Meanwhile, in other NSA news...

Yahoo! News has the following information just coming out:

It seems that the NSA has refused to grand security clearance to Jusitce Dept lawyers investigating the warrantless eavesdropping program.

 

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.

"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.

Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.

Must be nice to be the NSA (or the Bush administration) you can just choose not to give clearance to anyone and make all of that pesky congressional oversight go away. Isn't that called a dictatorship?