Brush Clearing and Bullshitting

The usual agenda for a Bush vacation:

In Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the holidays, his spokesman, Trent Duffy, defended what he called a "limited program."

"This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner," he told reporters. "These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches."

John at AMERICAblog notes that, if that’s true, his explanations about warrants becomes moot. Wiretapping people with “a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches” would be quickly approved by any court in the country, and adds:

But there's a larger question. If Bush is now telling the truth about who these people are, then pray tell, what the hell was Bush doing letting hundreds if not thousands of people "who have a history of blowing up trains, wedding and churches" run around free inside the US for the past 4 years?

Of course, the whole issue is that these people probably weren’t in the US. I mean, I’m pretty hip to the news. I remember trains being bombed in Madrid and London, and hotels, including one hosting a wedding, being bombed in Amman. (Churches? Don’t know where that came from.) But when is the last time you remember hearing about a commuter train, wedding, or church getting blown up in the US?

Crickets…

This goes back to the issue of monitoring American telecommunications switches, through which, at the behest of the government, American telecom companies have been rerouting increasing amounts of international traffic, thereby allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on calls which both originated from and connected to locations outside the US. Globalization of the telecom industry means that many international-to-international calls are routed through the US, in addition to large volumes of international internet traffic. Neither party has to be on US soil for their communications to end up there.

That these switches were the source of the data mine undermines the assumption that those monitored were all in the US—and the claim that it was a “limited” program.