The White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has always been something of a joke. The panel was created on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, which encouraged the administration to have an internal panel to watch for civil liberties violations.
Grudgingly, the White House agreed to establish the board, but then waited a year before actually appointing any members. Then, when Bush named his “bipartisan” choices, he picked Dems like Lanny Davis, an enthusiastic Lieberman ally. Last week, we learned that the Bush gang wouldn’t even let the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report to Congress without first vetting the panel’s report.
The Bush administration made more than 200 revisions to the first report of a civilian board that oversees government protection of personal privacy, including the deletion of a passage on anti-terrorism programs that intelligence officials deemed “potentially problematic” intrusions on civil liberties, according to a draft of the report obtained by The Washington Post. […]
“I think that kind of involvement does a disservice to any notion of independence by the board and therefore subtracts greatly from the necessary independence that would give the board credibility,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, which recommended the creation of the privacy board.
It’s the typical White House whitewash. It wasn’t enough that the president hand-picked the panel’s members, and it wasn’t enough to limit the board’s access — the Bush gang had to use its trusted editing pen to remove any suggestion that they might be doing something wrong.
To his credit, Lanny Davis responded to this by resigning. That’s clearly the right call, but I have to wonder, what did Davis expect?
Consider this description of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s power.
The board can’t demand documents; it can’t force bureaucrats who actually implement the program — and who might be aware of malfeasance — to speak with them under oath. Instead, its sole and complete authority is to take the administration at its word.
So it couldn’t have surprised anyone when the White House made over 200 changes, most of them deletions, from the panel’s report to Congress. In one of several examples, the White House objected to a stated plan to review a “material witness statute” used to detain terror suspects for lengthy periods of time without charging them with any crimes.
When Davis protested the attempted deletions, he said the board was told that the White House lawyers feared that because the material witness law was used by U.S. attorneys, a new probe of that issue would become a part of the larger controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys.
“I found this reason to be inappropriate — and emblematic of the sincere view, with which I strongly disagreed, of at least some administration officials and a majority of the Board that the Board was wholly part of the White House staff and political structure, rather than an independent oversight entity,” Davis wrote in his letter.
Mr. Davis, if you’re reading, in all sincerity and with all due respect, “Duh.”