In his much-discussed column, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter professes to be baffled by the president’s decision to by-pass the FISA court for some national security wiretaps:

What is especially perplexing about this story is that the 1978 law set up a special court to approve eavesdropping in hours, even minutes, if necessary. In fact, the law allows the government to eavesdrop on its own, then retroactively justify it to the court, essentially obtaining a warrant after the fact. Since 1979, the FISA court has approved tens of thousands of eavesdropping requests and rejected only four. There was no indication the existing system was slow…

Alter apparently does not remember the April 14, 2004 meeting of the September 11 Commission, in which a commission staffer read some the panel’s preliminary findings. Among those findings was the conclusion that, even after the reforms of the Patriot Act, the FISA application process was “long and slow”:

Many agents in the field told us that although there is now less hesitancy in seeking approval for electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the application process nonetheless continues to be long and slow. Requests for such approvals are overwhelming the ability of the system to process them and to conduct the surveillance. The Department of Justice and FBI are attempting to address bottlenecks in the process.