Here’s more evidence of the mindset of the Bush administration (via TPM):
A 1978 law appeared at first glance to be an impediment to using new procedures for such surveillance. It stated that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) provided the “exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted.”
…
This created a quandary that then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo resolved in the OLC memo. Until this week, members of the public did not know exactly what the memo said. But two Democratic senators who had read the classified version asked that a sentence in the memo be declassified, and this week they released the result:
The passage states that “[u]nless Congress made a clear statement in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area — which it has not — then the statute must be construed to avoid [such] a reading.”
This is how it works in this administration: they want to do something that is specifically against the law, so they pretend it doesn’t apply to them by writing an obviously stupid justification. At least they could have tried to make it sound good.
Petunias 