The Times, which has as its prime mission right now a search-and-destroy on the Bush administration, leapt before it looked with its story on Ashcroft being slapped down by a Federal court regarding rules of investigation.

The Bush administration's latest courtroom setback in the post-Sept. 11 hunt for terrorists came from an unlikely source: a secretive panel of federal judges that until now had always given the government what it wanted.



The rebuff by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may test the limits of the government's power to spy on terror suspects in the United States, and prompted a strongly worded appeal from the government.

The Justice Department released an edited version of the appeal Friday, minus the details about a secret international terrorism investigation.

It apparently was the first time the government has gone to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review to overrule the special espionage panel, created nearly 25 years ago as a check on the government's power to conduct domestic spying.

"It's a shock, and a reminder of something the attorney general in particular seems to need reminding on -- that there is another branch of government here that has more than an advisory role to play," said Peter Raven-Hansen, who teaches national security law at George Washington University.

Judges have clipped the government's wings in a handful of rulings in recent months dealing with secret detentions and deportations of potential terror suspects and rules for holding or prosecuting those whose names are public.



Ha! Darth Ashcroft thwarted in his evil attempts to take over the United States for Jesus! The Times thought it had Ashcroft in the wringer.

The Washington Post gleefully followed suit in its headline, "Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft! Justice Dept. Chided On Misinformation!" "Justice Department Rebuked!" crowed my local rag, the Mercury News, with the same story.

Then a little more info dribbled out, and a few editors started connecting dots.

A little paragraph in the middle of the Times story reads:

The court rejected a wiretap request in May, saying the government had previously misled the court or provided bad information and suggesting the government was now seeking power that would allow it to misuse intelligence information for criminal prosecutions. This was revealed Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A bit in the middle of the Post story reveals a bit more:

A May 17 opinion by the court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) alleges that Justice Department and FBI officials supplied erroneous information to the court in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.



Authorities also improperly shared intelligence information with agents and prosecutors handling criminal cases in New York on at least four occasions, the judges said.

The department discovered the misrepresentations and reported them to the FISA court beginning in 2000.



2000? What was Ashcroft doing in 2000?

In a later story, we learn a few more things.

Much of what the Justice Department wanted to do was related to "allow broader cooperation and evidence-sharing between counterintelligence investigators and criminal prosecutors." That is, to try and repair the "left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing" intelligence gaps that the Times and the rest of the Democratic buttmonkeys were screeching about just a few weeks ago.

And suddenly it occurs to the newpapers that most of the abuses that have caused the Court to act with this caution were in 2000 and early 2001--that is, under the direction of Louis J. Freeh, the Clinton director of the FBI, who was director until June of 2001, and the Reno Justice department.

Oops.

After the Enron debacle, among others, I'm sure that the Times is getting a little tired of flipping over rocks, yelling "Ta DAH!" and having a jackass underneath instead of the expected elephant.

I notice that this story has fled the front pages like it had a JATO unit up its butt. At least this is true on the Post and Times web pages, where I actually had to do a search to find it. Don't expect to see much on this any more.