Spying Inquiry Update

Well, the administration’s full court press attempting to swing Republican members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees against an official inquiry into the domestic spying program seems to have worked quite well. The Senate Committee voted along party lines, so, with a GOP majority, the proposed Senate inquiry has been squashed. And although the House Committee has voted to open a Congressional inquiry, there’s already argument about its scope:

Representative Heather A. Wilson, the New Mexico Republican and committee member who called last week for the investigation, said the review "will have multiple avenues, because we want to completely understand the program and move forward."

But an aide to Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who leads the committee, said the inquiry would be much more limited in scope, focusing on whether federal surveillance laws needed to be changed and not on the eavesdropping program itself…

Ms. Wilson said the review would include closed-door briefings by intelligence officials about the operational details of the program, a review of its legality and discussion about whether changes are needed in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which bans eavesdropping in intelligence investigations without a court order.

While the administration agreed under pressure last week to provide limited operational details to the House and Senate intelligence committees, Ms. Wilson said she wanted more information and remained uncertain whether the N.S.A. had the needed safeguards in place to protect against civil rights abuses against Americans.

But Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Mr. Hoekstra, said: "This is not an inquiry into the program. It's a comprehensive review of the FISA statute. " He said Mr. Hoekstra "wants to set up a process to move forward and look at the entire statute and ways to modernize it."

But aides in two other Congressional offices, speaking only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said their understanding of the agreement was that the inquiry would focus in large part on operational details of the surveillance program.

So, it’s not clear yet how effective this inquiry is actually going to be. The Bush administration is already laying out its rationale for not cooperating, which is, predictably, that a comprehensive inquiry risks disclosing national security information that could help Al Qaida.

Of course it does.