Bush ignored recommendations from both the Clinton administration and Hart-Rudman on terrorism and bin Laden in particular. FISA was available to Bush the day he took office.
So really, it's a case of Bush not giving a damn what the outgoing President had to say and not giving a damn what the Hart-Rudman report said. And no interest in following the law since legal means were also available to him when it took office.
FISA was in place prior to September 11, 2001
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 prescribes procedures for requesting judicial authorization for electronic surveillance and physical search of persons engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States on behalf of a foreign power.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_su... Bush ignores the Hart–Rudman Terrorism Report and claims Cheney will head up an anti-terror task force. A task-force that never materialized.
http://www.avatara.com/operationignore0.html Excerpt from:
Al Franken's book: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
“Meanwhile, on February 15, 2001, a commission led by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman issued its third and final report on national security. The Hart-Rudman report warned that "mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland was of serious and growing concern'' and said that America was woefully unprepared for a "catastrophic'' domestic terrorist attack and urged the creation of a new federal agency: "A National Homeland Security Agency with responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government activities involved in homeland security” that would include the Customs Service, the Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, and more than a dozen other government departments and agencies.
The Hart-Rudman Commission had studied every aspect of national security over a period of years and had come to a unanimous conclusion: "This commission believes that the security of the American homeland from the threats of the new century should be the primary national security mission of the U.S. government."
The report generated a great deal of media attention and even a bill in Congress to establish a National Homeland Security Agency. But over at the White House, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Attorney General Ashcroft, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided that the best course of action was not to implement the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, but instead to launch a sweeping initiative dubbed "Operation Ignore."
The public face of Operation Ignore would be an antiterrorism task force led by Vice President Cheney. Its mandate: to pretend to develop a plan to counter domestic terrorist attacks. Bush announced the task force on May 8, 2001, and said that he himself would "periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts." Bush never chaired such a meeting, though. Probably because Cheney's task force never actually met. Operation Ignore was in full swing.”
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1973708&mesg_id=1974079Bush Authorized Domestic Spying
*and info concerning spying prior to September 11.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20... "For more than four years, the NSA tasked other military intelligence agencies to assist its broad-based surveillance effort directed at people inside the country suspected of having terrorist connections, even before Bush signed the 2002 order that authorized the NSA program, according to an informed U.S. official."
Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy
http://www.slate.com/id/2133564 /
"A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and e-mails."
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