The Daily Background

After Republican Senator Arlen Specter was briefed on the relevant classified intelligence program(s) on Monday, Specter asked for a letter from the Administration, specifically the Department of Justice, to explain the apparent irregularities in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ testimony last week. He made it clear that he was going to release the letter to the media, and that a copy of the letter be forwarded to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy’s office as well. The deadline was noon.

Specter got the letter Tuesday afternoon, and the letter turned out to be two paragraphs from Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell. The letter essentially said the same thing the Sunday New York Times piece (which was “very long” in Wolf Blitzer’s eyes) said. That is, that James Comey was not referring to the NSA’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program” when he said it was very controversial within the Administration. McConnell says in his letter that he can’t say anything more about the matter.

For his part, Specter says he wants another follow up letter from Gonzales explaining more specific things about his testimony, and Senator Chuck Schumer has said “The question of whether Attorney General Gonzales perjured himself looms as large now as it did before this letter.”

But there’s something very important in McConnell’s letter (PDF here), that Specter must have specifically asked McConnell about– there’s no other reason McConnell would have mentioned it. And it’s surprising that the press hasn’t picked up on it at all.

McConnell ends his letter by noting that the Administration never called its warrantless wiretapping activities a “Terrorist Surveillance Program” internally, until they were forced to disclose it after a 2005 New York Times article publicly reported it for the first time.

Indeed, the original article did not refer to it by that name, and McConnell seems to confirm that “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was merely a name made up for marketing purposes to sell it to the public, explaining why some of the more serious, less partisan officials seem reluctant to call it that, such as FBI Director Robert Mueller, who refers to it only as “an NSA program that has been much discussed.”

McConnell writes, “I understand that in early 2006, as part of the public debate that followed the President’s acknowledgment, the Administration first used the term ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program’ to refer specifically to that praticulra activity the President had publicly described in December 2005.

“I understand that the phrase ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program’ was not used prior to 2006 to refer to the activities authorized by the President,” McConnell concludes.

The naming distinction is key in part because the Attorney General seems to be redefining what “Terrorist Surveillance Program” means every time he or other officials discuss the program. Previously lawmakers who had been briefed on the full intelligence activities said they were lead to believe that the wiretapping and the data mining were all part of the same “TSP” program, since they were all authorized under the same executive order in 2001, and all explained at the same time under the same classified context.

Now, Gonzales says that the internal disputes that did exist, apparently over the data mining activities, were part of an entirely separate intelligence program- an assertion that several lawmakers have challenged. More than a simple admission that the term “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was a marketing name thought up after the program was created to sound more benign, McConnell’s admission about the phrase may lend credence to the theory that Gonzales committed perjury, and is only now trying to cover his tracks by changing the meaning of the term to refer to something other than what lawmakers had previously been told it meant.

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