"Wingnuts"Purposely misquoting FISA to defend the Bush Administration

Glenn Greenwald has a superb post up about a particularly assanine lie that has wormed its way through the wankersphere.

Defenders of the Bush Administration are resorting to outright distortions and deliberate falsehoods about the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) in order to argue that the Administration's warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens complies with the mandates of that statute. To do so, they are simply lying -- and that term is used advisedly -- about what FISA says by misquoting the statute in order to make it appear that the Administration’s clearly illegal behavior conforms to the statute.

This is a real case study in how total falsehoods are disseminated by a single right-wing blogger who is then linked to and approvingly cited by large, highly partisan bloggers, which then cause the outright falsehoods to be bestowed with credibility and take on the status of a conventionally accepted talking point in defense of the Administration.

A blogger named Al Maviva wrote a staggeringly dishonest post which he said was based upon what he called a "little legal research" concerning FISA. He then proceeded to deliberately mis-quote the statute in order to reach the patently false conclusion that "the President probably does have the power to order NSA to monitor suspects, without a warrant, in terrorism cases."

This post was then cited and linked to, in some cases with approval, by several large conservative bloggers, and thereafter wormed its way up to the conservative motherload of Internet traffic, Instapundit, who approvingly linked to it. I have no doubt that -- thanks to law professor Instapundit and these others Administration defenders -- tens of thousands of people (at least) have now read this "legal analysis" defending the legality of the Administration’s conduct which is based on a glaringly unethical distortion of the language of FISA.
http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/purposely-misquoting-fisa-to-defend.html

Have we uncovered the system by which they spread their lies? Can we use this information to discreadit their source?

about the last days of W.C. Fields, in which he was sitting on his porch, a blanket on his lap, reading a bible.

When challenged as to why he, Fields, a confirmed atheist, would be doing this, Fields replied "Looking for a loophole . . ."

So goes the sum total of the efforts of the Bush regime. They care nothing for following the clear meaning and intent of the law. All their efforts are bent toward the expansion of powers that may be had by bending, stretching or breaking the loopholes.

Whoever this Al Maviva creep is, I doubt that he came up with the above-referenced exegesis himself. That's the kind of sputum that oozes out of the Liberty lobby and the Cato Institute and all the other filthy little holes that bleed cover for the rabid curs in the white house.