McConnell Spills His Guts-We're Criminals & So Are Companies That Helped Us & You Are Gonna Die!

McConnell Spills His Guts: We're All Gonna Die-We ARE Criminals & Co That Have Helped Should Be Sued

From TPM

McConnell: Debating FISA Will Cost American Lives

Even as he shed new light on the classified operations, McConnell asserted that the current debate in Congress about whether to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will cost American lives because of all the information it revealed to terrorists.

"Part of this is a classified world. The fact that we're doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die," he said.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003976.php#more

............

And From EmptyWheel

McConnell Kills
by emptywheel

Wow. I'm with Spencer Ackerman. If transparency is going to kill Americans, Mike McConnell just killed a lot more Americans blabbing to the El Paso Times http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_6685679 than a Congressional debate with marginal transparency ever will. Consider this example, where McConnell tries to convince the reporter that the Administration is not data-mining on a massive scale:

"Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing."

It's not a detail we've had before, now we have it. And note his disingenuousness. The claim of opponents is not that the Administration is now doing massive data-mining (well, not through the NSA--they've just moved that program to the FBI). The claim is that they were doing massive data-mining up until March 2004, when Comey and much of DOJ balked. Which kind of explains the reason why there's deep distrust.

And here's another reason for that distrust.

"Now the second part of the issue was under the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us. Because if you're going to get access you've got to have a partner and they were being sued. Now if you play out the suits at the value they're claimed, it would bankrupt these companies. So my position was we have to provide liability protection to these private sector entities."

What McConnell all but admits is that those lawsuits have merit--that there is a real possibility that having cooperated in the Administration's ill-conceived spying program will bankrupt big telecom. Again, if those suits have merit, there's a reason for the deep distrust--it's because BushCo encouraged the telecoms to violate the privacy of their customers on a massive scale.

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/08/mcconnell-kills.html

:wtf:

which terrorist have subscriptions to WSJ and the NYP. How about Fox News and CNN and MSNBC....then we would know where the terrorist are and what they see.