Deja Vu, Again.

As I wrote here, the Congressional Research Service opined that the President's program of domestic spying was probably illegal.

The Washington Post reports today that the non-partisan CRS has done it again. Here's the lede:

The Bush administration appears to have violated the National Security Act by limiting its briefings about a warrantless domestic eavesdropping program to congressional leaders, according to a memo from Congress's research arm released yesterday.

The Congressional Research Service opinion said that the amended 1947 law requires President Bush to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of such intelligence activities as the domestic surveillance effort.

You can read the entire story here.

NSA domestic spying program called illegal by CRS? Yeah, been there, heard that.

Elsewhere, recently de-classified documents reveals that completely apart from Joe Wilson, the intelligence community had concluded that Saddam was not going to get any uranium from Niger. Here's the article from the New York Times.

The report by the State Department's intelligence bureau was dated March 4, 2002, long before W made his notorious State of the Union speech.The memo was distributed at senior levels by the office of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Proof that W knew that Saddam was not acquiring yellowcake from Niger? Nothing new; just more of the same.

How did the administration respond to this repeat revelation of its own mendacity?

"This matter was examined fully by the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission, and the president acted on their broad recommendations to reform our intelligence apparatus," said Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Same bologna, different day.

Let's make this clear: the King George W conducted an illegal program of domestic spying, illegal because it was unauthorized, as well as illegal because he kept Congress in the dark. The President was lying us into war and trying to scare us into believing that Saddam had reconstituted a nuclear weapons program. The intelligence community did not get it wrong: au contraire -- Joe Wilson, the State Department, and other components knew that the Niger uranium supply was secure.

You've heard it all before.

“… and tell ’em Big Mitch sent ya!”