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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (21344)	8/6/2007 11:38:59 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Democrats pretend to be serious about intelligence. Friday, August 3, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT Imagine this scenario: U.S. intelligence against al Qaeda has declined by two-thirds because of court restrictions, and President Hillary Rodham Clinton is asking Congress to fix the problem. But Senate Republicans refuse to cooperate until the White House turns over executive branch documents, and because they won't protect phone companies from lawsuits for cooperating on the wiretaps. Do you think President Clinton would be denouncing Congress? Or that there might be a political uproar? Or that the press corps would assail Republicans for endangering national security? Yet this is precisely what is now happening in Washington--albeit with the political party roles reversed--and almost nobody seems to care. President Bush is mum while his aides beg Congress to do something, and Democrats claim they want to help but keep adding legal roadblocks that would continue to limit U.S. intelligence. The only person showing any alarm is Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, but he's in the minority and so is ignored by the press. As we reported last week, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell has been working behind the scenes for weeks to restore what even Democrats now concede is declining U.S. ability to eavesdrop on terrorists abroad. The phone companies have limited their cooperation due to the risk of lawsuits following the New York Times exposure of the wiretap program in 2005. Mr. Bush's January decision to subject these wiretaps to the supervision of the special FISA court has eroded intelligence even further. In many cases, the National Security Agency now needs a warrant to tap even foreign-to-foreign contacts that happen to be routed through U.S. telephone switches. No wonder Osama bin Laden thinks America is a "weak horse." Our politicians are behaving with all the gravitas of Don Adams listening to the phone in his shoe in "Get Smart." Democrats are the worst actors here because they won't even agree to mere six-month legal fix before they leave town this weekend for their August vacation. The White House has already compromised far too much and is only asking for two main temporary changes: Allow foreign-to-foreign calls to be tapped without a warrant. And if Democrats won't give the phone companies retroactive liability protection, then at least give them prospective immunity so they can cooperate from now on. But even this is proving to be too much for Democratic leaders, who are apparently worried more about MoveOn.org than they are about another intelligence failure. They say they want to fix the foreign-to-foreign problem. But they're worried that a suspected foreign terrorist might call someone in the U.S., either a citizen or permanent resident, and so they have been insisting that any wiretap on that terrorist's communications require a warrant from the FISA court. Thus if Ayman al-Zawahiri calls a terror cell in Detroit to give the green light for an operation, the NSA had better get a warrant before it listens in. Warrants for wiretaps on such calls originating overseas have never been required on FISA, for the obvious reason that foreign enemies don't deserve the same due process protections as U.S. citizens. What Democrats are seeking is an entirely new restriction on the executive branch's ability to gather intelligence during wartime. By our deadline yesterday evening, Democrats were also still insisting on limiting warrantless wiretaps to known "foreign terrorists." Admiral McConnell, the DNI, wants to be able to listen in to the larger universe of "foreign targets" as well, because America's enemies include state actors and others who may not be terrorists or linked to al Qaeda. In other words, Democrats want the NSA to get a warrant even to listen to, say, North Korean spies. And all of this, keep in mind, would only be for a six-month fix. If Mr. Bush wants a permanent fix for the next President, the White House would still have to deal with Democratic demands for documents related to the origins of the warrantless wiretap program after 9/11. Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy has been blocking any wiretap compromise until the White House discloses documents that may well be protected under executive privilege. Mr. Leahy's purpose isn't to sort out the right policy but to score partisan points by claiming the Bush Administration has broken the law. Never mind that every President has claimed the Constitutional power to wiretap our enemies without a warrant in the name of national security. This episode is most distressing for what it reveals about the unseriousness of our political class. Democrats so loathe the Bush Administration that they are willing to throw away one of our best weapons in the war against al Qaeda. It's long past time the President stopped pleading with Congress, and started explaining this outrage to the American people opinionjournal.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (21344)	8/9/2007 10:11:48 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

What the terrorist surveillance fight is really all about. Wednesday, August 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT To hear the critics tell it, the warrantless wiretapping law passed by Congress this weekend is an immoral license for a mad President Bush and his spymasters to eavesdrop on all Americans. For those willing to believe such things, mere facts don't matter. But for anyone still amenable to reason, the deal is worth parsing for its national security precedents, good and bad. The next Democratic President might be grateful. The good news is that the new law will at least allow the National Security Agency to monitor terrorist communications again. That ability has been severely limited since January, when Mr. Bush agreed to put the wiretap program under the supervision of a special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The new law provides a six-month fix to the outdated FISA provision that had defined even foreign-to-foreign calls as subject to a U.S. judicial warrant. The first duty of Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell is to prevent the next terrorist attack, and it's disgraceful that some have vilified him for trying to revive our intelligence ability in that cause. His effort has been no different, and no less honorable, than a general arguing for more troops. But it's important to understand for the debate ahead why all of this has become so ferociously controversial. Opposition from the Democratic left to this intelligence program isn't merely part of the partisan blood feud against a weak President near the end of his term. It is part of a far larger ideological campaign to erode Presidential war powers. Goaded by the ACLU and much of the press corps, many Democrats want to use the courts and lawsuits to restrict Mr. Bush and future Presidents in their ability to gather intelligence in the war on terror. For a flavor of this strategy, spend a few minutes on the ACLU's Web site. In that regard, even the weekend deal is far from encouraging. For example, the new law does not offer explicit liability protection for telecom companies that cooperate with the wiretap program. Instead, the most Democrats would accept is language to "compel" the cooperation of these companies going forward. The Administration hope is that this "I had no choice" claim will be an adequate defense against future lawsuits, but in the U.S. tort lottery that is no sure thing. Meantime, Democrats blocked any retroactive liability protection for companies that thought they were doing their patriotic duty by cooperating with the National Security Agency after 9/11. The goal here isn't merely to open another rich target for the tort bar. It is to use lawsuits to raise the costs for private actors of cooperating with the executive branch. Even if they lose at the ballot box or in Congress, these antiwar activists still might be able to hamstring the executive via the courts. That's also the explicit strategy in trying to expand the reach of the special FISA court to all wiretaps, foreign and domestic. The left is howling that the NSA will no longer need a FISA warrant for each wiretap (of which there were 2,176 in 2006). That's the best part of the bill. But the Administration did concede to let FISA judges review the procedures for wiretapping up to 120 days after the fact. If a judge objects, the wiretapping can at least continue, pending appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. This is the kind of review that judges are neither allowed to perform under the Constitution, nor equipped to provide as a matter of policy. Whatever the merits of the 1978 FISA law, no Administration has ever conceded that that law trumped a President's power to make exceptions to FISA if national security requires it. To do so would be a direct infringement on the President's Article II powers as Commander in Chief to protect the nation against its enemies. The courts have been explicit about this, with the FISA appellate court asserting in a 2002 opinion (In Re: Sealed Case) that "we take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power." FISA established a process by which certain domestic wiretaps in the context of the Cold War could be approved, not a limit on what wiretaps were ever allowed. In the weekend deal, the Bush Administration grants the FISA court power to review procedures even for foreign communications, which is unprecedented. Under Article III of the Constitution, the courts are granted the power to settle disputes. The judiciary also has power under the Fourth Amendment, which gives courts the ability to issue warrants. But nowhere does the Constitution empower our nation's judges to serve as foreign policy advisers or reviewers of intelligence policy. Judges have no particular expertise on intelligence, and in any case they are unaccountable to voters if their decisions are faulty. Recent news reports have suggested that several current FISA judges are uncomfortable with making such intelligence decisions, and rightly so. As for the possibility that Presidents will abuse this power, fear of exposure is an even more powerful disincentive than legal constraint. The political costs of being seen as spying on Americans for partisan ends would be tremendous. Congress, on the other hand, is only too happy to use the courts to squeeze executive power, in part because this allows the Members to dodge responsibility themselves. If there's another terror attack, the President still gets the blame even if some unelected judge refused a warrant. Congress can blame everyone else. This is a statutory version of Senator Jay Rockefeller's famous decision to write a letter to Dick Cheney objecting to the warrantless wiretap program after he'd been briefed on it, but then sticking the letter (literally) in a drawer. Only after the program was exposed did he unearth the letter to show he'd objected all along, though he'd done nothing at all to stop it. The weekend law expires in six months, and it would be nice to think enough Democrats would put aside this ideological obsession to work with Mr. Bush on a more permanent wiretap statute. Given the current state of Beltway rationality, we aren't optimistic. As negotiations unfold, we hope the President resists any deal that compromises the ability of his successors to defend the country. In 18 months, Mr. Bush will be leaving office, but the terrorist threat will continue. The stakes are too large for any President to accept new judicial limitations on his ability to track terrorists at home or abroad. Rather than accept such limits, Mr. Bush could use Congressional recalcitrance as an opportunity to withdraw the terrorist surveillance program from FISA authority, and thus toss the issue squarely in the middle of the 2008 Presidential campaign. opinionjournal.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (21344)	1/17/2008 9:29:22 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Fired Prosecutor Calls for One More Dismissal Evan Perez reports on the Justice Department It was just over a year ago that the Justice Department’s little project to send some U.S. attorneys packing went terribly awry. The prosecutor firings grew into a massive scandal that brought down Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who resigned after failing to shake allegations that he let politics seep into department dealings. Others involved have left too, and new management has tried to put the scandal to rest. But Bud Cummins, the former top federal prosecutor in Little Rock, Ark., and the first U.S. attorney to get the ax, says the housecleaning is not yet complete. In an opinion piece published in Washington Monthly, Cummins takes aim at Brian Roehrkasse, the department’s director of public affairs, who received a promotion after the departure of his predecessor, Tasia Scolinos. Cummins says that Roehrkasse “did more than perhaps any other DOJ official to disseminate the avalanche of untruths.” He calls on new Attorney General Michael Mukasey to finish the clean-up work by “telling Brian Roehrkasse to find a position more suited to his abilities. Hollywood, I suspect, awaits him.” Asked for a response, Roehrkasse said: “I’ve always strived to provide truth and accuracy in my statements based on the best information available to me.” blogs.wsj.com