NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — As Congress prepares to consider extending crucial provisions of the USA Patriot Act, civil liberties groups and some Democratic lawmakers are gearing up to press for sweeping changes to surveillance laws.

Both the House and the Senate are set to hold their first committee hearings this week on whether to reauthorize three sections of the Patriot Act that expire at the end of this year. The provisions expanded the power of the F.B.I. to seize records and to eavesdrop on phone calls in the course of a counterterrorism investigation.

Is this really an “expansion” of power? Or a matter of updating existing powers in order for the F.B.I. to effectively do its job of protecting American lives in wake of 21st century technological advancements?

Laying down a marker ahead of those hearings, a group of senators who support greater privacy protections filed a bill on Thursday that would impose new safeguards on the Patriot Act while tightening restrictions on other surveillance policies. The measure is co-sponsored by nine Democrats and an independent.

The Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE- ain’t that cute?) Act is being introduced by U.S. Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jon Tester (D-MT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT- who might as well carry a “D” by his name).

“Every single member of Congress wants to give our law enforcement and intelligence officials the tools they need to keep Americans safe,” Mr. Feingold said in a statement when filing the bill. “But with the Patriot Act up for reauthorization, we should take this opportunity to fix the flaws in our surveillance laws once and for all.”

Really?! Feingold (and every single member of Congress) wants to give our FBI and CIA the tools they need to keep Americans safe? Is that what he wanted in Oct. 2001 when he alone opposed the Patriot Act? If he had a chance to vote against the entire Patriot Act today, would he do so? 8 years following the events of 9/11, and we have not experienced another such terror attack. How has the Patriot Act not contributed to that success?

One of the witnesses Democrats have invited to testify at both hearings is Suzanne E. Spaulding, who has worked for lawmakers of both parties as a former top staffer on the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

I love when it’s always pointed out that she’s “worked for lawmakers of both parties”, as if that gives her credentials of being down the middle/bipartisan. But on this issue, she has always aligned herself against the Bush Administration on the Patriot Act, FISA, NSA surveillance program.

Mrs. Spaulding said she would urge Congress to tighten restrictions on when the F.B.I. could use the Patriot Act powers.

The rapid build-up of domestic intelligence authorities after the Sept. 11 attacks, she said, had overlooked “important safeguards,” which has resulted “in a greater likelihood at a minimum of the government mistakenly intruding into the privacy of innocent Americans, and at worst having a greater capability of abusing these authorities.”

Still, she acknowledged, the public record contains scant evidence that the F.B.I. has abused its powers under the three expiring Patriot Act sections.

Yet Spaulding and others of her mindset continue to fear-monger a characterization of “abuses”, “spying on AMERICANS (not terrorists)”, “civil rights intrusion”. That’s how they define this.

Republicans invited Kenneth L. Wainstein, a former assistant attorney general for national security for the Bush administration, to testify at both Patriot Act hearings.

“We have to be careful not to limit these tools to the point that they are no longer useful in fast-moving threat investigations,” Mr. Wainstein said. “There is an important place for oversight of national security tools, and that oversight is being exercised by Congress and by the federal judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

The first such provision allows investigators to get “roving wiretap” court orders authorizing them to follow a target who switches phone numbers or phone companies, rather than having to apply for a new warrant each time.

From 2004 to 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation applied for such an order about 140 times, Robert S. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week.

The second such provision allows the F.B.I. to get a court order to seize “any tangible things” deemed relevant to a terrorism investigation — like a business’s customer records, a diary or a computer.

From 2004 to 2009, the bureau used that authority more than 250 times, Mr. Mueller said.

The final provision set to expire is called the “lone wolf” provision. It allows the F.B.I. to get a court order to wiretap a terrorism suspect who is not connected to any foreign terrorist group or foreign government.

Mr. Mueller said this authority had never been used, but the bureau still wanted Congress to extend it.

I wonder if Dennis Kucinich sees that last fact as a reason for scrapping it. 5 years after the enactment of the Patriot Act, the number of searches conducted at libraries under the business records provision was just one, prompting Kucinich to say: “If they haven’t used it, they shouldn’t have any problems with our efforts to get it repealed.”

As Ron Kessler points out, “That was like saying that because a policeman had never used his gun, it should be taken away.” [pg 65, The Terrorist Watch]

Kucinich, btw, was on a FOX morning news show this weekend, crying foul over the timing of arrests made last week to foil a terror plot in NYC, in close proximity of the upcoming debate on the Patriot Act. That accusation is a bit akin to Nancy Pelosi’s smear of the CIA. However, who would engage in political timing and advocacy? Why, the national security-averse NYTimes in 2005:

Before yesterday’s vote, opponents of the legislation rallied around a front page article in Thursday’s New York Times that reported Mr. Bush had secretly lifted certain limits on spying inside the United States. After more than a year holding the story, the paper decided to run it on the day of the Patriot Act vote.

The rhetoric of the Senators who are introducing the JUSTICE Act is one of striking balance between giving law enforcement and intell officials the tools they need on the one hand; while protecting American civil liberties on the other. But are Americans really in danger of being targeted for civil rights abuses and violations under the current Patriot Act?

Many of the proposals under discussion involve small wording shifts whose impact can be difficult to understand, in part because the statutes are extremely technical and some govern technology that is classified.

But in general, civil libertarians and some Democrats have called for changes that would require stronger evidence of meaningful links between a terrorism suspect and the person whom investigators are targeting.

In the same way, some are proposing to use any Patriot Act extension bill to tighten when the F.B.I. may use “national security letters” — administrative subpoenas that allow counterterrorism agents to seize business records without obtaining permission from a judge. Agents use the device tens of thousands of times each year.

The Patriot Act section that expanded the F.B.I.’s power to issue those letters is not expiring, but they have become particularly controversial because the Justice Department’s inspector general issued two reports finding that F.B.I. agents frequently misused the device to obtain bank, credit card and telephone records.

National security letters are similar to grand jury subpoenas, issued in international terrorism and espionage investigations.

Ronald Kessler, The Terrorist Watch, has some things to say regarding this matter, Pg 73-5:

As it turns out, the actual number of national security letters issued by the FBI each year averages around 50,000. While that number may sound like a lot, an investigation of one suspected terrorist may entail issuance of hundreds of national security letters to track down data from each bank account, credit card, cell phone, telephone, e-mail, and Internet account he may have used over time.

~~~

In a later audit, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found minor deficiencies associated with 22 of the 293 national security letters he examined from 2003 to 2005. In some cases, the letters were issued after the authorized investigation period, or an agent had accidentally transposed the digits in a telephone number of a person under investigation.

In about half the cases, the problems were not the fault of the FBI: According to Fine’s report, recipients of the letters sometimes turned over more information than requested or provided information about the wrong phone number. These problems never should have been lumped in with FBI violations.

Mueller brought that up with Fine, who insisted he was right to do so.

Mueller says the reason the FBI did not keep proper track of requests for national security letters is that no separate system had been set up to keep track of them.

~~~

By the time the report came out, Mueller had already taken twelve steps to correct the problems,

~~~

Fine specifically found that the FBI had not intentionally violated any rules. He determined that, with the exception of situations where the recipient made an error, the FBI in most cases had obtained information to which it was, in fact, entitled. He noted the tremendous workload of FBI agents trying to stop the next attack. And he concluded that NSLs have contributed significantly to the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts.

The news accounts either ignored or downplayed these findings. Instead, they played up the story as a massive intrusion into people’s personal lives, suggesting NSLs had something to do with monitoring calls rather than simply obtaining subscriber information associated with telephone numbers and e-mail addresses or obtaining financial records.

The F.B.I and the C.I.A. are not interested in “spying” upon ordinary Americans. They are interested in being able to do their jobs and to do them well, which involves protecting their loved ones and ordinary Americans.

Whose rights were being violated more, those whose phones were tapped by court order or those who died in the 9/11 attacks?
- Ron Kessler, The Terrorist Watch, pg 64

JUSTICE Act 2009 fact sheet:

The Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts (JUSTICE) Act would reform the USA PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act and other surveillance authorities to protect the constitutional rights of Americans while ensuring the government has the powers it needs to fight terrorism and collect intelligence.

Title I – Reasonable Safeguards to Protect the Privacy of Americans’ Records

Sections 101-106 – National Security Letters

The bill rewrites the National Security Letter (NSL) statutes to ensure the FBI can obtain basic information without a court order, but also adds reasonable safeguards to ensure NSLs are only used to obtain records of people who have some connection to terrorism or espionage, and to provide meaningful, constitutionally sound judicial review of NSLs and associated gag orders.

Section 107 – Section 215 Orders

The bill would reauthorize the use of Section 215 business records orders under FISA, but with additional checks and balances to ensure these orders are only used to obtain records of people who have some connection to terrorism or espionage, and to provide meaningful, constitutionally sound judicial review of Section 215 orders and associated gag orders.

Title II – Reasonable Safeguards to Protect the Privacy of Americans’ Homes

Section 201 – “Sneak & Peek” Searches

The bill would retain the Patriot Act’s authorization of “sneak and peek” criminal searches but eliminate the overbroad catch-all provision that allows these secret searches in virtually any criminal case. It would shorten the presumptive time limits for notification, and create a statutory exclusionary rule.

Title III – Reasonable Safeguards to Protect the Privacy of Americans’ Communications

Section 301 – FISA Roving Wiretaps

The bill would reauthorize roving FISA wiretaps, but eliminate the possibility of “John Doe” roving wiretaps that identify neither the person nor the phone to be wiretapped. It would require agents to ascertain the presence of the target of a roving wiretap before beginning surveillance.

Section 302 – Pen Registers and Trap and Trace Devices

The bill would retain the Patriot Act’s expansion of the FISA and criminal pen/trap authorities to cover electronic communications, but would allow pen/traps to be used only to obtain information about people who have some connection to terrorism or espionage. It would impose additional procedural safeguards to serve as a check on these authorities.

Section 303 – Telecommunications Immunity

The bill would repeal the retroactive immunity provision in the FISA Amendments Act.

Section 304 – Bulk Collection

The bill retains the new warrantless authorities in the FISA Amendments Act but would prevent the government from using that law to conduct “bulk collection” of the contents of communications, including all communications between the United States and the rest of the world.

Section 305 – Reverse Targeting

The bill would ensure that the overseas warrantless collection authorities of the FISA Amendments Act are not used as a pretext to target Americans in the U.S.

Section 306 – Use of Unlawfully Obtained Information

The bill would limit the government’s use of information about Americans obtained under FISA Amendments Act procedures that the FISA Court later determines to be unlawful, while giving the court flexibility to allow such information to be used in appropriate cases.

Section 307 – Protections for International Communications of Americans

The bill would amend the FISA Amendments Act to create safeguards for communications not related to terrorism that the government knows have one end in the United States.

Section 308 – Computer Trespass

The bill would guard against abuse of a warrantless surveillance authority in the Patriot Act that allows computer owners who are subject to denial of service attacks or other episodes of hacking to give the government permission to monitor trespassers on their systems.

Title IV – Improvements to Further Congressional and Judicial Oversight

Section 401 – FISA Public Reporting

The bill would require limited additional public reporting on the use of FISA.

Section 402 – Use of FISA Evidence

The bill would apply the Classified Information Procedures Act to the use of FISA evidence in criminal cases, and allow the use of protective orders and other security measures in civil cases, to ensure that courts have discretion to allow litigants access to information where appropriate while still protecting sensitive information.

Section 403 – Nationwide Court Orders

The bill would permit a recipient of a nationwide court order to challenge it either in the district where it was issued or in the district where the recipient is located.

Title V – Improvements to Further Effective, Focused Investigations

Section 501 – Domestic Terrorism

The Patriot Act’s overbroad definition of domestic terrorism could cover acts of civil disobedience by political organizations. The bill would limit the qualifying offenses for domestic terrorism to those that constitute a federal crime of terrorism.

Section 502 – Material Support

The bill would amend the overly broad criminal definition of material support for terrorism by specifying that a person must know or intend the support provided will be used for terrorist activity.

The ambivelent news is that The UK recently managed to convict a group of three terrorists for attempted terrorism:

Airline terror trial: The bomb plot to kill 10,000 people
Three British Muslims have been convicted of planning a series of co-ordinated suicide bomb attacks on transatlantic airliners, which could have killed up to 10,000 people.
By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent
Telegraph.co.uk

The al-Qaeda cell plotted to cause mass murder by detonating home-made liquid explosives on board at least seven passenger flights bound for the US and Canada. The plot had the potential to be three times as deadly as the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

The convictions followed Britain’s largest counter-terrorism operation and two criminal trials which, in total, cost an estimated £60million.

All three men convicted on Monday had been found guilty at an earlier trial last year of conspiracy to murder, but prosecutors said it was vital to secure a conviction on another charge of conspiring to blow up the aircraft in order to prove that the threat to air traffic was genuine.

How, you ask, is this ambivalent news? It took two trials.

Part of the reason is why lawfare (as apposed to war crimes tribunals) is a bad idea.

Western Courts of Law, being primarily concerned with their own citizens, make it very difficult to introduce secret evidence. From a civil liberties point of view, and with regards to one’s own citizens, this is a good thing.

War Crimes Tribunals, charged with enforcing the Customary Laws of Warfare, are more concerned with discouraging violations of the Customary Laws of Warfare and have no bars against secret evidence.

The key to the successful second prosecution of the three terrorists in this case were e-mails electronically intercepted by the National Security Agency. The NSA was, as a matter of policy and law, interested in frustrating the plans of the terrorists while preserving the source of that intelligence.

NSA-Intercepted E-Mails Helped Convict Would-Be Bombers
By Kim Zetter
Wired

The three men convicted in the United Kingdom on Monday of a plot to bomb several transcontinental flights were prosecuted in part using crucial e-mail correspondences intercepted by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to Britain’s Channel 4.

The e-mails, several of which have been reprinted by the BBC and other publications, contained coded messages, according to prosecutors. They were intercepted by the NSA in 2006 but were not included in evidence introduced in a first trial against the three last year.

That trial resulted in the men being convicted of conspiracy to commit murder; but a jury was not convinced that they had planned to use soft drink bottles filled with liquid explosives to blow up seven trans-Atlantic planes — the charge for which they were convicted this week in a second trial.

According to Channel 4, the NSA had previously shown the e-mails to their British counterparts, but refused to let prosecutors use the evidence in the first trial, because the agency didn’t want to tip off an alleged accomplice in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf that his e-mail was being monitored. U.S. intelligence agents said Rauf was al Qaeda’s director of European operations at the time and that the bomb plot was being directed by Rauf and others in Pakistan.

The NSA later changed its mind and allowed the evidence to be introduced in the second trial, which was crucial to getting the jury conviction. Channel 4 suggests the NSA’s change of mind occurred after Rauf, a Briton born of Pakistani parents, was reportedly killed last year by a U.S. drone missile that struck a house where he was staying in northern Pakistan.

Students of history will recognize this as the same dilemma which confronted Prime Minister Churchill when the Allies intercepted German messages presaging the fire bombing of Coventry. The only reason the intelligence was subsequently released in this case was that the source had been eliminated by military action, thus obviating the clear advantages of protecting the source of the intelligence.

Wired’s article continues:

Although British prosecutors were eager to use the e-mails in their second trial against the three plotters, British courts prohibit the use of evidence obtained through interception. So last January, a U.S. court issued warrants directly to Yahoo to hand over the same correspondence.

It’s unclear if the NSA intercepted the messages as they passed through internet nodes based in the U.S. or intercepted them overseas. If the former, it’s possible the interception was part of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program — a surveillance program aimed at intercepting foreign correspondence as it passed through domestic internet switches. Such interception was previously illegal unless conducted with a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. After news stories revealed that the NSA was conducting such surveillance without a warrant, however, Congress legalized such collection activities last year in its passage of the FISA Amendments Act.

(Hat Tip: The Lede)

Hat Tip: Gabriel Malor at Ace’s Place, who comments: “…Democrats wished they hadn’t.”

Glen “Instapundit” Reynolds twigs to the same story via Orrin Kerr at Volokh “…who doubts this story will get the attention it deserves.” Of course not, it doesn’t fit the narrative.

Coming on the heels of Cheney’s FOX News Sunday interview, in which the former Vice President leveled criticism toward the current President that he is increasing America’s vulnerability to terrorism, is an interview by Jake Tapper with the president’s National Security Adviser, Gen. Jim Jones (Ret.). Jones claims that under the Obama Administration, we have been more successful in putting terrorists out of business and in improving international relations:

“This type of radical fundamentalism or terrorism is a threat not only to the United States but to the global community,” Jones said. “The world is coming together on this matter now that President Obama has taken the leadership on it and is approaching it in a slightly different way – actually a radically different way – to discuss things with other rulers to enhance the working relationships with law enforcement agencies – both national and international.”

Jones said that “we are seeing results that indicate more captures, more deaths of radical leaders and a kind of a global coming-together by the fact that this is a threat to not only the United States but to the world at-large and the world is moving toward doing something about it.”

The former Marine General didn’t provide any specific numbers to back up his claim, but he said “there is an increasing trend and I think we seen that in different parts of the world over the last few months for sure.” He added that he was not “making a tally sheet saying we are killing more people, capturing more people than they did — that is not the issue.”

But the numbers are going up, he said. “The numbers of high value targets that we are successfully reaching out to or identifying through good intelligence” from both the CIA and intelligence agencies from US allies has made the difference, he said. “We have better human intelligence; we know where the terrorists are moving. Because of the dialogue and the tone of the dialogue between us and our friends and allies…the trend line against terrorism is positive, and that’s what we want. If we have a positive trend line we have a safer country.”

All this was going on under the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration is an inheritor of those successes, including cooperation amongst foreign nations in the GWoRIT.

Many of the tools and policies put in place in waging the Overseas Contingency Operations are Bush era creations, which President Obama has kept in place in his continuation of “Bush’s War(s)”.

Steve Schippert writes:

Someone is going to point to Pakistan to help him out here, where Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud was finally introduced to the working end of a Hellfire missile.

That’s a load of garbage the instant anyone attempts to take that easy way out. The cooperation within Pakistan has got jack to do with President Obama’s suddenly deft foreign policy prowess nor his wild popularity with global media and resulting coverage – which is to be astutely distinguished from wild popularity among world leaders. Pakistan’s cooperation was being lined up mostly by the Taliban itself, which made its insurgency against the government of Pakistan so bold that the Pakistanis could push it off no longer. They simply had to deal, and have been for the better part of the year.

Predator drone attacks? Those began under President Bush and continue on under President Obama. Under Musharraf and during the Bush tenure, Pakistani authorities handed over to us, Abu Zubaydah and KSM. How have relations improved under Obama’s watch?

The GWoRIT has not been waged ONLY militarily and ONLY in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s been waged globally, with kills and captures of leaders and operatives happening all the time, in 102 different countries, in cooperation with our CIA and FBI and our military. This all happened under President Bush.

Cowboy diplomacy and “go-it-alone” unilateralism? “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists”? America’s standing harmed; we’re hated all over the world….spin and the stuff of talking point mantra myth-perceptions.

“There is no military solution.”

So sick of this strawman! When had the Bush Administration ever claimed its solution to fighting terrorism was strictly a military one? When was its approach to Iraq and Afghanistan ever strictly a military solution?!

Reaching out to the Muslim community? Not exclusively unique to President Obama.

Closing Gitmo? Really?!? Please wake me when it actually happens.

The War in Iraq? President Obama rode in on the coattails of the surge success he opposed and is merely surfing the waves of SOFA, signed under President Bush.

The War in Afghanistan? He’s acting more like Bush, than not.

NSA warrantless wiretaps much criticized under Bush continue under Obama (partial list of plots averted under Bush)….Rendition programs begun under Clinton, leaked under Bush (which did harm our relations by embarrassing allies implicated in cooperation with the Bush Administration on the GWoRIT- but that’s thanks to the NYTimes, USAToday, and WaPo. We just can’t be trusted with keeping secrets), continue under Obama….

Democratic candidate hopeful, Barack Obama, on the campaign trail in January of ‘08:

Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me

by Anne Broache

HANOVER, N.H.–Barack Obama may be leading the Democratic presidential pack in every major poll here, but that didn’t dissuade the Illinois senator from a final early-morning rally with the Facebook generation.

Clearly not content to leave their votes to the whims of online politicking, the Illinois senator stepped onto a stage fashioned in a Dartmouth College gymnasium, pulled an index card from his inside jacket pocket, and launched into a familiar set of talking points centered on what has become a familiar theme for his campaign: change and hope.

“My job this morning is to be so persuasive…that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack,” he told a crowd of about 300 Ivy Leaguers–and, by the looks of it, a handful of locals who managed to gain access to what was supposed to be a students-only event.

For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and “wiretaps without warrants,” he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans’ phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)

It’s hardly a new stance for Obama, who has made similar statements in previous campaign speeches, but mention of the issue in a stump speech, alongside more frequently discussed topics like Iraq and education, may give some clue to his priorities.

In our own Technology Voters’ Guide, when asked whether he supports shielding telecommunications and Internet companies from lawsuits accusing them of illegal spying, Obama gave us a one-word response: “No.”

Some liberal Obama supporters were getting a clue on Iraq and wiretaps during the campaign season; but still, they came out to bat for The One, putting their eggs in the basketcase of “hope” and “change”.

So after campaigning strongly against the Bush playbook, after being sworn in, after receiving security briefs, now that he’s responsible for the consequences of making decisions, what does President Obama do? Adopt from the Bush playbook:

Some are even saying that in Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s:

Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration’s made two deeply troubling arguments.

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.

It’s an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration “invoked a legal tool known as the ’state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.” He was right then, and we’re dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.

Sad as that is, it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

Previously, the Bush Administration has argued that the U.S. possesses “sovereign immunity” from suit for conducting electronic surveillance that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, FISA is only one of several laws that restrict the government’s ability to wiretap. The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Adminstration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.

Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ’s radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama’s own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.

Out-Bushing Bush, the Examiner Editorial describes this as “Warrantless Wiretaps on Steroids”:

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 – introduced by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, and cosponsor Olympia Snowe, R-ME – bypasses all existing privacy laws and allows White House political operatives to tap into any online communication without a warrant, including banking, medical, and business records and personal e-mail conversations. This amounts to warrantless wiretaps on steroids, directed at U.S. citizens instead of foreign terrorists.

The bill gives the Secretary of Commerce and a new national cybersecurity czar power to shut down all Internet transmissions in the event of a yet-to-be defined “cyber emergency.” This is a dangerous power, even for a president who in a 2008 campaign appearance at Dartmouth College harshly criticized Bush for anti-terrorist “wiretaps without warrants,” and promised that if elected he would leave such policies behind.

Perhaps what the hysteria-driven Bush deranged as well as the citizen-critics with reasonable concerns don’t seem to understand is that President Bush kept America safe after 9/11 not by accident, but by design through implementation of such tools as the Patriotic Act and NSA Surveillance program. It’s something that the Constitutional Law professor lecturer turned PotUS perhaps understands as well, now that he is sitting in the big chair, privy to all the national security briefs.

For all the uproar and shrill scaremongering over civil liberties violations, there’s nothing “unprecedented” here:

If you want to see real abuses of civil liberties, read Geoffrey R. Stone’s 2004 book “Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism.” It tells how John Adams jailed a congressman for criticizing his “continual grasp for power.” How Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had the army arrest up to 38,000 civilians suspected of undermining the Union cause. How Woodrow Wilson imprisoned Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs for opposing U.S. entry into World War I. And how Franklin D. Roosevelt consigned 120,000 Japanese Americans to detention camps.

You can also read about how presidents from FDR to Richard Nixon used the FBI to spy on, and occasionally blackmail and harass, their political opponents. The Senate’s Church Committee in 1976 blew the whistle on decades of misconduct, including FBI investigations of such nefarious characters as Eleanor Roosevelt, William O. Douglas, Barry Goldwater and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

All you have to do is recite this litany of excess to realize the absurdity of the cries of impeachment coming from the loonier precincts of the left. Muttering about “slippery slopes” isn’t enough to convince most people that fascism is descending. If the president’s critics want that part of the nation that doesn’t read the Nation to believe that he’s a threat to our freedom, they’d better do more than turn up the level of vituperation. They’d better find some real victims—the Eugene Debses and Martin Luther Kings of the war on terror.

Here is Stephanie Miller on Larry King Live:

LARRY KING, HOST: Nancy, what do you make of hoping for failure. Supposing it worked, and there were maybe some socialistic inclines, but more people went to work and more people had health care? Why would that be bad?

NANCY PFOTENHAUER, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: Well, I think the point is that Rush — and I agree with him wholeheartedly on this — believes these policies are antithetical to the American dream, and absolutely the wrong direction for the economy. I would be delighted to challenge the other two panelists on this one. What he has put together in the so-called stimulus package is an embarrassment. You had Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid writing the bill. You’ve put in 46 billion for 15 programs that OMB already declared ineffective. You have 300 million dollars going for golf carts, for heavens sake. Then turns around and, in a downturn economy, and advocates a tax increase. At the same time, he is making protectionist noises. This is a nasty economic cocktail, and it is going to hurt the American people. And I think that’s what Rush Limbaugh has been trying to underscore. And he is exactly right.

KING: If he fails, Stephanie, that will be good?

STEPHANIE MILLER, LIBERAL TALK RADIO HOST: I guess that is what Nancy and her friends want. As long as you have a place to listen Rush on the radio — if he fails we all fail.

KING: If his policies fail, he fails, right?

MILLER: Exactly. To me that seems treasonous.

~~~

MILLER: Nancy, you are right about one thing. We love this episode of Republican. It’s delightful and it’s not solving any of the serious problems that the country is facing. You know who is it good for? Rush Limbaugh. He loves this attention.

If I could say something tonight that gets me that kind of attention, like maybe Rush Limbaugh should be executed for treason. How about that?

I’m sorry, Rush would be way at the back of any line waiting to get shot for treason. Wanting Obama to fail in turning this country into a Socialist state is one of the most patriotic sentiments I’ve heard on radio in some time. And if he had said the same thing, that those who want Obama’s plan to succeed should be shot for treason he would be strung up by Miller. Par for the course I suppose, inside any description of a liberal is the word hypocrite.

Maybe we should put those in the press, such as James Risen and Eric Lichtblau and who leaked the CIA wiretap program and the SWIFT program in the front of that line to get shot for treason?

One of the best qualities in the man that I will sorely miss is that he never backed down on something he felt was right due to public opinion. He knew we had to finish the Iraqi mess once and for all after 9/11. There was no way we could allow Saddam to thumb his nose at the world, supporting terror, and obtaining WMD, in a post-9/11 world. He knew 13 years of conjoling, begging and pleading was enough. But even then he gave Saddam a chance to stop it. He didn’t just give him a chance to stop the war from happening he went to the UN for help in getting him to comply with a strong resolution. A resolution that any sane leader would have recognized was his last chance:

…in 2002 President Bush bucked the advice of his more hawkish advisers and agreed to take Tony Blair’s advice and seek another U.N. Resolution — was it the 16th or 17th? — against Saddam Hussein. Resolution 1441 passed 15-0. True, the Administration failed to obtain a second resolution, not least because the French reneged on private assurances that it would agree to a second resolution if America obtained the first.

He has done everything in his power to insure that we would not be attacked again. Again, making unpopular decisions, but he never backed down in the face of public opinion because he knew it was the right thing to do. We do not find many politicians like that. It’s a rare quality and the one I will miss sorely.  

He put two great justices onto the Supreme Court in Samuel Alito and John Roberts. Something that will pay dividends for many years to come.

He is leaving a strong alliance with Europe:

This American president will bequeath his successor an alliance with Europe as robust and healthy as at any time in the post-Cold War period.

Pro-American governments are in charge in Paris, a first since 1945, as well as every other major European capital (London, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome) except Madrid. On Russia and China, on terrorism, rogue states and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Europe and America share the strategic diagnosis, if not wholly the cure. A revived NATO leads missions in Afghanistan and the Balkans.

To be sure, Europe hasn’t fallen in love with hard power, and Washington didn’t sign up for unfettered multilateralism. The improved outlook in Iraq, and the Bush administration’s decision to lay off Iran, defused two potential flashpoints late in its term. Even so, recent years have seen a Euro-American rapprochement take hold that silenced shrill predictions of “divorce” or worse in the wake of the Iraq war.

“Trans-Atlantic relations are rather good at the moment,” says a senior European Union foreign policy adviser who requests anonymity and is not inclined to Panglossian views of the alliance. “Better than ever,” adds another, Alar Olljum, who runs the in-house think tank for the European Commission.

Europeans tend to find explanations in altered American behavior. Here “Bush One” is pitted against “Bush Two”: the first term of unilateralism and Iraq and the second of kinder, gentler diplomacy. Condoleezza Rice kicked off the charm offensive with a speech in Paris in early 2005 calling for a fresh start. Europe and America, she said, must together seize “a historic opportunity to shape a global balance of power that favors freedom.” Robert Gates replaced the European bête noire Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

Yet the Bush policy on NATO, the Mideast or other big issues didn’t change significantly from the first to second terms. Europe itself did.

And finally I will leave off with The Anchoress from a post she did in 2007 in response to the Bush bashing from the right, of all places, due to the immigration issue.  One issue I never agreed with the man about. 

Betrayal is such a strong word; did he betray you, really?

• Did he protect us from the reach & province of the International Criminal Court? Yes.
• Did he keep us from the Kyoto mess that is currently tying up Europe? Yes.
• Did he create a workable alternative to Kyoto that other countries have embraced? Yes. Bet you didn’t know that!
• Have US Carbon Emissions decreased on his watch, without Kyoto? Yes.
• Did he submit a comprehensive energy plan that got killed by a weak congress? Yes.
• Has he lowered the deficit ahead of schedule in time of war? Yes. Even the NYTimes admits it!
• Did he cut taxes? Twice? Yes. And yes.
• Did he try to get the cuts made permanent? Yes. Congress dropped that ball.
• Did he stop government funding of EMBRYONIC stem cell research? Yes.
• Has he kept the promises he made as he held a dead cop’s shield before the Joint Houses? Yes.
• Did he go after the Taliban and AlQaeda in Afghanistan barely a month after 9/11? Yes.
• Has he been unflagging in his efforts to subdue terrorism, worldwide? Yes.
• Has be been the consistent voice for human liberty around the globe? Yes.
• After some serious missteps, is the surge working? Yes.
• Has he been a staunch friend to Israel, the only stable democracy in a frantic region? Yes.
• Did he end the farce of world-wide Arafat admiration? Yes
• Did he remove Saddam Hussein, whose state supported terrorists, from power? Yes.
• Did he invade Iraq at a time when the whole world believed Saddam had and “would use” WMD? Yes.
• Did he bring a much-maligned coalition with him? Yes. Some are still there.
• Did he liberate 50,000 people in keeping with the ideals of the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act? Yes.
• Has he inspired the Iraqi people to finally believe enough in freedom to fight AlQaeda with us? YES!
• Has he figured out that a free and engaged Middle East makes America safer? Yes.
• Has he kept you safe since 9/11? So safe that you’ve almost forgotten to fear? Yes.
• Did he remove “the wall” between the CIA and the FBI? Yes.
• Did he go to the UN before invading Iraq? Yes.
• Did he tell the UN that the US would never ask permission to defend herself? Yes.
• Did he inspire Libya to surrender it’s WMD without firing a shot? Yes.
• Did he appoint excellent SCOTUS and Federal Judges to the bench? Yes.
• Did he implement the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program? Yes.
• Did he immediately move to freeze assets and make terror funding more difficult? Yes.
• Did he reform Medicare? Yes.
• Did he reform Social Security to give you more power over your money? He tried. See Congress.
• Did he manage an economy thru recession, terror attack & war w/ consistent gains for over ten quarters? Yes.
• Has he kept unemployment between 5.5% and 4.4% for an impressive period? Yes.
• Does he say what he means and mean what he says? Yes.
• Did he try to address immigration last year, when the houses in his party? Yes.
• Does he support the second amendment? Yes.
• Does he support school vouchers and school choice? Yes.
• Did he sign the ban on Partial Birth Abortion? Yes. It went to court, but he signed it.
• Did he reverse Clinton’s intent to kill Reagan’s pro-life Mexico policy? Yes.
• Did he support the Defense of Marriage Act? Yes. That used to be vitally important to you.
• Did he expand the roles of faith-based organizations in social programs? Yes.
• Did he prosecute the white-collar criminals like Ken Lay who ran riot through the ‘90’s? Yes.
• Has he handled himself with enormous courage, dignity and grace in the face of world/media/hate?
• Is he a man with a creed before he’s anything else? Yes.
• Did he establish Health Savings accounts? Yes.
• Did he have the Border Patrol installing monitoring devices along the borders? Yes.
• Has he made mistakes? Yes. Some undeniable beauts.
• Has he been an imperfect president? Yes.
• Has he spent too much? Probably.
• Has he given you most of what you’ve wanted? Actually, looking at the list…yes!
• Has he dared to disagree with anyone to keep his principles, even you? Yes.

Has he really been your Judas? Has he really betrayed you?

What she said.

He leaves us with a safer country.  A strong country.  A proud country.

Thank you President Bush.  You will be sorely missed.

Job well done!

Should NSA Whistleblower Be Prosecuted?
By Kim Zetter
December 15, 2008 | 9:43:42 PM

Opinions are divided on whether Thomas Tamm, the original source for The New York Times 2005 story on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, should be prosecuted for revealing classified information. Tamm is a former justice department prosecutor.

Seems like a rather clear situation to this former holder of a high level security clearance. The laws on the matter are explained on a regular basis to all who carry such clearances, as are the penalties for compromising such information.

I say charge him with every pertinent and lesser included charge and try him in the FIS court before a jury of his peers: persons currently carrying clearances of the level he held.

Hat Tip: Glenn Reynolds

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party.

Civil-liberties groups were among those outraged that the White House sanctioned the use of harsh intelligence techniques — which some consider torture — by the Central Intelligence Agency, and expanded domestic spy powers. These groups are demanding quick action to reverse these policies.

Former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan, leader of Obama’s intelligence-transition team. Mr. Obama is being advised largely by a group of intelligence professionals, including some who have supported Republicans, and centrist former officials in the Clinton administration. They say he is likely to fill key intelligence posts with pragmatists.

link

EXIT QUESTION: If you voted for Barack Obama in the hopes of a more transparent intelligence gathering administration, do you realize that you’ve just been pwnd?

How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command — every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war — to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
-President Bush in an address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington D.C., September 20, 2001.

While al Qaeda blusters and purports to be planning new attacks, they’ve been getting their asses kicked in, all across the globe. This is especially true in Iraq, where the Iraqi government will begin paying salaries to 51,000 members of the Sons of Iraq, and where al Qaeda lost the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.

Critics of President Bush’s Iraq War venture love to claim that “he took his eye off the ball; we should be in Afghanistan and Pakistan- that’s where al Qaeda is.”; “We let bin Laden get away.” And of course, they also love to point out, “al Qaeda was never in Iraq….until we invaded.”

al Qaeda has had operations in 50 countries, and we’ve killed and captured operatives in 102 different countries since 9/11. Although we have a large, visible, military footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve been engaging al Qaeda all across the globe.

Leaked to today’s NYTimes, which leaks it to the American public, is the following:

November 10, 2008
Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.

Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.

According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.

It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a former senior military official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”

The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.

Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.

The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported.

For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

At the time, American officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy.

Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’ results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed.

But even with the new authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said.

The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, was aborted at the last minute.

Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command hastily put together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky.

Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some in the C.I.A. even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to authorize the mission.

Former military and intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, had pressed for years to win approval for commando missions into Pakistan. But the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington determined that the risks to American troops and the alliance with Pakistan were too great.

Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for General McChrystal, who is now director of the military’s Joint Staff, declined to comment.

The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.

Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.

Negotiations to hammer out the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. and the State Department about the military’s proper role around the world, several administration officials said.

American officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization.

Senior officials of the State Department and the C.I.A. voiced fears that military commandos would encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the C.I.A. had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador’s knowledge or approval.

Mr. Rumsfeld had pushed in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in countries where American commandos had not operated before.

Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.

Several officials said the negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination among the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A., and set a very high standard for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack.

The 2004 order also provided a foundation for the orders that Mr. Bush approved in July allowing the military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20 militants, American officials said.

Administration officials said that Mr. Bush’s approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to sign an order — separate from the 2004 order — that specifically directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the C.I.A., on the Qaeda network and other militant groups linked to it in Pakistan.

Unlike the 2004 order, in which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach, directing the military to work with the C.I.A. to find targets in the tribal areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to be approved by the group of Mr. Bush’s top national security and foreign policy advisers, called the Principals Committee.

Of course, for the critics, this is simply further evidence of “cowboy diplomacy” by the power-usurping Bush regime.

It’s not by accident that we have not been attacked on American soil since September 11, 2001. It is because of President Bush engagement on the War on Terror that we have been kept safe for the last 7 years.

Will President Elect Obama carry the ball passed to him, without fumbling it? I think one of the legacies Bush will leave behind for the next president to be grateful for, are necessary tools set in place to fight terrorism in the 21st century (Patriot Act, NSA Surveillance programs, etc.).

President Bush never took his eyes off the ball. War-critics just never understood the rules of the game.

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold will not filibuster a compromise version of an electronic surveillance program although he thinks it will infringe on U.S. citizens’ civil liberties.

Feingold said he and other Senate opponents won’t try to stop the vote, but they “won’t allow it to pass quickly.”

Instead, Feingold, D-Wis., told an audience at the New America Foundation that he plans to highlight the bill’s flaws in floor speeches. There may be several procedural votes before final passage, he added. Feingold said he and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., met with Senate leader Harry Reid last week to discuss their objections.

That was a day ago. Now today:

This is a deeply flawed bill, which does nothing more than offer retroactive immunity by another name. We strongly urge our colleagues to reject this so-called ‘compromise’ legislation and oppose any efforts to consider this bill in its current form. We will oppose efforts to end debate on this bill as long as it provides retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that may have participated in the President’s warrantless wiretapping program, and as long as it fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

Funny funny funny.

Lets not forget that the Senate passed a similiar bill in February that included immunity 69-29 which then went to the House which vowed to never pass a bill with immunity. They promptly passed a bill with immunity and then sent it back to the Senate.

The Senate tried to get rid of immunity last time but couldn’t get through the filibuster. Now after this flip and flop they somehow think it will pass this time?

Nope….its all a big show for their masters at MoveOn.

We have to wonder how Barack is going to vote on this seeing as how he supported the bill himself a few days ago:

In his most substantive break with the Democratic Party’s base since becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama declared he will support the bill when it comes to a Senate vote, likely next week, despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program of suspected terrorists.

Of course he did add the caveat that he would try his best to strip the immunity out of the bill, which won’t happen, but either way would vote for passage.

Now that the nutty left has been screeching to anyone that would lesson Feingold flipped. Will Obama do the same?

I betting yes on that one.

But I’m also betting he won’t be anywhere near Congress to cast his vote when it does come up. Wouldn’t be politically expedient you see. And if there is one thing we have learned about the messiah, he is your typical politician.

More here.

The entire article by Lance Fairchok at American Thinker is spot-on excellent, and exactly what I was looking for as an answer to this, which surprisingly seemed to get little media traction. However, I’d like to cite the following passage as a lead-in for a different, if not unrelated topic:

Webster defines propaganda as the “spreading of ideas or information to further or damage a cause,” it is also “ideas or allegations spread for such purpose.” The popular connotation of the word is false information, or information used to deceive or mislead. The left uses the word as a negative label for information that does not conform to their view, a tool to demean and discredit, regardless of truth. Their purpose is to dominate what the public sees with their messages and to eliminate contradictory information.

In information warfare, this is called shaping the battle space.

Throughout this war, the military has been inundated with negative press. Damaging leaks were rampant, coming from the Democrats in the Senate and the House, from the CIA and the State Department, even from inside the Pentagon. Every setback was exaggerated in an unrelenting information campaign to shape public perception.

Disinformation from our enemies was accepted without critical analysis by much of the media. Papers worldwide splashed every unsubstantiated negative story they could find. Enemy agents posing as stringers were feeding false stories about American atrocities. Terror attacks were timed for the 24-hour news-cycle. The broadcast media’s mantra for Iraq was “if it bleeds it leads” writ large.

The enemy knew it, and used it.

This relentless media assault frustrated and confounded the military, for whom the lessons of press malfeasance in Vietnam still rankle. How can you prosecute a war against a vicious enemy when your every action may be portrayed as criminal? How can you show success when failure is all Americans are allowed to see and hear? How do you get your message out when the press ignores or alters it? How can you tell the ground truth if no one is there to listen?

This brings us to today’s New York Times piece, written by Scott Shane, which details some of the little known interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. What is shocking (and yet, why shouldn’t we be surprised?) is the disclosure outing of the name of the 9/11 Mastermind’s interrogator:

Mr. Martinez declined to be interviewed; his role was described by colleagues. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A., and a lawyer representing Mr. Martinez asked that he not be named in this article, saying that the former interrogator believed that the use of his name would invade his privacy and might jeopardize his safety. The New York Times, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked undercover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news articles and books, declined the request. (An editors’ note on this issue has been posted on The Times’s Web site at nytimes.com/world.)

What is it about today’s press that has impaired judgment, given aid and comfort to America’s enemies, endangered lives, prolonged the conflict, and sabotaged and undermined anti-terror programs by publishing leaks regarding such things as CIA secret prisons, NSA surveillance program, the SWIFT program? Were 32 frontpage stories on abu Ghraib published in the New York Times really warranted? Did the act itself inflame the Arab world and create more terrorists, or was it the media hype about the abuses, which did so? What about Haditha? Who has done more damage to the war effort? Soldiers on the frontlines to win hearts and minds, protesters out on the streets, politicians back in Washington, or perceptions created and driven by the media in its coverage of the war? The Bush Administration is held accountable for its failures in prosecuting the Iraq battle with zero percent casualties; but where is the media accountability?

There’s a reason for classified information and government secrets, aside from cynical conspiratorial beliefs that our government is up to no good, to remain secret from the public (and consequently, from our enemies). Is it not obvious?

From the editor’s note regarding the NYTimes defending its decision to publish KSM’s interrogator’s name:

The Central Intelligence Agency asked The New York Times not to publish the name of Deuce Martinez, an interrogator who questioned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other high-level Al Qaeda prisoners, saying that to identify Mr. Martinez would invade his privacy and put him at risk of retaliation from terrorists or harassment from critics of the agency.

After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books. The editors judged that the name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.

The Times’s policy is to withhold the name of a news subject only very rarely, most often in the case of victims of sexual assault or intelligence officers operating under cover.

[sarcasm]
Yes, if only he were an “undercover” operative like Valerie Plame Wilson. Then the NY Times would have kept him anonymous. [/sarcasm]

Since I opened this post by citing a passage from Michael Yon’s book I found relevant, let me bookend the post by closing with this passage from Robert Kaplan’s Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, pg 26-27:

Dekryger showed me the book he was reading, Tarawa: The Story of a Battle by Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod. He said that he found the book inspiring. Leafing through it, and reading it carefully at night in the hootch, I discovered that it was like other books popular among marines and soldiers, but which the contemporary media, aside from the military correspondents, were barely aware of. No potboiler, Tarawa was just an old-fashioned sort of book, very much in the tradition of great war reporting as defined by Richard Tregaskis in Guadalcanal Diary, Bing West in The Village, and Harold Moore and Joe Galloway in We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. These books celebrated the sacrifice and heroism of American troops in World War II and Vietnam not because it had been the authors’ intention, but because it was true and happened to be all around them.

~~~

Sherrod, like other correspondents of the era, keeps using the words “we and “our” when referring to the American side, for although a journalist, he was a fellow American living among the troops. Back in Honolulu a week after the battle, he found the naïveté of the home front toward Tarawa “amazing”. The public saw the killing of so many troops in so few days as scandalous. There were rumblings in Congress about an intelligence failure, and vows that such a thing must not happen again. But as Sherrod argues, there was no easy way to win many wars (in fact, eight months later, the first day of fighting on Guam would claim nearly seven hundred marines dead, wounded, or missing). Thus, “to deprecate the Tawara victory was almost to defame the memory of the gallant men who lost their lives achieving it.” He concludes that on Tarawa, in 1943, “there was a more realistic approach to war than there was in the United States.”

A bipartisan deal that clears the way for a sweeping overhaul of domestic wiretapping laws will let telecommunications companies escape lawsuits over the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program, congressional leaders announced Thursday.

The measure could be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives as early as Friday.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, said the bill is “not perfect” but “strikes a sound balance” between intelligence-gathering and court oversight.

It’s not perfect, thats for sure. But it does allow telecom companies to continue assisting the government in keeping tabs on terrorists who communicate with those inside our borders. The WSJ put it this way. This will:

ensure that much of the controversial surveillance operation created by President Bush in secret will outlast his administration.

A counter-terrorist surveillance operation created in secret without the knowledge of the MSM? Gasp! How dare they!

Yes, yes, I know….its the new age of September 10th and all.

But reading through the reports on this deal it appears that it has a bit to satisfy both sides. It has safeguards put in place to prevent abuse of the intelligence gathered on Americans by a review of targeting procedures annually. As far as the telecoms go it appears that they will get immunity prior to this legislation simply by the AG in the court where a lawsuit is pending certifying that the President authorized the surveillance to prevent terrorist attacks and that they were asked to assist in this endeavor.

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline has much more on this subject:

In cases based on surveillance performed since the FISA court became involved, immunity is conferred by a certification by the Attorney General that the surveillance was undertaken pursuant to an appropriate order.

The certification will terminate any litigation against a telecom unless the court finds that it is not supported by substantial evidence provided to the court. In performing its review, the court is limited basically to examining the certification itself, along with relevant court orders or letters to the telecoms requesting assistance. If the Attorney General declares that disclosure of the certification would harm our national security, the court must review the certification and supplemental materials without disclosing them to the other parties.

In prior versions of this legislation, the standard of review with respect to certifications by the Attorney General was “abuse of discretion.” Thus, those who wish to limit the immunity grant can claim a victory of sorts based on the inclusion of a “substantial evidence” standard. In practice, however, the new standard should not be a difficult one to meet. Absent a very liberal, very mischievous judge, a telecom company that deserves immunity should be able to obtain it rather summarily.

Problem is we have tons of very liberal, very mischievous judges on the bench today. But this is better then nothing at all and while its not perfect by any stretch of the imagination it will at least get the surveillance back up and operating to protect this country….which should be priority number one.

Of course the left has a very different set of priorities:

I’ve now just read a copy of the final “compromise” bill. It’s even worse than expected. When you read it, it’s actually hard to believe that the Congress is about to make this into our law. Then again, this is the same Congress that abolished habeas corpus with the Military Commissions Act, and legalized George Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program with the “Protect America Act,” so it shouldn’t be hard to believe at all. Seeing the words in print, though, adds a new dimension to appreciating just how corrupt and repugnant this is

Abolished habeas corpus for those who are not Americans and have waged war on this country?….oh the shame. Warrantless surveillance of terrorists outside of this country calling into this country?…..oh the shame!

Nevermind that our Constitution allows all of those “horrible” acts to occur, and nevermind that those “horrible” acts are just plain common sense tactics to combat this enemy we fight. Nevermind all that when your combating Bushitler….our nations security be damned!

Is he saying that in a time of national crisis, the president should not be permitted to ask the telecoms for assistance that is arguably beyond what is prescribed in a statute?

Is he saying that, contrary to the indication of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, Sen. McCain does not believe the president has authority under Article II of the Constitution to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States unless a federal judge gives permission?

When he says, “there must be clear guidelines for [the telecoms'] participation,” does that mean — even if it is not a precondition for immunity — Sen. McCain believes the telecoms should, as his surrogate Mr. Fish asserted, be subjected to “hearings, real hearings, to find out what actually happened, what harms actually occurred, rather than some sort of sweeping of things under the rug”?

But today the McCains campaign responded and its all good news:

Senator McCain supports the FISA modernization bill passed by the Senate without qualification. He believes no additional steps should be necessary to secure immunity for the telecoms; both the 109th and 110th Congresses have conducted extensive evaluation and examination of this topic and have satisfied the public’s need for appropriate oversight; hearings purportedly designed to ‘get to the bottom of things’ have already occurred; and neither the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Senator McCain has never stated, nor does he believe that telecoms should only receive retroactive immunity in exchange for congressional testimony about their actions. We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

~~~

Senator McCain believes that the Democrats’ reckless delay in passing a FISA modernization bill is unnecessarily risking our national security and dangerously restricts the vital efforts of our intelligence community.

I think the most important part of this statement is his underlying support of the Presidential powers given to him under Article II of the Constitution. Something the Democrats have been fighting against since Bush came into office.

Andy asks one more question tho. Why isn’t McCain hammering this talking point daily?

Why isn’t Sen. McCain leading on this crucial national-security issue?

This is a home-run waiting to happen. The Democrats, deeply in the thrall of the trial lawyers and Leftists who would prefer to see America vulnerable, are opposing commonsense legislation. Even the awful post-Watergate Congress, in its hostility to executive power, understood that foreign intelligence collection should not be managed by federal judges. Yet, the House Democrats’ position holds that if terrorists in Baghdad kidnap a U.S. Marine, we need to get a federal judge’s permission to authorize eavesdropping as those terrorists contact their confederates in Sadr City … or Tehran.

That’s lunacy. But it’s the Obama position. And it is classically symbolic of how the Democrats’ likely standard-bearer views our national security. McCain should be hammering him on this daily.

Meanwhile the legislation sits dormant, at the Democrats behest, and our intelligence gathering capabilities is badly damaged.

The damage to US intelligence gathering has accumulated, and in August will become overwhelming. The FISA court orders which have enabled some intelligence gathering to continue despite the expiration of the earlier bill will themselves expire in August. At that point, Usama bin Laden can begin using pay phones.

So someone needs to be making a stink about it. As Andy stated, Bush really can’t anymore so the only person who can…and who should use it like a hammer over the head of Obama, is McCain:

President Bush has done what he can do, and has admirably held the line against further compromise on our security. But the brute politics are that he cannot lead on surveillance reform anymore.

Only Senator McCain can do that.

Hopefully we will see that soon. The Democrats have shown nothing but allegiance to the trial lawyers on this issue and they are vulnerable to that argument. We need to start hearing that soon.

As a sidenote check out this article on the whole “warrantless wiretapping” debate and why it should not even be called warrantless.

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people’s communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless to constrain the agency’s mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully informed of its activities.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

It isn’t clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency’s work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all.

A number of NSA employees have expressed concerns that the agency may be overstepping its authority by veering into domestic surveillance. And the constitutional question of whether the government can examine such a large array of information without violating an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy “has never really been resolved,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a national-security lawyer who has worked for both parties on Capitol Hill.

NSA officials say the agency’s own investigations remain focused only on foreign threats, but it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between domestic and international communications in a digital era, so they need to sweep up more information.

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city — for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans — the government’s spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.

The information doesn’t generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone’s location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.

Intelligence agencies have used administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI — which don’t need a judge’s signature — to collect and analyze such data, current and former intelligence officials said. If that data provided “reasonable suspicion” that a person, whether foreign or from the U.S., was linked to al Qaeda, intelligence officers could eavesdrop under the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program.

When will the Democrats be happy? When there are so many new Gorelick walls and inept policies, ie the 1978 FISA act, that our intelligence agencies are once again hamstrung from doing their jobs? Who will they blame when those agencies fail to stop a future attack because they did not have access to information the Supreme Court has already ruled they can capture?

Take one guess.

Those same agencies because, well, they just should of figured it all out dammit!

In the year 2008 most of our communications are done electronically. To deny our intelligence agencies the ability to sift through transaction data is just foolish. The emails are not being read, the addresses are. Big difference. A beautiful example given in the report is the airline passenger data. Its analyzed for suspicious patterns like, for example, five completely unrelated people repeatedly flying together. When does a coincidence become much more? And shouldn’t that be something our intelligence agencies look into further?

The report goes into the Supreme Court ruling in 1979 that allows the capture of phone numbers but questions the relevance of it in todays world with such brilliant questions from lawyers like this one:

Ms. Spaulding, the national-security lawyer, said it’s “extremely questionable” to assume Americans don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy for data such as the subject-header of an email or a Web address from an Internet search, because those are more like the content of a communication than a phone number. “These are questions that require discussion and debate,” she said. “This is one of the problems with doing it all in secret.”

Gosh, why in the world would our intelligence agencies want this done in secret? I can’t think of one reason….

Come on!

And no Ms. Spaulding, we do not have an expectation of privacy on web addresses from an internet search or subject lines. If these lawyers and other lefties had their way our intelligence agencies would only.

This is why politicians on both sides of the aisle should piss you off:

Hoyer said in his weekly press conference that he hoped to wrap up work on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; “towards the end of this week or the beginning of next week.”

However, the majority leader acknowledged that there were “still disagreements” within the Democratic caucus over the issue of granting immunity to telecom companies who aided the government in the wiretapping program.

Although Democratic leaders insist they are working feverishly to iron out their differences, one House member – speaking on the condition of anonymity—suggested it could be a long time, if ever, before the bill was brought for a vote.

“A lot of people think the politics of doing nothing on this issue are very good for both sides of the political spectrum,” they said.

Republicans get to beat the Dem’s over the head with their failure to get this thing done while the Democrats don’t piss off their big breadearners….the trial lawyers.

Meanwhile our country’s security is in shatters…..