FEAR Unit Returns

I've written a bit over the years about FEAR Unit, the Federal Even-yeared Antiterror Response. It seemed like every time an election came up we'd be bombarded with terror alerts and lurid attack plans. Since the Presidential approval ratings hit the toilet, FEAR Unit has been deployed in non-election years as well, to improve Republican standing and, in one case, to get legislation passed. Jane Harman has blown the whistle on the behind-the-scenes work to get the odious FISA bill through the Congress. It turns out that the Bushies did what they do best - they started a whisper campaign, this one about a major terrorist attack on the US Capitol that turned the Fear Caucus of the Democratic Party to jelly, and allowed the Administration to get the massive surveillance powers they sought.

Republicans and the Bush administration used a 'bogus' terror threat that raised specific fears of an attack on the Capitol to scare lawmakers into adopting a dramatic temporary expansion of the government's spy powers last month, a former top intelligence committee Democrat said Wednesday.

Congress agreed to give President Bush and the nation's intelligence agencies extra authority to spy on Americans just hours before lawmakers left for a month-long recess in August. In the legislative session's final week, news emerged of an impending plot by foreign terrorists to attack the US Capitol, and Republicans pointed to the reports as justification to expand the administration's powers.

"That specific intelligence claim, it turned out, was bogus; the intelligence agencies knew that," Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) said at a forum on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act organized by the Center for American Progress in Washington. However, lawmakers did not learn of the claim's unreliability until "the day" they approved the FISA expansion, she said.

This is unconscionable and clearly should be the biggest news story of the day, if not the year. Let's go through this again: the Bush Administration used talk of a FAKE TERRORIST ATTACK to scare legislators into passing the FISA bill. There can be nothing more disgraceful than to play on those fears.

And honestly, considering that lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have had six years' worth of dealing with this guy and knowing how he operates, it's almost as disgraceful that they fell for it.

After this revelation, if any Democrat votes for re-authorization, they should be drummed right out of the party. Memo to the Democrats: the President is lying to you to get extraordinarily radical new powers. And he's manipulating the intelligence services to frighten you into doing so. And he's continuing to use his minions to do it. Michael McConnell testified the other day that the FISA court got so restrictive that NSA had to get warrants to spy on insurgents in Iraq. Not true:

That sounded dubious to us. Would the FISA Court have really issued such a patently absurd ruling? And it turns out we're not the only ones. FISA expert Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies also finds McConnell's statement dubious.

"It's totally implausible, like the claim about the arrests in Germany. Doesn't NSA have collection capabilities in Iraq? If so, they are totally outside FISA," Martin says. "Even if they're taking the Iraqi insurgent calls off the wire in the U.S. talking to each other, they don't need a court order and no court is going to bar them. Or is it that the NSA is so incompetent that it doesn't know they are Iraqi insurgents talking to each other and they were just blindly searching all traffic, which the court said they weren't allowed to do?"

We asked Ross Feinstein, McConnell's spokesman, to elaborate on his testimony. Feinstein declined, but indicated that McConnell stands by it.

The larger point here is that, if we know that they're lying to obtain the powers, can there be any doubt that they'd also lie about how they'd use them?

Appearing alongside Harman at Wednesday's forum was Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official, who has emerged as a harsh critic of President Bush. Fein noted that FISA grew out of concerns over Nixon administration scandals and revelations that foreign intelligence resources were being abused.

"Unchecked spying invariably leads to abuses in collection for political purposes, not national security purposes," Fein said. The danger inherent in giving Bush -- or any president -- authority to spy on Americans without oversight is that "it will be hijacked to advance a political agenda."

Spread this far and wide. Make sure every Congressperson in America knows about it. Lying about terror is the tactic to serve the prime agenda of this President.