Mukasey dishonesty update

[maddezmom]

Mukasey dishonesty update
There are several updates in the ongoing fallout from Michael Mukasey's patently false claims made in the speech he delivered several weeks ago in San Francisco regarding FISA and the 9/11 attacks. This week, Mukasey responded to a letter he received from John Conyers and two other Subcommittee Chair in which Mukasey acknowledged (because he was forced to) that the call he claimed originated from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. was fictitious, but he nonetheless vaguely asserted that his underlying point -- that FISA unduly restricted pre-9/11 eavesdropping and prevented detection of those attacks -- was somehow still accurate.

In his reply, Mukasey claimed that the telephone call did not originate from Afghanistan but from another country he refused to identify, and further claimed that the call he was referencing was discussed in the Joint Inquiry Report -- which, as I noted when I first received the same explanation from the DOJ, reached the opposite conclusion of the one Mukasey was trying to advance: namely, that Report concluded that the Bush administration had all the authority it needed under FISA to intercept and investigate any such calls, and its failure to do so had nothing to do with any supposedly excessive constraints imposed by law.

In reply, Conyers sent another rather scathing letter and made those points. He complained about Mukasey's "failure to address several of our specific inquiries" and, more importantly, "far from supporting the Administration’s position on reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the incident referred to in your March 27 speech leads to precisely the opposite conclusion." Specifically:

Based on the April 10 letter and other information from the Department, it now appears that the incident mentioned in your March 27 remarks concerned phone communication between a future 9/11 hijacker while in the U.S. and a known terrorist facility in the Middle East, which was in fact discussed by the Congressional intelligence committees in their report on 9/11. As the committees explained, however, the failure to utilize the information in this call had nothing to do with limitations in FISA, contrary to what your March 27 speech appeared to suggest.

more:http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/18/mukasey/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/greenwald

[EVDebs]

1. The country right now is gagging on the litany of lies nt

[ladjf]

2. Just another administration "goon".

[acmavm]

3. Thank you again Diane and Chuck for saddling us with this

lying son of a bitch.

Typical.

[indepat]

4. And may Diane and Chuck choke on their own spittle

:D