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Pelosi's "justifications" for the FISA "compromise"
salon.com, June 22
[TIME Magazine, June 20:] Letting the PAA expire was a risk—the Administration pilloried Democrats for being soft on terrorism. But Pelosi successfully parlayed it into specific improvements. For example, under Administration proposals, the telecoms would have received full retroactive immunity from lawsuits brought by civil libertarians alleging they violated the fourth amendment by complying with Administration requests to conduct wiretaps following 9/11. In negotiations with Pelosi's office, the telecoms offered a compromise: Let a judge decide if the letters they received from the Administration asking for their help show that the government was really after terrorist suspects and not innocent Americans. Pelosi's negotiators felt that was a significant concession. The California district judge who will make the decision in such cases has been sympathetic to some of the civil libertarians' claims. And an adverse decision can be appealed to the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The telecoms are casting it as a victory, and Pelosi's aides acknowledge the telecoms are likely to win immunity in court. But they're getting less than they would have in a Senate version of the bill, and they will hardly have a free ride once litigation and lobbying fees have been added up.
This is false from start to finish...The court most certainly does not decide if the Government letters to telecoms "show that the government was really after terrorist suspects and not innocent Americans." To the contrary, the judge is barred from examining the real reasons this spying occurred. The judge has only one role: dismiss the lawsuits as long as the Attorney General--Bush's Attorney General--claims that the spying was "designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack." The court is barred from examining whether that's true or whether there is evidence to support that claim. It's totally irrelevant whether the Judge is favorable to "civil libertarians' claims" or not since he's required to dismiss the lawsuits the minute the Attorney General utters the magic words, and he's prohibited from inquiring as to whether the Attorney General's statements about the purpose of the spying are true. That's why Rep. Blunt dismissed the whole process as nothing more than a "formality"--because it compels the court to dismiss the lawsuits and bars it from engaging in the inquiry which [TIME] falsely assures [its] readers the judge will undertake.
As for the notion that telecoms will have "hardly had a free ride" from breaking our spying laws because they had to pays fees to lobbyists to get Congress to write an amnesty law for them, and incurred some lawyers fees in the resulting lawsuits, that's really almost too extraordinary for words. The amount of fees the telecoms incurred is less than pocket change. And in return, they are having the Congress pass a law with no purpose other than to compel dismissal of lawsuits brought against them by their customers for breaking the law. But in today's America, it's considered a real burden--an unjust plight--when put-upon high government officials such as Lewis Libby and terribly-burdened huge corporations such as AT&T have to incur some fees in order to win extraordinary government protection from consequences after they get caught deliberately and continuously breaking numerous federal laws. It's touching to see the Time Warner Corporation express such empathy for the tribulations of AT&T and Verizon through its media organs.
Finally, we have [TIME's] explanation as to why Pelosi and the House leadership did what they did:
Stonewalling the Administration and letting the surveillance powers expire could have cost the Democrats swing seats they won in 2006 as well as new ones they have a chance to steal from Republicans this November. "For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue," says a top Pelosi aide, who estimates that as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it...Pelosi's centrist compromise doesn't just help House Democrats in the fall. It also gives the party's presumptive nominee for President, Barack Obama, a chance to move to the center on national security. "Given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay," Obama said in a statement Friday. "So I support the compromise."
The very idea that Democrats would lose elections if they didn't support this bill is false on numerous levels. They could have easily removed the issue simply by voting to extend the PAA orders for 6-9 months. More importantly, Karl Rove's central strategy in the 2006 midterm election was to use FISA and torture to depict the Democrats as being Weak on Terrorism, and the Democrats crushed the Republicans and took over both houses of Congress. Pelosi's claim that they support extremist Bush policies in order to avoid election losses in "swing districts" is dubious in the extreme--an excuse to feed to Democratic voters to justify their complicity in these matters...What the Democratic leadership is saying is quite clear: we will continue to trample on the Constitution and support endless expansions of the surveillance state because that is how we'll win in swing districts and expand our Congressional majority (Hunter at Daily Kos...has
one of the clearest statements on why this bill is so abominable). The only objective of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer is to have a 50-seat majority rather than a 35-seat majority, and if enabling the Bush administration's lawbreaking and demolishing core constitutional protections can assist somewhat with that goal, then that it what they will do. That's what they are saying all but explicitly here.
Obama's support for the FISA "compromise"
salon.com, June 21
In the past 24 hours, specifically beginning with the moment Barack Obama announced that he now supports the Cheney/Rockefeller/Hoyer House bill, there have magically arisen--in places where one would never have expected to find them--all sorts of claims about why this FISA "compromise" isn't really so bad after all...Accompanying those claims are a whole array of factually false statements about the bill, deployed in service of defending Obama's indefensible--and deeply unprincipled--support for this "compromise." Numerous individuals stepped forward to assure us that there was only one small bad part of this bill--the part which immunizes lawbreaking telecoms--and since Obama says that he opposes that part, there is no basis for criticizing him for what he did.
...It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts. The ACLU
specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President's power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it "fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home" because "the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power." Rep. Rush Holt--who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers--condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the "bad guys" in the very people who do the spying.
This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism--"you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe"--and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here. Last night, Greg Sargent wrote that the most infuriating aspect of what Obama did here "is that since the outset of the campaign he's seemed absolutely dead serious about changing the way foreign policy is discussed and argued about in this country"; that Obama's "candidacy has long seemed to embody a conviction that Democrats can win arguments with Republicans about national security--that if Dems stick to a set of core principles, and forcefully argue for them without blinking, they can and will persuade people that, simply put, they are right and Republicans are wrong"; and that "this time, he abandoned that premise," even though "if there were ever anything that would have tested his operating premise throughout this campaign--that you can win arguments with Republicans about national security--it was this legislation..."
...Making matters worse still, what Obama did yesterday is in clear tension with
an emphatic promise that he made just months ago...Obama's spokesman, Bill Burton, back in in September, vowed that Obama would "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."...You can email Burton (
bburton@barackobama.com) to demand that Obama comply with his commitment not just to vote against, but to filibuster, telecom amnesty. (Incidentally, Chris Dodd made an identical promise when he was running for President, prompting the support of hundreds of thousands of new contributors, and he ought to be held to his promise as well.)
...The excuse that we must sit by quietly and allow him to do these things with no opposition so that he can win is itself a corrupted and self-destructive mentality. That mindset has no end. Once he's elected, it will transform into: "It's vital that Obama keeps his majority in Congress so you have to keep quiet until after the 2010 midterms," after which it will be: "It's vital that Obama is re-elected so you have to keep quiet until after 2012," at which point the process will repeat itself from the first step. Quite plainly, those are excuses to justify mindless devotion, not genuine political strategies. Having said all of that, the other extreme--declaring that Obama is now Evil Incarnate, no better than John McCain, etc. etc.--is no better. Obama is a politician running for political office, driven by all the standard, pedestrian impulses of most other people who seek and crave political power. It's nothing more or less than that...Whether you think he is engaging in them out of justifiable political calculation or some barren quest for power doesn't much matter. Either way, no good comes from lending uncritical support to a political leader, or cheering them on when they do bad and destructive things, or using twisted rationalizations to justify their full-scale assault on your core political values. The overriding lesson of the last seven years is that political figures, more than they need anything else, need checks and limits. That is just as important to keep in mind--probably more so--when you love or revere a political leader as it is when you detest one.[/q]
What is with you?
