The NY Times begins the New Year with more leaks about the "domestic spying" program.

The top deputy to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused two years ago to approve important parts of the secret program that allows domestic eavesdropping without warrants, prompting two leading White House aides to try to win the needed approval from Mr. Ashcroft himself while he was hospitalized after a gall bladder operation, according to officials knowledgeable about the episode.

With Mr. Ashcroft recuperating from gall bladder surgery in March 2004, his deputy, James B. Comey, who was then acting as attorney general, was unwilling to give his certification to crucial aspects of the classified program, as required under the procedures set up by the White House, said the officials, who asked for anonymity because the program is classified and they are not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Are they not authorized to discuss it publicly, but authorized to discuss it with newspaper reporters? A more appropriate description would probably be that they are not supposed to divulge this information to anyone. If I were to try that crap with MY employer's confidential information, I'd be in jail faster than you can say Benedict Arnold.

Of course there's also the possibility that as Acting Attorney General, Mr. Comey didn't feel it was his place to make an important decision on the program when the Attorney General was fully capable of making a determination in his stable, non-life threatening condition at the hospital.

I'm a little confused by this story in general in that the program had been in place for about 2 1/2 years at the time, supposedly with the knowldge and frequent review of the Justice Department - yet there is no explanation of why the Justice Department would suddenly be concerned with specific aspects of the program.

The most important aspect of the article for me is this - which in my opinion should have been the headline:

"...The Justice Department...oversaw an audit..on the program.

The audit examined a selection of cases to see how the N.S.A. went about determining that it had probable cause to believe that someone in the United States, including American citizens, had sufficient ties to Al Qaeda to justify the extraordinary step of eavesdropping on their phone calls and e-mail messages without a court warrant. That review is not known to have found any instances of documented abuses.

You mean with Bush's lust for power, he didn't even target one person by mistake? Not one political enemy? I knew he was incompetent, but this is ridiculous - he doesn't even know how to abuse power correctly!

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UPDATE from Newsweek to appear in their January 9th issue:

On one day in the spring of 2004, White House chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made a bedside visit to John Ashcroft, attorney general at the time, who was stricken with a rare and painful pancreatic disease, to try—without success—to get him to reverse his deputy, Acting Attorney General James Comey, who was balking at the warrantless eavesdropping. Miffed that Comey, a straitlaced, by-the-book former U.S. attorney from New York, was not a "team player" on this and other issues, President George W. Bush dubbed him with a derisive nickname, "Cuomo," after Mario Cuomo, the New York governor who vacillated over running for president in the 1980s. (The White House denies this; Comey declined to comment.)"

Personally the last part seems rather dubious to me, but it does clarify the point on whether Ashcroft approved "warrentless eavesdropping". I still don't understand how this only came up 2 1/2 years after the program supposedly started.

Also, Newsweek reports that the domestic program targets 500 Americans a day. This is somewhat misleading in that the original December 16 report by the NY Times says that 500 persons in the United States (an unknown number of whom may be Americans) were monitored at any given time.