Revealed: Spying Abuses 'Systemic' In Recent Months -- Which Is Exactly What the 2008 FISA Law Was Designed to Do

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon. Posted April 16, 2009.

Abolishing eavesdropping safeguards was the central purpose of the FISA bill. It was why Dick Cheney and Michael McConnell were demanding its passage.  Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin at the time wrote:

Most Americans don't realize that the FISA compromise comes in two parts. The first part greatly alters FISA by expanding the executive's ability to wiretap and engage in much broader searches of communications than were permissible under the law before. It essentially gives congressional blessing to some but not all of what the executive was doing under President Bush. President Obama will like having Congress authorize these new powers. He'll like it just fine. People aren't paying as much attention to this part of the bill. But they should, because it will define the law of surveillance going forward. It is where your civil liberties will be defined for the next decade.

But key Democrats [and, needless to say, the GOP minority, which (other than Ron Paul) unanimously supported the bill] ran around spouting pure propaganda, telling the public that they were supporting this new FISA bill because it would safeguard and even enhance civil liberties protections. 

Here is what was said about the bill by the Democrats' House Majority Leader -- who, along with Dick Cheney and Jay Rockefeller, was the key force behind its passage:  "In an interview with Politico on Monday, [Steny] Hoyer called the FISA legislation a 'significant victory' for the Democratic Party — one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens."

Hoyer's claims were echoed immediately by Barack Obama when he announced that he, too, would support the FISA "revisions." Obama said:

Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people . . .

Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future.

And here is the excuse which Time Magazine offered for the Democrats as part of an article mindlessly repeating what was told to them by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

What motivated Pelosi and the Democrats to incur the wrath of their liberal base and allow one of the Administration's most controversial anti-terror policies to be extended? A mix of politics, pragmatism and some significant concessions. ...

Stonewalling the Administration and letting the surveillance powers expire could have cost the Democrats swing seats they won in 2006 as well as new ones they have a chance to steal from Republicans this November. "For any Republican-leaning district this would have been a huge issue," says a top Pelosi aide, who estimates that as many as 10 competitive races could have been affected by it.

The Washington Post Editorial Board -- one of our nation's leading watchdogs over abuses of government power (just ask them and they'll tell you that) -- issued a ringing endorsement of the new bill:

CONGRESSIONAL leaders of both parties should be commended for drafting legislation that brings the country's surveillance laws into the 21st century while protecting civil liberties and preserving important national security prerogatives. The bill is scheduled to be voted on today in the House, and it deserves to pass.

Worst of all, Obama surrogates  -- such as Cass Sunstein, Greg Craig and Nancy Soderberg -- were dispatched to tell people with a straight face that the FISA-gutting bill strengthened civil liberties protections and improved eavesdropping oversight. Needless to say, hordes of trusting Obama supporters immediately seized on that blatantly false assertion ("the bill Obama supports strengthens oversight!") and began reciting it in defense of their candidate. Now, a mere nine months later, The New York Times reports that the bill enabled and caused massive abuses of the NSA's eavesdropping powers. Imagine that: if you gut even the minimal oversight provisions designed to check presidential eavesdropping abuses, abuses will not (as Democrats and Obama surrogates claimed) decrease, but will actually increase substantially. Who could have guessed?

See more stories tagged with: new york times, dick cheney, barack obama, fisa, nsa, jay rockefeller, steny hoyer, eric lichtblau, cass sunstein, national security agency, james risen, greg craig, micheal mcconnell, nancy soderberg

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