US President George W. Bush…used to assure Americans wary of expanded anti-terrorism powers that tapping telephones required a judge’s go-ahead.

“Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order,” he said on April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York.

“Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so,” he added.

On April 19, 2004, Bush said the Patriot Act enabled law-enforcement officials to use “roving wiretaps,” which are not fixed to a particular telephone, against terrorism, as they had been against organized crime.

“You see, what that meant is if you got a wiretap by court order — and by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example,” he said in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Vice President Dick Cheney offered similar reassurances at a Patriot Act event in June 2004, saying that “all of the investigative tools” under the law “require the approval of a judge before they can be carried out.”

Of course, we expect our politicians to flip-flop and lie to support whatever it is they’re doing illegal or unethical. The reason so many True Believers are called “ditto-heads” is that as soon as the excuses for the lies are offered up, they’re immediately parroted as gospel.

Update: A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush’s secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.