Who to Believe on the NSA?

Once again, we've apparently got a difference of opinion about what the White House told Congress. Recently, the Bush Administration has argued that Congress had the same intelligence the White House did in the run up to the Iraq War, but we've discovered that this was not entirely true. Congress saw much of the same intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, but they weren't privy to the intelligence suggesting that the first intelligence couldn't be trusted. Now, we've got the White House claiming they ran the information regarding NSA spying past Congress and Congress didn't have a problem. Once again, not entirely true. In today's Washington Post, former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle wrote:

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to "deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided" the attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words "in the United States and" after "appropriate force" in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.

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The Bush administration now argues those powers were inherently contained in the resolution adopted by Congress -- but at the time, the administration clearly felt they weren't or it wouldn't have tried to insert the additional language.

Further, Jay Rockefeller, ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released a two-and-a-half-year-old letter (careful, PDF) he wrote to Dick Cheney expressing his concern over the project. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi requested a classified letter she wrote to the Bush Administration expressing similar concern be declassified.

Still, The New York Times, apparently trying to get back into the White House's good graces after blowing the whistle on the illegal NSA activity in the first place, has an article today backing up the administration's position by suggesting that Democrats pretty much didn't mind the program in the first place.

So which is it? Presumably the fuller story will ultimately come out, though most likely after the holidays. But in the meantime, when it comes to taking the administration at its word, we've learned that it's never a sucker bet to put your money down against it.