller’s typed notes, which are undated, also reveal a series of meetings earlier and later that month between the F.B.I. director and other administration officials, including Mr. Comey, Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House Counsel and General Michael V. Hayden, then the director of the National Security Agency, which conducted the electronic monitoring program.

At one point in a meeting with Mr. Mueller, the notes show, Mr. Gonzales said that even he was “barred” from getting as much information as he wanted about the highly classified eavesdropping program, because of strict White House secrecy rules.

Mr. Mueller’s notes, which have been turned over to the House Judiciary Committee, were described by two officials who had reviewed them. The notes recount Mr. Mueller’s arrival at the hospital after Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, had attempted to persuade Mr. Ashcroft to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the program. Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft’s hospitalization, had declined to sign the reauthorization because he believed that part of the program was unlawful.

Mr. Mueller said he went to the hospital after receiving a phone call from Mr. Comey, arriving there at 7:40 p.m; he stayed until 8:20 pm. His notes said that Mr. Comey told him that Mr. Ashcroft, who had undergone gall bladder surgery the previous day, was in “no condition” to receive visitors.

Mr. Mueller’s notes were turned over to the committee with some of the entries deleted or heavily edited, including virtually all of Mr. Mueller’s notations about his White House meeting with President Bush on March 12, when the F.B.I. Director intervened to head off threatened resignations by himself, Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey and a number of other Justice Department officials.

After speaking with Mr. Comey and Mr. Mueller, the president agreed to permit changes in the N.S.A. activities to satisfy the legal objections. Current and former government officials have said the legal dispute involved data mining, meaning computer searches of large volumes of electronic records of telephone calls and e-mail messages.

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee on July 26, Mr. Mueller gave a sparse description of the hospital encounter that generally accorded with Mr. Comey’s account. But he declined to describe his conversation with Mr. Ashcroft in any detail.

In response to a question about the attorney general’s condition that night, he replied only that he knew Mr. Ashcroft “had gone through a difficult operation and was being closely monitored in the hospital.”

Pressed by committee Democrats for a fuller description of the scene, a seemingly reluctant Mr. Mueller would say only that the hospital visit was “out of the ordinary.”

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.