More Bullshit Re: Warrantless Wiretaps?

I just want to point to this story in today's Post. I didn't hear Bush speak, and this is a fairly sketchy report, but I do want to note the following 'graph:

Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have been subjected to the surveillance, according to government officials. Officials have privately credited the eavesdropping with the apprehension of Iyman Faris, a truck driver who pleaded guilty in 2003 to planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Bush said other plots have been disrupted as well.

Now, if we had an honest administration, we could conclude that 'the wiretaps' here meant 'the wiretaps authorized by Bush which would not have been authorized without his action.' However since we know that this administration will lie and distort with abandon ("there are no plans to invade Iraq on my desk..."), we can't draw that conclusion here. What we need to ask is:

(a) Were the wiretaps that disrupted the plots authorized by the FISC or by the president?
(b) If they were authorized by the president, would they have been authorized by FISC otherwise?

If the answer to (a) is "by the FISC," then Bush is lying to us again by suggesting that it was his wiretaps that disrupted the plots. If the answer to (b) is 'yes' then, again, he is deceiving us by trying to make his authorization sound like a decisive causal factor when in fact it was superfluous.

While we're at it, let's direct some attention to the 'graph that follows the one above:

"The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time," he said.

Note that while this may very well be true, alone it's not enough to constitute a defense of the policy. We also need to know whether his actions were legal, how much they increased the likelihood of catching terrorists, and how many wiretaps were authorized. We can radically increase the likelihood of catching terrorists by turning the country into a police state, but that doesn't mean that we should do so. Above we are told that "hundreds and perhaps thousands" of people were subject to these warrantless wiretaps. I've heard that the figure could go as high as 7,000. Apart from the legal questions we also face questions like this one: is it worth it to spy on, say, 5,000 American citizens if this spying will produce, say, a 1 in 10,000 chance of catching a terrorist? We probably can't answer that question unless we have some idea what kind of thing such terrorists are planning...but my point is just that it's not enough just to note that there was some increase in the likelihood of catching the bad guys.

One last question here: is this administration a big civics experiment to see how much dishonesty, corruption and incompetence the American people will put up with before putting their collective foot down?

Just wondering.