Look, all I’m saying is when it comes to national security issues, you can’t expect the president (whomever he is) to be totally forthcoming on everything. What if Roosevelt and Churchill had been honest about Calis? In Bush’s mind, the NSA system had been used by Clinton, his AG and members of Congress had told him they had no qualms about the program, so in his mind, he was justified in being misleading. I just argue he shouldn’t have commented on it in the first place.

I’m tired of defending President Bush. I’ll be glad when his term is up. I believe the program is illegal. I’m not arguing any of this, I’m just saying when anyone tells you anything about operational security matters, don’t be disappointed when you later learn they were intentionally misleading you.

As in, “before the President wanted to make Al Queda aware that things were being done differently and secretly in order to foil any future attacks on the United States.”

FISA is a secret court. Whether or not they notify FISA has no standing on whether or not the terrorists find out about it. Bush told the terrorists he was going to listen in to their communications, in October 2001. It wasn’t a secret. The secret was that the wiretaps were being done without court supervision, in violation of the law.

I guess we’ll never know, since Bush probably doesn’t want the terrorists to know which of our tactics work best in catching them. Still, it’s nice to know he’s there to look out for us.

“…before the existence of the NSA’s warrantless wiretap program was confirmed.”

As in, “before the President wanted to make Al Queda aware that things were being done differently and secretly in order to foil any future attacks on the United States.”

What’d ya think? He was going to say, “Oh yeah! We’ve got this really neat secret NSA program to really mess up the way they communicate with one another!”?

I’m not happy with the program or that he (using your words) lied to conceal the program’s existence, but I understand it. He should have instead said something like, “I’m not going to discuss ongoing programs.”