More Impeachment Talk . . . But This Time It's Straight From The Elephant's Mouth

The very conservative Washington Times has an interesting article in the current issue of its Insight Magazine. The article is titled "Impeachment Hearings: The White House Prepares For The Worst," and it begins this way (via AmericaBlog):

The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress.

"A coalition in Congress is being formed to support impeachment," an administration source said.

Sources said a prelude to the impeachment process could begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. They said the hearings would focus on the secret electronic surveillance program and whether Mr. Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Administration sources said the charges are expected to include false reports to Congress as well as Mr. Bush's authorization of the National Security Agency to engage in electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant. This included the monitoring of overseas telephone calls and e-mail traffic to and from people living in the United States without requisite permission from a secret court.

Meanwhile, a new Gallup Poll has given us some insight as to why BushCo is working so hard this week to play down its illegal domestic spying operation:

A new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows public sentiment is against the program. Fifty-one percent of Americans said the administration was wrong to intercept conversations involving a party inside the USA without a warrant. In response to another question, 58% of Americans said they support the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the program.

So let me see if I got this straight: Even though the Republican-skewed Gallup poll shows that the country is against Bush on this issue, the Democrats still appear reluctant to challenge Bush on it. That is shameful, particularly given that we undoubtedly haven't heard the fully story yet with regard to Bush's criminal activity.

Indeed, new information is emerging almost every day on this. For example, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former NSA chief, stated yesterday that the warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails was "targeted and focused" and did not constitute a "driftnet" over U.S. cities. As Kevin Drum notes, this was an interesting admission:

Unless I've missed something along the way, this is important news. Hayden is saying that the NSA program isn't some kind of large-scale data mining operation that the authors of the FISA act never could have foreseen. Rather, it's "targeted and focused" and involves "only international calls and only those we have a reasonable basis to believe involve al Qaeda or one of its affiliates."

In other words, it's precisely the kind of monitoring that the FISA court already approves routinely and in large volumes. Another few hundred requests wouldn't faze them in the least.

In a later post, Drum adds these observations:

Administration apologists have argued that the White House couldn't seek congressional approval for this program because it utilized super advanced technology that we couldn't risk exposing to al-Qaeda. Even in secret session, they've suggested, Congress is a sieve and the bad guys would have found out what we were up to.

But now we know that's not true. This was just ordinary call monitoring, according to General Hayden, and the only problem was that both FISA and the attorney general required a standard of evidence they couldn't meet before issuing a warrant. In other words, the only change necessary to make this program legal was an amendment to FISA modifying the circumstances necessary to issue certain kinds of warrants. This would have tipped off terrorists to nothing.

It's not surprising that, as the above-linked Insight article puts it, the Bush administration is "bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress." BushCo is clearly anticipating the release of even more damaging information with regard to its criminal activity.