Who is Bushcorps Spying On---and Why?

After his so-called contrite address to the nation Sunday(in which he said he made mistakes but he's going to keep on making the same ones in Iraq), President Bush on Monday hawked his way through a press conference in which he not only didn't sound contrite about the secret spying program in the White House, he said he would continue doing it.

Today the blogosphere was full of speculations as to why this spying was going on in the first place. Several writers, including David Sirota, pointed out that Bush already has extraordinary powers under the The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that act, he can order wiretaps etc. to gather foreign intelligence, and within 72 hours of starting it, must go to a secret court (which apparently exists only to okay this spying) to get its approval. In a quarter century of this act, only four requests have been denied.

But the Bush National Security Agency spying doesn't even bother with these niceties. Sirota wonders why. He notes that the reason Bush gave Monday---speed is of the essence---doesn't do it:

...the law currently allows Bush to order surveillance as fast as he possibly can, and allows surveillance operations to take place immediately. The only thing that is required is a court-issued warrant that can be used retroactively within 72 hours of when the operation started.

He concludes:

There really is only one explanation that a sane, rational person could come up with: The surveillance operations Bush is ordering are so outrageous, so unrelated to the War on Terror and such an unconstitutional breach of authority that he knows that even a court that has rejected just 4 warrant requests in 25 years will reject what he's doing.

What could that be? Josh Marshall thinks it might be some kind of electronic survelliance or dating mining that doesn't allow for individual warrants. Ameriblog speculates it might be spying on reporters.

Bush says that these were only Americans making phone calls to people with known Al Qaeda ties. That probably knocks out members of Congress, but it very much sounds like US journalists. Who else, other than terror cells, would be talking on a regular basis with people who might have ties to terrorism? American journalists working on stories.It could even include US journalists talking to their bureaus abroad. Read again who Bush said the program is targeting (if you believe him): "intercept the international communications of people with known links to Al-Qaida and related terrorist organizations."

What's a "known link"? Does a journalist who has contacts inside Al Qaeda have a "known link" to Al Qaeda? Well sure he does, he absolutely has links/contacts with Al Qaeda.

But an operative caution here is "If you believe him." For what if this spying has nothing to do with intercepts of calls overseas, and represents spying on people within the U.S. for reasons unrelated to terrorism, except in the usual wide Republican definition, which could mean everything from threats against Republicans winning elections to how close people are coming to discovering vote fraud and manipulation, or corruption involving Republicans and the corporations that own them?

In a different context this might amount to fantasy and paranoia. But not with this administration. Not given what we already know. Not now.