In response to G-man's speed argument...
Quote:

Bush's "Need for Speed" Argument Runs Into the Truth
by David Sirota
In his news conference today, President Bush invoked the need for speed in the War on Terror as the reason he is illegally ordering the National Security Agency to conduct domestic surveillance without search warrants. Sounds like a compelling argument, right? In the fast-moving world of information age technology, we can't really afford to make our law enforcers take the time to go get a warrant, right?

It's true – Bush might have had a point, except for one tiny little detail he refused to discuss at his press conference: namely, the fact that current law is so lax that he is already permitted to get a search warrant 72 hours after surveillance is conducted. Put another way, the law currently allows Bush to order surveillance as fast as he possibly can, and allows surveillance operations to take place immediately. The only thing that is required is a court-issued warrant that can be ussed retroactively within 72 hours of when the operation started. And, as I've noted earlier, the special court that grants these warrants has only rejected 4 government requests in a quarter century, meaning getting a warrant is about as easy as it gets...that is, as long as you aren't trying to do something wholly outrageous and unrelated to the War on Terror.

And so we're back to the same question: why did the President order domestic surveillance operations without even asking retroactively for warrants? In his press conference, Bush tried to ramrod the entire issue into one of him working to defend America, and critics supposedly being weak on national security. But he frontally refused to answer the very simple question when a reporter put it to him:
...
There really is only one explanation that a sane, rational person could come up with: The surveillance operations Bush is ordering are so outrageous, so unrelated to the War on Terror and such an unconstitutional breach of authority that he knows that even a court that has rejected just 4 warrant requests in 25 years will reject what he's doing. All you have to do is look at recent news reports about federal law enforcement and military assets being deployed against domestic anti-war and peace groups to know that this is well within what the Bush White House sees as acceptable behavior.
...

Common Dreams

Fair play!