From TPM.com
McConnell helps muddy the water in his letter (Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) uncharitably calls it "gobbledygook" full of "weasel words"). There was no single surveillance program, McConnell writes, but "various intelligence activities" that had been authorized in a presidential order. And those activities weren't characterized as being in a program until the President was forced to publicly disclose a "particular activity," i.e. "the targeting for interception without a court order of international communications of al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist organizations coming into or going out of the United States."
The phrase "Terrorist Surveillance Program," McConnell says, refers only to that specific activity. (Entertainingly enough, he doesn't independently characterize the TSP as a program - just a "particular activity".) Notably, McConnell's letter is the first time that the administration has publicly admitted that "Bush's order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrant less surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005."
TSP - Terrorist Surveillance Program - is it one activity or a Bush use of a Umbrella term for the data acquisition aspects of the war on terror. I believe that Bush the Namer guy used the name he knew.
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