Admission Of Failure By The Attorney General?

So stated a tearful Attorney General Michael Mukasey on March 27, 2008 during a question-and-answer session after a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco: "We knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went. You've got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn't come home, to show for that."

Mukasey was lamenting being proscribed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from intercepting a communication from someone outside of the U.S.A. to someone inside the U.S.A. The government "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up a phone in Iraq and calls the United States," Mukasey said.

Except of course, that it doesn't need a warrant, and didn't need one in the summer of 2001. The federal government could have requested a warrant to listen in on the call of a suspected foreign terrorist to someone in this country- or monitored the conversations for 72 hours without a warrant.

Now, this could be, and probably is, just another effort to blame the FISA for the Bush Administration's own inability to detect the terrorist attacks which took place on September 11, 2001. But if instead it really happened the way Mukasey claimed, the "liberal media" no doubt will jump on this story and demand a congressional investigation of this crew of bunglers. Just kidding.