[NYTr] Bush: Burn the Constitution and Protect Amerikkka!

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

World Socialist Web Site - Sep 22, 2007
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/sep2007/spy-s22.shtml

Bush calls for expansion of “Protect America” spy bill

By Kate Randall

President Bush appeared Wednesday at the National Security Agency’s
(NSA) headquarters to call on Congress to make permanent and expand
provisions of the “Protect America Act of 2007.” The bill—passed with
bipartisan support in August just prior to the Congressional
recess—grants vast powers to the government to carry out spying against
the population of the US and the world.

Speaking at the NSA’s National Threat Operations Center in Fort Meade,
Maryland, Bush argued, “Without these tools, it will be harder to
figure out what our enemies are doing to train, recruit and infiltrate
operatives into America.” Under the act’s provisions, the government
can conduct warrantless wiretapping of electronic communications so
long as one end of the communication is “reasonably believed to be
located outside the United States.”

The law amends the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),
which governs surveillance of domestic communications. Before its
passage, agencies such as the NSA and CIA had been required to obtain a
warrant from a special FISA court. The government can now carry out
such warrantless wiretapping for up to a year following certification
from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence
(DNI).

The vague provisions of the law would allow the government discretion
to monitor, without a warrant, the electronic communications of US
citizens, effectively violating the ban on “unreasonable searches and
seizures” inscribed in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.

The Democrats provided the votes necessary to ensure the bill’s passage
in August, following a high-pressure campaign by the White House that
branded anyone opposed to the bill as “soft on terror.” The only token
concession made by the Bush officials was a “sunset provision” that
called for the law to expire in six months, on February 1, 2008. The
Bush administration has waited less than two months to resume its
campaign to make the law permanent and expand it.

“The threat from Al Qaeda is not going to expire in 135 days,” Bush
said on Wednesday. Joined by Vice President Dick Cheney and National
Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, he argued that retroactive
immunity should be extended to telecommunications companies that may
have helped the government conduct spying prior to January 2007 without
a court order.

“It’s particularly important,” Bush said, “for Congress to provide
meaningful liability protection to those companies now facing
multibillion-dollar lawsuits only because they are believed to have
assisted in efforts to defend our nation, following the 9/11 attacks.”

DNI McConnell testified before Congress on Thursday, reprising his role
as the administration’s chief proponent of the legislation. Appearing
before the House Intelligence Committee, he argued that even the public
debate of these provisions had compromised their effectiveness in the
“war on terror.” He said that Congressional examination of the laws
governing FISA ran counter to established precedents, according to
which “intelligence business is conducted in secret.”

“It’s conducted in secret for a reason,” McConnell said. “You
compromise sources and methods, and what this debate has allowed those
who wish us harm to do is to understand significantly more about how we
were targeting their communications.”

Asked by Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (Democrat, California) whether he thought
questioning by Congress of the Bush administration’s intelligence
program would lead to the killing of Americans, he replied, “Yes,
ma’am, I do.”

McConnell also repeated his claim that before passage of the latest
bill the NSA had been forced in one case to wait 12 hours for a
court-approved warrant to listen to phone conversations between Iraqi
insurgents holding American soldiers hostage, because the
communications were routed through US systems. In 2006, in fact, 2,176
of 2,181 wiretapping applications were approved by FISA judges, often
in minutes after only an oral briefing.

When the “Protect America” bill was passed in late-night sessions
before the August recess, 16 Democrats were among the 60 members in the
Senate voting for the bill. In the House, 41 Democrats joined the 186
Republicans voting in favor. There is every reason to believe this time
around that Congressional Democrats will provide the necessary votes to
see that the domestic spying bill does not expire.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid commented on Bush’s speech, “The
Democratic Congress will pass legislation to strengthen the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, while also respecting the privacy of
law-abiding Americans.” He added, “Neither the White House nor
congressional Republicans should use this process to create a political
wedge issue.” In other words, while making some protestations against
the Bush administration’s assault on democratic rights, they are in
agreement with the aims and methods of the “war on terror,” and fear
above all being seen as weak on the issue.

The Democrats’ actions follow a familiar pattern. Before the vote in
August, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi charged that the legislation “does
violence to the Constitution of the United States.” While the rules of
the House of Representatives stipulate that the majority party controls
the schedule of votes, Pelosi did not exercise this right to delay a
vote or kill it outright.

Within days of the measure’s passage, Pelosi sent a letter to Democrats
Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep.
Silvestre Reyes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, calling
on them to come up with a new bill that “responds comprehensively to
the administration’s proposal while addressing the many deficiencies”
in the approved law.

While a Conyers representative commented at the time that the chairman
“will want to move swiftly on introducing and moving the legislation in
September,” no such initiative has been forthcoming.

In voting Wednesday on another issue of grave concern to civil
liberties, a proposal that would have granted habeas corpus rights to
detainees, including those at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, failed in the
Senate. Six Republicans joined with 50 Democrats in an effort to stop a
Republican filibuster and bring the measure to a vote, four fewer than
needed.

The proposal, backed by Patrick Leahy (Democrat, Vermont), chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Arlen Specter (Republican,
Pennsylvania), would have amended the Military Commissions Act of 2006,
which stripped detainees of their right to appeal their detention in
federal court.

Leahy argued promoting the measure, “Casting aside the time-honored
protection of habeas corpus make us more vulnerable as a nation because
it leads us away from our core American values and calls into question
our historic role as a defender of human rights around the world.”

The elimination of the habeas corpus rights of any non-citizen seized
by the US government and imprisoned as an “unlawful enemy combatant”
was the most sweeping change of the 2006 legislation. The act also
authorized CIA interrogations of prisons using methods not permitted by
the Geneva Conventions, retroactively legalizing the torture committed
by CIA operatives from 2001 to 2005.

Passed in the lead-up to the 2006 mid-term elections, the White House
and Congressional Republicans sought to smear any Democrats who voted
against the bill as abettors of terrorism.

House speaker at the time, Dennis Hastert, denounced the Democrats’
slightly watered-down version of the bill, saying, “The Democratic plan
would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent
Americans’ lives.” Within minutes of the signing of the bill, a
Republican National Committee press release blared, “Democrats Would
Let Terrorists Free.”

In the end, the Democrats provided the votes necessary to secure the
legislation’s passage, signaling their agreement with the framework of
the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” in which basic democratic
rights and civil liberties must be sacrificed in an indefinite war in
defense of US imperialist interests.

These views are at odds with those of the majority of Americans. Within
weeks of the passage of the Military Commissions Act, the Democrats
regained a majority in Congress, largely on the wake of growing
opposition within the US population to the wars and occupations in Iraq
and Afghanistan.