Hoo boy.

In a firedoglake entry, ReddHedd lays out the legal ramifications of the domestic spying scandal. Not so much for the government....but for any number of charged and/or convicted terrorism suspects whose defense counsel are now obliged to challenge their cases.

If ReddHedd is correct (and she is an attorney so I'm assuming she knows more than I do about this): Nearly all of them now have grounds to claim that they might have first attracted federal attention through an illegal, improper wiretap.

If we were to believe government spin, Bush was only trying to make it easier to catch bad men and put them away. But what he chose to do about it is about to turn into a legal nightmare. One that may make it more difficult to catch new criminals and stop any that we already have from walking. As Redd puts it:

This is what happens when you play fast and loose with the rules. It comes back to smack you right in the ass. And all of us will be paying the price for it: in court costs, in energy that will now have to be expended on this issue rather than on further needed prosecutions (because manpower only stretches so far), on the possibility that a bad actor will be set free because the President of the United States authorized a segment of our government to cheat the law because to follow it was too much work for him.

Thank you, President Bush; it's as if you ran out and whacked the statue of justice right on the knee, a la Nancy Kerrigan.