Unpleasant Reality

"But civil engineers understand that once a levee is 'topped,' floodwaters can rapidly erode the structural base of the levee and nearly always result in a breach, according to AP interviews with officials from the Corps of Engineers and others."

And Raum caught the White House in a lie: "In a document it called ' Setting the Record Straight ,' the White House said Bush's Aug. 28 videoconference 'was open to the press and the full transcript of this videoconference was released to Congress and the public in the fall of 2005.'

"However, only the opening portion of the conference, where Bush made brief remarks, was witnessed by a small news media pool. And full transcripts of that and other sessions were not released by either the administration or Congress."

I'm glad Raum weighed in on the breaching vs. topping issue. The argument that Bush's statement about not anticipating the breaching of levees was legitimate because the word "breach" never came up in the Aug. 28 videoconference is so laughable -- and so reminiscent of Clintonian parsing -- that even the White House has refused to make it. Nevertheless, it's been banging around the blogosphere, fueled by volunteer presidential apologists.

Spying and Oversight

Scott Shane and David D. Kirkpatrick write in the New York Times: "The plan by Senate Republicans to step up oversight of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program would also give legislative sanction for the first time to long-term eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant, legal experts said on Wednesday.

"Civil liberties advocates called the proposed oversight inadequate and the licensing of eavesdropping without warrants unnecessary and unwise. But the Republican senators who drafted the proposal said it represented a hard-wrung compromise with the White House, which strongly opposed any Congressional interference in the eavesdropping program."

Meanwhile, the committee chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, insisted that he had driven a hard bargain with the White House.

" 'There was a lot of pushback,' Mr. Roberts said. 'So we kept saying, I am sorry, that is not acceptable, and the reality is such that you will either do this or you will face bigger obstacles and we will get into confrontation.'"

The committee will not hold hearings on how the program works, why it was initiated, or whether it's legal. The committee will not insist that the administration get warrants from this point forward. But, after 45 days of warrantless spying on any given person, administration officials will be asked to explain why they want to continue, in secret, to a small group of senators.

Senator Mike DeWine, a principal author of the agreement, said it would give "very specific pinpoint oversight."

Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus write in The Washington Post: "The panel's vice chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said yesterday in an interview that the proposals fall far short of allowing Congress to make judgments necessary to oversee the program. 'It is 'undersight' when they tell us what they want us to know,' Rockefeller said, referring to the White House. 'It's 'oversight' when we know enough to ask our own questions.' "

Eggen and Pincus lead their NSA story with this news: "A former senior national security lawyer at the Justice Department is highly critical of some of the Bush administration's key legal justifications for warrantless spying, saying that many of the government's arguments are weak and unlikely to be endorsed by the courts, according to documents released yesterday.