[Osx-nutters] Fwd: 4th Amendment & Dems

[Kevin Callahan]

Alter: I Know What You Did Last Summer

By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek

Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue - I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but  
while everyone was at the beach or "The Simpsons Movie" on the first  
weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment  
to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved "probable  
cause" before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not  
the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It's the  
plain truth of where we've come as a country, at the behest of a  
president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and  
with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know  
better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of  
fear—both physical and political—trumping principle amid the ancient  
tension between personal freedom and national security.

Congress had good reason to amend the 1978 Foreign Intelligence  
Surveillance Act (FISA). After the shift from satellites to fiber- 
optic cable for most international phone calls, the statute was as  
out of date as disco. With Congress, the courts and President Bush  
squabbling over his illegal wiretapping program, the government was  
actually conducting less surveillance of foreign nationals than  
before 9/11, which was crazy. We had to do more listening in,  
especially with scary new intelligence "chatter" suggesting an  
unspecified attack on the U.S. Capitol this summer. Congressional  
sources who attended the late-July classified intel briefings, but  
won't talk about them for the record, say these threats didn't sound  
like spin. After all, we're not talking here about trumped-up Iraqi  
WMD, but Al Qaeda terrorists who have already tried to kill us.

So members of Congress are legitimately afraid that they and their  
families will get blown up this summer. Fair enough. But then they  
lost their heads and sold out the Constitution to cover their  
political rears while keeping the rest of us mostly in the dark. The  
reason we don't know more about what happened is that the United  
States has moved sharply in recent years from legitimate secrecy— 
regarding sources and methods—to the bogus kind the late senator  
Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others warned will wreck democracies. For  
instance, the abstract legal arguments used by the shadowy FISA court  
to strike down Bush's surveillance program are secret. Why? Because  
they might be politically embarrassing.



Here's what we do know. We know that the Democratic leadership  
rightly conceded to Adm. Michael McConnell, the once widely respected  
director of National Intelligence, to allow eavesdropping on  
foreigner-to-foreigner communications routed through American phone  
companies (no biggie; we've always spied on foreigners). We know that  
the Democrats thought they had a deal until McConnell, who is  
supposed to be nonpartisan, went back to the White House and got  
fresh marching orders to squelch reasonable judicial oversight by the  
FISA court. And we know that the administration's new position was  
that the attorney general (the disgraced Alberto Gonzales) should  
have the sole authority to spy without a warrant on any American  
talking to a foreigner, even if it's you and the guy from Mumbai  
fixing your printer.

Then the Democrats said: "Wait a minute! That's unconstitutional!"  
Right? Actually, no, they didn't. Even liberals like Rep. John  
Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, argued in two  
heated, closed-door meetings on Aug. 3 that the Democrats might as  
well cave. Otherwise, they would be pounded during the August recess  
for ignoring national security and destroyed as a party if the  
country were actually attacked. Even though the leadership and 82  
percent of House Democrats voted against the bill, they did not block  
it, delay the recess and hold the Congress in session. The private  
excuse was that the liberal base wouldn't be satisfied no matter what  
they did, and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn't make  
the more conservative Senate go along anyway. Apparently, there's  
always an excuse for leaving for vacation on time.

Afterward, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said publicly that many  
provisions were "unacceptable" and the House would revisit the newly  
signed legislation "as soon as possible." Democrats obtained a sunset  
clause that requires the whole thing to be reauthorized in six  
months. But real damage has been done. At a minimum, we have  
suspended the Fourth Amendment for the time being. Doing so might  
conceivably be excusable if we're likely to catch terrorists this  
way. But with a tiny number of Arabic speakers asked to translate  
thousands of transcripts, there's little chance we'll find a needle  
in the haystack. If our snooping technology were so terrific at  
nabbing bad guys, we'd brag to Al Qaeda about it as a form of  
deterrence instead of keeping it secret. "Secrecy is for losers,"  
Moynihan liked to say, in a time before we began losing freedom and  
security simultaneously.

<URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3672516/site/newsweek/page/0/>

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