Just after dawn on September 11th, 2001, I flew out of Dulles Airport less than an hour before the departure from the same airport of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon later that morning. When I arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, to give a speech, the North Tower of the World Trade Center had been hit. By the end of my remarks, both the North and South Towers stood shrouded in smoke and flames with many desperate people jumping to their deaths, some 90 stories below. I spent much of the rest of that horrible day trying to get back to Washington to assist the President in my role as White House Counsel.

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.

I have removed the view permissions settings because they seemed to be getting in the way of publication of blog entries and the like and very little, if anything, was being set as private. Document attachments to forum posts remain private unless you are logged in. If anyone would like to discuss this, please send me an email or give me a call.