Hmm, what was the most disturbing part of Joe Lieberman’s appearance on ABC’s “This Week” this morning? It’s a surprisingly tough call.
Was it Lieberman’s reality-be-damned insistence that “the surge is working”? That was certainly disconcerting. Was it Lieberman’s assertion that leading Democrats are weak because they reject a neocon vision of foreign policy? That wasn’t much better.
But the real gem of the morning was Lieberman’s bizarre argument that terrorism in Britain should mean more warrantless domestic surveillance here. (ThinkProgress has a clip.)
“I hope that these terrorist acts in London and England wake us up here in America to stop some of the petty, partisan fighting that’s going on about…electronic surveillance, a lot of which could help stop terrorist attacks against the United States. Some of the fight is ideological. Some of it is just plan mistrust of the administration.
“I hope this week, based on what happened in the United Kingdom, President Bush, the bipartisan leadership of Congress will sit down and say, ‘Hey, let’s cut out the nonsense. We’re fiddling while our enemies are getting ready to attack us. Let’s figure out how to pass a law to modernize this electronic surveillance capacity which was critical.’ […]
“I’m talking about…the so-called FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was adopted in the ’70s. Technology has — both that used by the enemy, the terrorists, and that used by us has improved dramatically. And right now, we’re at a partisan gridlock over the question of whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow e-mail trails of non-American citizens.”
There are more than a handful of errors of fact and judgment here, but let’s stick to the two biggest.
First, Lieberman insists FISA is a generation too old. What he neglects to mention is that FISA has been updated many, many times. FISA may have been passed nearly three decades ago, but it’s been amended repeatedly to adapt to evolving threats and circumstances.
Second, Lieberman seems woefully confused about the nature of the debate. The Bush administration has engaged in electronic surveillance of Americans without warrants or oversight. Congress has requested information about how the program operates, which the administration has refused to provide. To hear Lieberman tell it, there’s a controversy about whether to spy on terrorist suspects. That’s demonstrably false, and the senator surely knows better.
Lieberman wants to “cut out the nonsense.” Good idea. The White House has apparently operated under the impression that FISA is inconvenient, and therefore irrelevant. As Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) noted way back in January 2006, “If [Bush] needs more authority, he just can’t unilaterally decide that that 1978 law is out of date and he will be the guardian of America and he will violate that law. He needs to come back, work with us, work with the courts if he has to, and we will do what we need to do to protect the civil liberties of this country and the national security of this country.”
When Lieberman tells a national television audience that the question is over “whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow e-mail trails of non-American citizens,” he’s either intentionally trying to deceive or he’s embarrassingly confused about the issue at hand.