Same Shit

The Patriot apologizes for the dearth of postings of late but what with a heavy travel schedule, the Zalewski family reunion and a bout with spoiled mayonnaise there has been precious little time to rant and rage about the sorry state of the union. The Times had a story yesterday about Bush signing a law which provided a broad expansion of the warrantless wiretap program. The law was largely authored by the White House and somehow made its way through a democratically controlled Congress without too much hand wringing or public comment.

Previously, under the FISA Courts (set up by the Dems in the late 1970s), a secret Court reviewed evidence and issued warrants to various agencies authorizing wiretapping of American citizens where the national security was ostensibly at risk. Essentially a rubber-stamp for the FBI, FISA rarely declined to issue a warrant where one was requested by the Justice Department. Under the new law, provided that the government is targeting a foreigner talking to a US citizen, no warrant is needed.

The new law expands the eavesdropping powers Bush claimed he had the right to exercise with his Terrorist Surveillance Program in two major ways. First, the law requires telecommunications companies to make their facilities available for government wiretaps, and it grants them immunity from lawsuits for complying. Second, Bush has said his original surveillance program was restricted to calls and e-mails involving a suspected terrorist, but the new law has no such limit. Instead, it allows executive-branch agencies to conduct oversight-free surveillance of all international calls and e-mails, including those with Americans on the line, with the sole requirement that the intelligence-gathering is "directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." There is no requirement that either caller be a suspected terrorist, spy, or criminal. Government officials are apparently unhappy that details of the wiretapping program were leaked to the public. I wonder why?

As Walter Pincus reports in the Washington Post today, "senior government officials" say Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell will design the procedures for using the new surveillance powers Congress has approved and determine whether the administration is complying with them. Doesn’t that make you feel better about the program?

While the Patriot isn’t surprised at this expansion of the secret police’s powers under this fascist administration, he is pissed at the Democrats complicity at bringing the law to the president’s desk. In what has become an all too familiar scenario of the lawmakers putting their own interests over the Country’s, a number of Democrats in the apparently had doubts about the new law but they caved under threats from the president to force congress to stay in session until they created a version of the law to which he could agree. God forbid the Democrats miss their summer vacation. I mean, warrantless wiretapping isn’t that important compared to missing out on a couple of weeks on the Cape.

As Time Grieve noted in Salon’s War Room today, “The authority granted by the surveillance legislation expires after six months, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she wants to see it rewritten even before then. But here's a question: If Democrats in the House and the Senate found it impossible to resist giving the Bush administration surveillance powers it didn't already have, are they really going to be comfortable taking those powers away once Gonzales and McConnell can start claiming -- while keeping the details under seal, of course -- that the new powers are already working to stop terrorist attacks?” Good question. I think I know the answer.