The White House has every reason to be pleased with the results of the latest “debate” over surveillance powers in Congress. Bush wanted sweeping new powers to spy on Americans without court orders or oversight, and at least for the next six months, lawmakers delivered.
Now, from the Bush gang’s perspective, there’s an easy spin: these changes were absolutely necessary and will keep the U.S. safe. It’s not an accurate argument, but at least it’s a coherent argument. People need to give up for civil liberties, in exchange, the president will use his sweeping new powers responsibly. Trust him.
But if that’s the right way to defend the bill, this is the wrong way.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino appeared on Fox and Friends this morning to defend the new law, saying it was the “bare minimum of what Mike McConnell, the DNI, said he needed.”
She added, “And I see today that some people are saying that this is a wild expansion of powers for the president. That could not be further from the truth. Only in a Democratic spin room could they come up with expansion of powers when you have to — when what we actually did was return the law to its original intent.”
Watching Perino say this on national television this morning, she seemed to almost mean it, as if she believed what she was saying. If so, she’s either an excellent actor or she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
First, this doesn’t meet the DNI’s standards for the “bare minimum” he needed to do his job effectively. In fact, he struck a compromise with congressional Democrats that would have given the administration less power — but the White House intervened to scuttle the deal.
Second, this doesn’t “return the law to its original intent”; it does the opposite, taking the law far beyond anything that has existed before. For a change, Hiatt & Co. got this one right.
Administration officials, backed up by their Republican enablers in Congress, argued that they were being dangerously hamstrung in their ability to collect foreign-to-foreign communications by suspected terrorists that happen to transit through the United States. The problem is that while no serious person objects to intercepting foreign-to-foreign communications, what the administration sought — and what it managed to obtain — allows much more than foreign-to-foreign contacts. The government will now be free to intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas) that involve “foreign intelligence” — not just terrorism. It will be able to monitor phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens or residents without warrants — unless the subject is the “primary target” of the surveillance. Instead of having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court ensure that surveillance is being done properly, with monitoring of Americans minimized, that job would be up to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The court’s role is reduced to that of rubber stamp.
This is as reckless as it was unnecessary. Democrats had presented a compromise plan that would have permitted surveillance to proceed, but with court review and an audit by the Justice Department’s inspector general, to be provided to Congress, about how many Americans had been surveilled.
Again, the problem is not just that Perino goes on national television to state obvious falsehoods — I expect that — it’s that she does so with such weak and pathetic lies. Where’s the creativity? Where’s the clever word-parsing? Maybe an evasive non-sequitur or two?
Shameless mendacity I can tolerate, but this is just lazy. It’s as if Perino just isn’t trying anymore. C’mon, Bush gang, I expect better lies than this.