Glenn Reynolds and the anti-libertarian Presidency.

I wonder why the non-partisan libertarian hasn't called for immediate congressional investigations for this alarming expansion of executive power?

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

...Nacchio's account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

...In a statement released after the story was published, Nacchio attorney Herbert Stern said that in fall 2001, Qwest was approached to give the government access to the private phone records of Qwest customers. At the time, Nacchio was chairman of the president's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.

"Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request," Stern said. "When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

I guess he's much too busy bashing Gore and obsessing over Hsu.

(h/t blogenfreude)

UPDATE

Greenwald notes that the libertarian not only ignores the Bushies' power grab, he shills for it.

Like clockwork, the standard roster of GOP hacks -- The New York Post and Instapundit -- have their talking-point marching orders and are today promoting this dramatic tale. The Post article goes so far as to show a picture of one of the kidnapped soliders with his wife and repeatedly insinuates that the need to comply with FISA prevented the U.S. military from eavesdropping on insurgent calls and thereby prevented the military from saving this soldier.

As Spencer Ackerman previously reported, McConnell's claims in this regard are completely false, since their failure to eavesdrop right away was their own fault for failing to invoke FISA's emergency eavesdropping provision, whereby they are free to eavesdrop for 72 hours without a warrant. Just as importantly, the eavesdropping here involved foreign-to-foreign communications (i.e., Iraq-to-Iraq), which nobody in Congress believes ought to require a warrant.

This incident, then, has absolutely nothing to do with the pending FISA debate. But the administration and its standard, mindless followers nonetheless exploit -- as usual -- the U.S. troops who were killed by insurgents in Iraq for their own domestic political agenda.

A political agenda that has nothing to do whatsoever with libertarianism.