Incompetent? Unethical? Both?

Silvestre Reyes--fresh from a course on Middle Eastern politics--thinks the Bush administration approved a warantless wiretapping program, not because they thought the legal hurdles required to get a warrant were too cumbersome, but because they didn't understand how short the hurdles in fact were:

All that is required to start emergency surveillance under the current law is a phone call from the National Security Agency or the FBI to one of those Justice Department officials.

Yet that is not the administration's practice. The administration's practice is to get multiple approvals and involve hordes of lawyers. Before we sweep away the FISA framework, Congress must review the administration's cumbersome, uncoordinated process that leads to delays in getting emergency FISA applications approved.

In fact, I believe it was the administration's cumbersome, uncoordinated process and not the statutory requirements that led the president to authorize an end-run around FISA.

This actually cuts against most of what I'm inclined to believe. My suspicion has always been (and probably remains) that the Bush administration knew pefectly well that very little stood between them and all the wiretap warrants they wanted, but never bothered to acquire those warrants, because they sort of assumed that that would open the door down the road to technical objections and perfectly accurate charges of recklessness. And so they decided to do it all in secret. Then again, Silvestre Reyes chairs the House Intel committee, so conceivably he knows a bit more about, well, a lot of things than I do.

If Reyes is right, then the situation is worse than even I imagined it to be. It means that we have this flimsy power-check called FISA that isn't really understood well by any of the people who fall most directly under its legal purview and so they basically just ignore it altogether. It further means that if the administration had not been just shady, but had also been even slightly competent, then they could have done the exact same thing they're being criticized for doing and done it perfectly legally. And almost nobody would know about it. Of course, this yet another reason that the Bush presidency can end not a moment too soon. But, now that FISA has received the outside attention it deserves, it also means that FISA ought to be amended and made more muscular.