President Bush has repeatedly defended his domestic spying program by citing pre-9/11 failures. “We didn’t know they were here until it was too late. The authorization I gave the NSA after September 11 helped address that problem,” Bush said last Saturday after the spying story broke.

Nope.

The L.A. times reports that the specific case Bush referenced in his address—that of the 2 hijackers who crashed the jet into the Pentagon—could have been thwarted using traditional FISA regulations.