I’ve just finished digesting
this Op-Ed written in today’s New York Times by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and I have to admit that I’m a bit stunned.
I also believe this column should be read by every voter in this country, because doing so will confirm once and for all and for all time that the Bushco regime will NEVER capitulate on any matter with the “Democrat” congress.
McConnell’s column is shameless fear mongering and propagandizing from the nearly first word to the very last. At best, it is merely an idiotic rehash of familiar, erroneous GOP talking points. At worst, it is absolutely dreadful in its utter denial of reality.
It is utterly uncompromising in its goal of making sure that FISA remains a dead, rotting carcass of a law intended to maintain governmental checks and balances on our domestic and international spying.
Basically, it is Bushco in a nutshell.
So, where to begin?
Before the Protect America Act was enacted, to monitor the communications of foreign intelligence targets outside the United States, in some cases we had to operate under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, a law that had not kept pace with changes in technology.
That argument is a “red herring.” The changes sought considering evolution in electronic communication since 1978 could have been accomplished without destroying the law’s provisions, which was the true intent all along (David Addington’s remark about “bombing the FISA court” (three-quarters of the way down in
this post) captured what this administration had always sought).
And what does “in some cases” mean anyway? As
this Wikipedia article states, FISA was a law “prescribing procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of ‘foreign intelligence information’ between or among ‘foreign powers’.”
Since McConnell doesn’t bother to specify what “cases” he’s talking about, I don’t know why I should have to hazard a guess on that.
In a significant number of these cases, FISA required us to obtain a court order. This requirement slowed — and sometimes prevented — our ability to collect timely foreign intelligence.
This is one of the evergreen Repug lies about FISA; again, the Wikipedia article tells us…
The act created a court which meets in secret, and approves or denies requests for search warrants. Only the number of warrants applied for, issued and denied, is reported. In 1980 (the first full year after its inception), it approved 322 warrants.[2] This number has steadily grown to 2224 warrants[3] in 2006. Only 5 warrants have been rejected since the court first met in 1979. [4]
The issue, as always, isn’t this administration’s “ability to collect timely foreign intelligence.” It is their desire to comply with a law requiring oversight.
Also…
The judicial process intended to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans was applied instead to foreign intelligence targets in foreign countries. This made little sense, and the Protect America Act eliminated this problem.
Why did it make “little sense” (assuming you can accept this claim at face value anyway)? Is the blanket assumption such that any “targets in foreign countries” were automatically deemed guilty without benefit of trial or any judicial review whatsoever?
(Oh right, what a dumb question for an administration that has waged war on habeas corpus rights for almost its entirety…)
To continue…
The intelligence community should spend its time protecting our nation, not providing privacy protections to foreign terrorists and other diffuse international threats.
The illogic of this sentence is astounding (not the politics, however), given the fact that, as the FISA Wikipedia article notes (under surveillance provisions without a court order), our services could already conduct surveillance without a court order under FISA…
The President may authorize, through the Attorney General, electronic surveillance without a court order for the period of one year provided it is only for foreign intelligence information [11]; targeting foreign powers as defined by 50 U.S.C. §1801(a)(1),(2),(3) [12] or their agents; and there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.
Bushco would love to have you believe that existing FISA law created a logjam for approval of warrants within the FISA court that tied the hands of our intelligence agencies and rendered them incapable of doing their jobs. This, quite simply, is a lie, and it is typically reprehensible of this regime to resurrect it in this column or anywhere else.
Also…
Finally, it is critical for the intelligence community to have liability protection for private parties that are sued only because they are believed to have assisted us after Sept. 11, 2001. Although the Protect America Act provided such necessary protection for those complying with requests made after its enactment, it did not include protection for those that reportedly complied earlier.
I think Spencer Ackerman of TPM Muckracker makes a good point
here; McConnell has stated that AT&T and Verizon are already complying with the government on warrantless surveillance (the
courageous exception of Joe Nacchio and Qwest notwithstanding)…so, if they’re already doing that, why do they need immunity unless they have something to hide (and given this administration’s track record, why would you
not ask that question?).
(And by the way, regarding the El Paso interview mentioned by Ackerman, who can forget the following illustrious quote from McConnell
noted here?)
Also…
I share the view of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, after a year of study, concluded that “without retroactive immunity, the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests in the future,” and warned that “the possible reduction in intelligence that might result from this delay is simply unacceptable for the safety of our nation.”
McConnell doesn’t state if he’s referring to the 110th or 109th Congress here, by the way; I would be mildly shocked if that quote came from Jay Rockefeller – if I had to bet on this, I’d attribute this to Kit Bond if it came from anyone (and “unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests,” huh? You mean,
like Bushco itself?)
Also, to me the most laughable part of McConnell’s column is that he doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of the RESTORE Act, which of course was so thoroughly misrepresented by Joke Line a week or so ago, playing Charlie McCarthy to Pete Hoekstra’s Edgar Bergen
here.I think part of the reason why McConnell neglected to mention it, in addition to the fact that it showed the Democrats crafting legislation that properly struck the balance between the legitimate needs of our intelligence services and privacy protections, was because the RESTORE Act doesn’t provide for telco immunity – so…it…must…be…destroyed.
One day when the book is written and the last chapter finally closed on our currently troubled life and times, it will read that individuals such as McConnell were more concerned with consolidating political power for the favored few than acting in accord with internationally accepted conventions of law enforcement and intelligence gathering. That is sad enough.
I only hope that we aren’t all reading this “book” amidst the rubble of an attack that could have been prevented by our government had it acted with courage and common sense instead.
Update 12/11/07: More from Chris Dodd
here...
This TPM Election Central link (h/t Avedon Carol at Eschaton) tells us..
