House Passes Changes in Eavesdropping Program
It will come as no great surprise to anyone that the House has passed Bush's amendments to FISA. Bush has not only refused to follow the law regarding FISA, but he has consistently insisted that the FISA law did not need updating, which made his recent insistence that it must be updated as a matter of urgency all the more bizarre.
The legislation makes changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.The new laws will be effective for the next six months, although senior Democratic leaders say that they are not going to wait that long before they propose changes.
There was no indication that lawmakers were responding to new intelligence warnings. Rather, Democrats were responding to administration pleas that a recent secret court ruling had created a legal obstacle in monitoring foreign communications relayed over the Internet.
They also appeared worried about the political repercussions of being perceived as interfering with intelligence gathering. But the disputes were significant enough that they are likely to resurface before the end of the year.
Democrats have expressed concerns that the administration is reaching for powers that go well beyond solving what officials have depicted as narrow technical issues in the current law.
In a statement issued late Saturday, Mr. Bush said he would “sign this legislation as soon as it gets to my desk.” The Senate approved its version of the bill on Friday.
It is fairly astonishing that there has been such a breakdown on matters of national security between the Republicans and the Democrats since 9-11. Here in Britain, the need to confront the terrorist threat is about the one thing that the main parties can agree on.Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Friday that the bill the administration wanted would allow wiretapping without warrants as long as it was “concerning a person abroad.” As a result, Mr. Reyes said, the law could be construed as allowing any search inside the United States as long as the government claimed it “concerned” Al Qaeda.
Democrats said their suspicions had been fueled in part by the White House’s repeated reluctance to ask Congress for technical changes addressing issues that should have been apparent long ago.
In a recent letter to a Republican on the committee, Representative Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, Mr. Reyes noted that Congress had updated the FISA law eight times since the Sept. 11 attacks.
“You repeatedly claim that FISA is woefully outdated,” Mr. Reyes wrote. “Neither you nor the administration raised concerns during consideration of those bills that the statutory changes proposed were inadequate.”
However, the Bush administration's cavalier attitude to the law - Guantanamo Bay, suspension of Habeas Corpus, wiretapping without warrants from FISA etc, - have led to an unavoidable chasm of mistrust. Blair was said to have consulted Cameron and Menzies whenever he proposed any course of action that might have been controversial, knowing that it was important that he kept the other political parties on board. In the United States this has not been possible because Dick Cheney and others have set out, from the first day of the Bush administration, to reclaim powers that they think the executive has given up since the Nixon administration. The Bush administration has been cloaked in secrecy which means, whenever they make this kind of request, no-one is ever taken inside the loop and told exactly why the changes they are demanding are so important. The administration simply make the demand and impugn the patriotism of anyone who asks why they need such vague powers.
This has never been truer than in the past eighteen months when it was leaked that the President has authorised warrantless wiretapping, outside of the rules of FISA, and that he refuses to stop doing so.
Then there is the other matter of any time this administration is asked to account for itself at Congressional committee hearings, it either refuses to send people who have been subpoenaed, or it sends Alberto Gonzales along to lie or to claim a memory loss which is so profound that, in anyone else, would signal the onset of Alzheimer's disease.
The House Democratic leadership had severe reservations about the proposal and an overwhelming majority of Democrats opposed it. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the measure “does violence to the Constitution of the United States.”And that, more than anything else, explains the chasm of mistrust between the Democrats and the Republican party. The current President refers to the Constitution as “just a goddamned piece of paper!” The fact that he has so little respect for this "piece of paper" that he has worn a solemn oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" was always going to lead to a rift between the two main parties.
Giving someone with so little respect for the Constitution the amount of unchecked power that has now been handed to Bush is a grave mistake. And, based on past behaviour, it is a power that he will almost certainly abuse.
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