Sometime Wednesday night, Time magazine quietly corrected its correction to a Joe Klein column but the silent edit still failed to fix the egregious story that falsely stated Democrats wanted to extended the full protection of the Constitution to all foreign terrorists.

For one, the new correction still misstates the very name of the bill passed by the House.

More importantly, the second correction fails to correct the central premise of Klein's column, turning what might have been unintentional, but dangerous misstatements in the original into a lie supported by Time's top editors.

Klein's November 21 column, "The Tone-Deaf Democrats," stated that the House-passed Restore Act "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans."

That's just wrong, since, under the bill, 1) the NSA would remain free to wiretap and eavesdrop at will outside the United States and 2) would be granted the extraordinary power to install wiretaps inside U.S. facilities without warrants (they just can't use communications they capture about Americans).

If the foreigners are using U.S. communication technology such as Gmail and the spooks want to routinely keep their communications with Americans and the spooks have no way to wiretap outisde the United States, they can simply turn to a secret court to get a blanket warrant that can cover all of the targets.

The original correction, so hilariously wrong that THREAT LEVEL called for a correction to the correction, read:

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't.

The new one reads (changes in bold):

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. The bill does not explicitly say that. Republicans believe it can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't.

THREAT LEVEL has spent enough words on Klein and Time's sloppiness, but suffice it to say that no one, Republican or Democrat, who is familiar with FISA could argue in good faith that the bill would "require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court."

For guidance, Time need look no further than the Chicago Tribune, which ran a excerpt of the original column Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Tribune out corrected Time with only a single take:

A Time magazine essay by Joe Klein that was excerpted on the editorial page Wednesday incorrectly stated that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would require a court approval of individual foreign surveillance targets. It does not.

But the spinmeisters continue. Today, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan), who is the top Repubican on the House Intelligence Commitee, defended Klein in a National Review op-ed, identifying himself as one of Klein's sources and spouting the same misinformation that Klein now seems to have re-printed verbatim.

For Time to continue to allow people to believe that that's possibly what this bill would do means after all the detailed criticism it has gotten is clear proof the original column is no longer a dangerous misunderstanding of a complex issue by a two-bit political columnist.

Instead, it's now an institutional lie.

For more see Salon's Glenn Greenwald take on the Hoekstra op-ed/Tribune correction, and his post on Time's second, secret correction.

UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune's editorial page editor Bruce Dold tells THREAT LEVEL:

"I decided we would run a correction after readers brought this to our attention. I believe that, late yesterday, Time issued a more specific correction than its original statement."

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CC Photo: David Fraíz Cosano