Everybody pretty much guessed that the White House put out a bunch of really scary, frightening 'intelligence' to try and manipulate the Democrats who are still (ridiculously) afraid that if they don't give the White House unlimited power, they'll be blamed for a future terrorist attack.

Today's NY Times article confirms that that's what happened:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings, were skeptical.

The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that, improbably, broadened the administration’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight.

...

“There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through,” said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the plan.

The White House, Mr. Feingold said Friday in an interview, “has identified the one major remaining weakness in the Democratic Party, and that’s its unwillingness to stand up to the administration when it’s making a power grab regarding terrorism and national security.”

...

Democratic leaders did not demand that the security agency seek individual court warrants for eavesdropping. But they did want the court to review and approve the agency procedures soon after surveillance began.

The administration, however, wanted the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to approve the surveillance, with the court weighing in just to certify that no abuses occurred, and only long after the surveillance had been conducted.

The talks intensified in the days before the recess last weekend, highlighted by proposals and counterproposals in calls between Mr. McConnell and the Democratic leadership.

By Aug. 2, the two sides seemed relatively close to a deal. Mr. McConnell had agreed to some increased role for the secret court, a step that the administration considered a major concession, the White House and Congressional leaders said.

But that night, the talks broke down. With time running out, the Senate approved a Republican bill that omitted the stronger court oversight. The next day, the House passed the bill.

If the White House was really so concerned about this gap in the FISA law, they should've been sharing this intelligence consistently instead of doling it out in driblets, and only the bits likely to get the Democrats to do what they want. Any Democrat in Congress who honestly thinks that this was an emergency that just happened to come up right before the August recess doesn't deserve to be in the Congress.

It isn't the Democrats that were endangering national security, it was Republicans who were willing to risk the non-passage of changes to the FISA bill that both sides agreed were necessary, for the sake of grabbing more power for the President.

And tell me, how in the hell did these Democrats decide that it was a good idea to give oversight privileges to Alberto Gonzales, instead of a court?

The Democrats that voted to continue Bush's reign of fear were played for fools. And Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid showed a distinct lack of leadership. If they'd wanted to, they could've stopped this; but obviously the continuing erosion of our Constitutional rights wasn't a big enough deal to inconvenience anyone with.

Gyah.