604

The first president of the United States was incapable of telling a lie, or so the story goes, but the current president seems incapable of telling anything but.

So last week, when the president climbed up on his high horse and decried the "shameful act" of leaking his secret NSA spy program to the press, his moral indignation didn't quite ring true, and neither did his defense of spying without a warrant:

We know that a two-minute phone conversation between somebody linked to al Qaeda here and an operative overseas could lead directly to the loss of thousands of lives. To save American lives, we must be able to act fast and to detect these conversations so we can prevent new attacks.

Act fast? Is immediately fast enough? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the law that Bush appears to have violated, allows the government to spy first and ask for a warrant later. It just don't get no faster than that.

What bothers the president is not that he may have broken the law, but that someone dropped a dime on him. The Bush Justice Department has already begun an investigation to find the source of the leak.

But that's putting the cart before the horse. It can't be a crime to expose a criminal act. So before the justice department spends any more time hunting down the person who exposed the NSA's eavesdropping, we need to determine whether the eavesdropping itself was illegal.

And if it is found to be illegal, the whistleblower who exposed the crime should be congratulated, while those who ordered it should be prosecuted, up to and including the president.