"But the attorney general might have to tell the president he might well not be able to get that warrant. FISA requires the attorney general to convince the panel that there is "probable cause to believe" that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist."
I don't know if the numbers are right but the MSNBC tonight said that of 4000+ requests 4 were denied and 96 ammended.
That may be true, but the crucial missing statistic is how long it took to put together the petition to the court, assembling all the supporting data, and signatures up and down the line. This has proven in the past to take literally months, and has diren people to utter frustration. Consider the case of Zacharias Moussawi.
As Bush has tried to emphasize, there is a distinction between monitoring the calls of someone over a long term, and detecting activity that may or may not occur once ot twice in a very short time frame.
Imagine that a high level al-Qaida has been captured and us cell phone numbers recovered from him.
Just how long do you imaine those phone numbers will continue to be hot? Do really you imagine that they will still be in use weeks later, after a FISA warrant has been obtained?
Bush was denied wiretaps, bypassed them (FISA Court denied them in unprecedented numbers)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1547700/posts
U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.
A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.
The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation.
But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.