Officials Fault Case Bush Cited as Excuse for Spying

LAT

...In his radio address Saturday, Bush said two of the hijackers who helped fly a jet into the Pentagon — Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar — had communicated with suspected Al Qaeda members overseas while they were living in the U.S.

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But some current and former high-ranking U.S. counter-terrorism officials say that the still-classified details of the case undermine the president's rationale for the recently disclosed domestic spying program.

Indeed, a 2002 inquiry into the case by the House and Senate intelligence committees blamed interagency communication breakdowns — not shortcomings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any other intelligence-gathering guidelines.

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The officials from U.S. intelligence, law enforcement and counter-terrorism agencies said they agreed to discuss the case — and Bush's reference to it — because they did not believe it supported the administration's position that the FISA court should be circumvented in certain high-profile and urgent terrorism cases.

"It's total hubris. It's arrogance by the people doing this," said a second senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.....