Another Baby Step Forward

We've apparently made another very small step in figuring out some of what this administration has been up to. We knew that there was some dissension within the Justice Department over some aspect of the National Security Agency's top-secret surveillance program in 2004. When James Comey, acting attorney general while John Ashcroft was in the hospital, refused to approve the program, Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card invaded Ashcroft's hospital room to convince Ashcroft to overrule. He refused to, and many top Justice Department officials threatened to resign if the White House went along with it anyway. Some compromise was reached, and the Justice Department approved the program as it exists today. In talking about all this before the Senate, Alberto insists that there was no dissension over the elements of the program that were ultimately approved. No, I guess not, seeing that what we've got now was a compromised that everyone signed off on. But it's never been clear exactly what Alberto and Andy Card intended to have approved at the hospital and what was so bad that John Ashcroft and several other Justice officials were willing to resign over.

Today's New York Times adds a little bit to the puzzle, reporting that whatever it was, it involved data mining. That's something that moves the investigation on, certainly, but it doesn't give us much to chew on. Even the Times says so:

A half-dozen officials and former officials interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity, in part because unauthorized disclosures about the classified program are already the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used.

Nor would they explain what modifications to the surveillance program President Bush authorized to head off the threatened resignations by Justice Department officials.

So there's not much there, but it's a start. Nothing yet justifies the kind of desperate secrecy Alberto and the rest of the administration has been insisting on, so it goes much deeper than this. Josh Marshall has further analysis:

To put this into perspective, remember that the White House has been willing to go to the public and make a positive argument for certain surveillance procedures (notably evasion of the FISA Court strictures) which appear to be illegal on their face. This must be much more serious and apparently something all but the most ravenous Bush authoritarians would never accept. It is supposedly no longer even happening and hasn't been for a few years. So disclosing it could not jeopardize a program. The only reason that suggests itself is that the political and legal consequences of disclosure are too grave to allow.

Is it too obvious to end with "more to come"?