A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency broke ranks with the White House on Tuesday and called for a full Congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program.
The lawmaker, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said in an interview that she had "serious concerns" about the surveillance program. By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why.
Ms. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of President Bush's father, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full Congressional investigation into the program, in which the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.
The above is from Eric Lichtblau's "Republican Who Oversees N.S.A. Calls for Wiretap Inquiry."
The paper long gave up on the story and if it's going to be driven in the news cycle at the paper of record, it will have to be done by Republicans. (Note a Republican in the house is more important to the paper than a former president, Jimmy Carter. This gets coverage.) Don't kid yourself that paper will respond to the readers. After the non-mea culpa and the promise of exploring those WMD stories, the paper never did. They thought they could offer a lame apology and everyone would forget. Or are we to believe that they're still reviewing those stories all these months later and about to file a report? Get real.
We'll note Andrew C. Revkin's "A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA:"
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.
Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his resums on file at the agency asserted.
However, as Revkin notes, of his work on the re-election of Bully Boy and on the inauguration committes: "No one has disputed those parts of the document." Bully Boy priorities are intact.
Rod passes on a scheduled topic for today's Democracy Now!:
A look at the first presidential elections in Haiti since the U.S.-backed ouster of Jean Bertrand Aristide nearly two years ago.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
the new york times
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