The Los Angeles Times features a remarkably disingenuous headline today over a story by reporter Josh Meyer. The headline screams: “White House backtracks on claims of lost intelligence – Hours after chiding Congress for not finishing a wiretapping bill and leaving the nation ‘vulnerable to terrorist attack,’ officials acknowledge all requested information is being received.”

The impression, of course, is that the administration overstated its case that the intelligence community has lost information due to the shameful failure of House Democrats to enact the intelligence reform bill that passed the Democrat-controlled Senate by an overwhelming bipartisan margin. If one reads what was actually said, however, it’s obvious that that’s not what happened.

On Friday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell sent a letter to Rep. Silvestre Reyes, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The letter stated “We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress’ failure to act.“ (Underlining in original.) The loss was evidently due to skittishness from the telecommunications companies about their legal exposure for cooperating with the government now that House Democrats allowed the Protect America Act (PAA) to lapse. The PAA provides that any surveillances begun under it can run for a full year even if the statute lapses. The PAA is, however, less clear about whether, post-lapse, existing orders may be modified to meet changing conditions, the telecoms continue to get immunity, and courts continue to be available to enforce PAA surveillance.

The Justice Department and the National Intelligence Directorate have been trying to convince the telecoms — which are already looking at numerous lawsuits and the potential of billions of dollars in liability — to interpret the PAA in a way that gives them confidence that they can continue to cooperate without exposing themselves to more trouble. At least some of the telecoms have been weighing that argument.

On Friday night, after the Mukasey/McConnell letter was sent, DOJ and DNI apparently learned that the industry will continue to honor existing PAA directives, including to the extent those existing directives provide for new surveillances. The AG and the DNI thus put out a press release on Saturday explaining that. The press release notes that, “Unfortunately, the delay resulting from this discussion impaired our ability to cover foreign intelligence targets, which resulted in missed intelligence information.”

The administration is not backtracking. It warned on Friday of what could have been an even worse degrading of our intelligence collection capacity which, at least for now, turns out not to be as dire because the telecoms have decided to continue cooperating. But the administration maintains that intelligence has been lost already because of the House’s failure to pass (or, indeed, even permit a vote on) the Senate bill; it admonishes that the industry could well change its mind; and it adds that — even if the industry keeps cooperating — the loss of the PAA authorities going forward will continue to degrade our intelligence-gathering capacity.

That is obviously true: not all new surveillances we should be doing will be covered by existing PAA directives; for those surveillances, we would have to use the outdated FISA law which, unlike the PAA, requires satisfying a judge that there is probable-cause. Common sense: if you used to require no hurdle before surveillance could be performed overseas and now you require a probable-cause hurdle, you are going to have significantly less surveillance over time.

That’s not backtracking. That is sounding an alarm that neither House Democrats nor the Los Angeles Times seem to want to hear.