Will the Democrats Ever Learn?
By Robert Parry
Created Jul 9 2008 - 9:24am
A popular Wa****ngton saying holds that "politics is about the future, not
the past." Regrettably, that often translates into sweeping serious
wrongdoing under the rug in the name of "looking to the future" - a
mistake
the Democrats appear poised to make again in approving a new wiretapping
law.
What infuriates the Democratic "base" and many other Americans about this
"compromise" bill is not only that it grants the President powers beyond
the
narrow technological fixes that were initially cited, but that it
sanctions
a cover-up of George W. Bush's past abuses of power.
If the Democratic leaders push through this legislation, with retroactive
immunity for the telecommunications companies that aided Bush's
warrantless
wiretaps, the one remaining door for discovering the truth about Bush's
program may be slammed shut for good.
Current lawsuits against the telecoms hold out some hope for determining
whether the wiretaps were narrowly targeted against genuine foreign
terrorist threats, as Bush insists, or involved broad data sweeps against
Americans, as some have re****ted.
Because Bush has wrapped the program in layers of secrecy - and permitted
only limited congressional oversight - the House-passed wiretap bill would
leave the American people with no way of knowing for sure what happened.
The Democratic leader****p - now joined by Sen. Barack Obama - seems more
spooked about the risk of getting blamed for another terrorist attack than
in finding the truth and protecting the people's constitutional rights
against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In praising the bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - and Obama - have noted
that it reaffirms that the President must follow the law and that the
secret
court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 must
have
oversight of all wiretaps.
"The President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be
over,"
Obama said in a statement. "It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap
statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear
that the President cannot cir***vent the law and disregard the civil
liberties of the American people."
Right-Wing Theories
But critics dismiss those provisions as little more than fig leafs, since
the FISA law already was the "exclusive" means for the government to
engage
in electronic spying.
Nevertheless, Bush relied on right-wing legal theories asserting his
unlimited powers in wartime to ignore FISA and to authorize warrantless
wiretaps inside the United States of Americans communicating abroad. He
then
lied to the public about what he was doing.
On April 20, 2004, Bush told [1] a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., that warrants
were still required for all wiretaps.
"By the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about
wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order," Bush said.
"Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down
terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
After the New York Times disclosed the warrantless wiretapping program in
December 2005, Bush acknowledged its existence but insisted that the
program
was "limited" to "taking known al-Qaeda numbers - numbers from known
al-Qaeda people - and just trying to find out why the phone calls are
being
made."
In his folksy style, he told an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, on Jan.
11, 2006, that "it seems like to me that if somebody is talking to
al-Qaeda,
we want to know why."
But the program that Bush described could have been accomplished through
warrants under the FISA law, which even lets the government wiretap for 72
hours before going to a secret court for a warrant. Suspicions grew that
Bush's wiretaps were more expansive than he was letting on.
In May 2006, USA Today re****ted that the wiretapping project indeed was
much
more ambitious, with the National Security Agency seeking to establish a
database on phone calls made by tens of millions of Americans.
"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," one person told
USA
Today. The program's goal is "to create a database of every call ever
made"
within the nation's borders, the person said. [USA Today, May 11, 2006
[2]]
In reacting to the USA Today's story, Bush said, "We're not mining or
trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."
But
Bush s didn't define what he meant by "ordinary Americans" nor whether the
data-mining might cover, say, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of
people, just not "millions."
Orwellian Scheme?
Some of the telecom companies mentioned by USA Today - AT&T, Verizon and
BellSouth - disputed parts of the story, leaving widespread uncertainty
about whether the Bush administration was engaged in some Orwellian scheme
that could be used against political enemies or was simply doing its best
to
track foreign terrorists.
There are historical reasons to suspect that the administration would be
inclined to use such a huge database against its political enemies, as
happened in the 1960s and 1970s.
Then, it had become an article of faith for some government officials that
the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War protests must have been
orchestrated and financed by some international foe of the United States.
Some of the excesses in those investigations, such as the bugging of the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and break-ins targeting Pentagon Papers leaker
Daniel Ellsberg, led to new laws in the 1970s limiting the power of the
Executive.
One of those laws was FISA, which tried to balance the government's
legitimate interest in tracking foreign agents and the citizens'
constitutional right of protection against unreasonable searches.
However, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush asserted "plenary"
-
or unlimited - powers as Commander in Chief and brushed aside legal
requirements that the government obtain a warrant through a special FISA
court before eavesdropping on phone calls inside the United States.
(There also have been questions raised about whether the origins of the
spying program pre-dated 9/11. Court records from the insider-trading
trial
[3] of former Qwest chief executive Joe Nacchio suggest that the Bush
administration's surveillance plan might have dated back to February
2001.)
Accountability?
Rather than simply letting bygones be bygones, the Democratic-controlled
Senate could pair any concessions to the Bush administration on the
wiretap
bill with a requirement for as full a public disclosure about the spying
operation as possible.
One idea surfaced last year when Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania,
suggested that the U.S. government take the place of the telecoms in the
lawsuits, rather than simply grant blanket immunity.
Another possibility would be a blue-ribbon commission to *****s whether
the
Bush administration abused its authority in spying on Americans, with
public
hearings and findings published in a formal re****t that would give the big
picture while protecting legitimate secrets.
Instead, the House-passed bill calls for classified and unclassified
re****ts
written by the administration's inspectors general and forwarded to
Congress
a year from now. The limited unclassified version -- presumably giving a
sketchy outline of Bush's program -- would then be released to the public.
By then, of course, the bill sup****ted by the Democratic leader****p - and
the party's presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. Obama - would have long
since let Bush and the telecom companies off the hook.
If that happens, the precedent set could be that Presidents can do
whatever
they want and then finesse the consequences, escaping any real
accountability. Bush's presidential hubris would have triumphed once more.
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues.
I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an op****tunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are
at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
|
