A Stitch in Haste

General Michael Hayden, the number two intelligence official in the nation and a former director of the National Security Agency, the bureaucracy responsible for the warrantless wiretapping scandal, has inadvertently neutralized a White House spin tactic by insisting that warrantless wiretapping isn't just about "in time of war" --

"Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the al-Qaida operatives in the United States," Hayden said...

Now wait just a minute. The entire purported legal justification for warrantless wiretapping was that we are in a post-9/11 War on Terror and that the ability to spy on Americans gather foreign intelligence was somehow "inherent" to the President's wartime authority as benevolent dictator Commander-in-Chief. So now the Administration is switching to a purely consequentialist position? The Constitution and the law and the Congress and the courts be damned, all that matters is that "it works"? In peacetime as well as war?

The more this Administration tries to defend the program, the more indefensible it becomes. Another Haydenism:

Hayden ... told the National Press Club in Washington that the program is "targeted and focused" on al Qaeda and does not cast a "drift net" over Americans' telephone and e-mail communications.

Now wait just another minute. If the program (which now has a name -- Terrorist Surveillance Program) is so "targeted and focused" and if it's true to its new namesake (i.e., only monitoring communications involving those known or reasonably suspected to be terrorists), then why is it so hard to get a warrant, even retroactively?

The wiretap two-step. The song may change, but the dance stays the same.