When it comes to spying, the nation's top officials just can't keep from misleading the American people.

But has two years of end-of-the-world rhetoric and dodgy legalistic explanations from an Administration that secretly turned NSA's formidable spying apparatus on the American people finally run its course?

On Sunday, the New York Times' Eric Lichtblau put paid on accusatiions that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lied to Congress when he said there was no internal disagreement over the warrantless wiretapping of Americans. If the Ashcroft ICU showdown wasn't enough to earn Gonzales the official title of liar, the story that FBI employees thought the law was being broken 12 hours after the secret wiretapping of Americans started certainly does.

Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times reports that Democrats no longer trust the "straight shooting" Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and consider him to be a "lobbyist."

In letters to lawmakers, McConnell warned that prolonged debate by the House was making the nation "more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats." In a newspaper interview last year, he said that merely debating the issue meant that "some Americans are going to die," because terrorists and other adversaries would learn more about America's surveillance capabilities. More recently, at a House hearing in February, McConnell was accused of offering misleading testimony when he warned that allowing temporary eavesdropping authority to lapse would cause phone companies to quit cooperating.

For the past year, McConnell has largely been allowed to get away with his fear-mongering and exaggerated claims about the effect of curtails on wiretapping powers because even the most basic facts about the the president's rogue wiretapping program remain classified.

But even with that cloak of darkness to hide the truth, McConnell still manages to mislead Congress and make statements so absurd that's its impossible for anyone actually paying attention to the debate to believe him.

Like when he trotted out the Iraqi hostage story after it had been debunked, or told Congress how the powers under Protect America Act snagged German terrorists and then had to retract the politically convenient exaggeration.

And he's been yapping all over that a secret court destroyed 70 percent of the nation's spies' ability to eavesdrop around the world and then it turns out the problem is all about not being able to harvest every email that enters or leaves switches based in the United States.

You'd think at least that the nation's top law enforcement official Attorney General Michael Mukasey would tell the truth, but he seems to have caught the same exaggeration flu that McConnell suffers from.

Last week, Mukaskey came to San Francisco and said that the "government shouldn't need a warrant when someone picks ups a phone in Iraq and calls the United States." He's right and it never has.

He also said that before 9/11, the government knew about a call from a safe house in Afghanistan to somewhere in the United States. "We didn't know precisely where it went." He suggested that the U.S. might have prevented another terrorist attack if the government could have monitored that call without court approval.

It could have. It should have. The CIA and the FBI, under the Bush administration, could have taken Al Qaeda seriously and stopped 9/11 with the tools they had. They did not.

And now the nation's top law enforcement official is lying about wiretapping laws. And he added that companies such as AT&T, Sprint and Verizon that massively violated federal privacy laws should be given amnesty, which he said "was just not fair."

That's just absurd. As we learned over the last two years, even John Ashcroft knew the targeting wiretaps at Americans without warrants was illegal. The telecoms certainly knew it, too.

And in another stunning revelation in Sunday's New York Times story, we learn that from the start, the Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson refused to sign off on any applications for full wiretaps that used information from the illegal wiretaps.

To top it off the next day, he tops himself by saying that theft of intellectual property fosters terrorism. These people have no shame.

Now Congress is returning to session and the White House is now willing to make some sort of deal now that it's figured out its fear mongering, terror armageddon rhetoric isn't working any more.

The House shouldn't bargain lightly and the more time passes, the more that this program comes into focus as an immense and illegal operation that violated every legal boundary put into place after the country learned about Nixon and Hoover's wiretapping excesses.

Just today, John Yoo's infamous torture memo was declassified.

There's no reason that Congress should be in any hurry to hand more wiretapping power to this administration of exaggerators and chicken littles until it releases the other John Yoo memo – the one that gave legal cover to the government's spying on American citizens without court orders. The one that told this President that he had the power to order his minions to collect, store and sift through my phone records and internet usage without getting a judge's approval.

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