It's Not Like There Would Be Anything Noteworthy In Bill Clinton's Email

Well here we go again.

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.

The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

As Rush Holt, one of the few in Congress who seems to know what he's talking about with this program, “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental." In one instance, the NSA accessed Bill Clinton's email:

(An analyst) said he and other analysts were trained to use a secret database, code-named Pinwale, in 2005 that archived foreign and domestic e-mail messages. He said Pinwale allowed N.S.A. analysts to read large volumes of e-mail messages to and from Americans as long as they fell within certain limits — no more than 30 percent of any database search, he recalled being told — and Americans were not explicitly singled out in the searches.

The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.

I'm sure that investigation was completely stringent. And I'm sure that "ban" on explicitly singling out individuals was strictly enforced. Because why would anyone want to know what Bill Clinton's doing?

Don't B.S. us with the fig leaf of "inadvertent overcollection." This happens virtually the same way every time.

Every time new revelations of illegal government spying arise, the same exact pattern repeats itself: (1) euphemisms are invented to obscure its illegality ("overcollection"; "circumvented legal guidelines"; "overstepped its authority"; "improperly obtained"); (2) assurances are issued that it was all strictly unintentional and caused by innocent procedural errors that are now being fixed; (3) the very same members of Congress who abdicate their oversight responsibilities and endlessly endorse expanded surveillance powers in the face of warnings of inevitable abuses (Jay Rockefeller, Dianne Feinstein, "Kit" Bond, Jane Harman) righteously announce how "troubled" they are and vow to hold hearings and take steps to end the abuses, none of which ever materialize; (4) nobody is ever held accountable in any way and no new oversight mechanisms are implemented; (5) Congress endorses new, expanded domestic surveillance powers; and then: (6) new revelations of illegal government spying emerge and the process repeats itself, beginning with step (1).

And if you thought that the Congress or the Justice Department could at least revisit step (5) once step (1) re-occurs over and over again, Attorney General Eric Holder helpfully informs you that telecom immunity and the FISA Amendments Act is settled law, unable to be tweaked or fixed or even investigated. Holder wouldn't even stand by his statement that violating FISA breaks the law - he can't now, because as the Attorney General he would be obligated to act on his words.

FEINGOLD: On another topic, I wrote to the president on Monday about my continued concern that the administration has not formally withdrawn certain legal opinions, including the January 2006 white paper that provided the justification for the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. At the letter was prompted in part by a recent speech that I'm sure you're aware of by the director of national intelligence in which he asserted that the program was not illegal, but he later clarified that.

In a speech to the American Constitutional Society in June 2008, you, sir, set the following. "I never thought that I would see the day when a president would act in direct defiance of federal law by authorizing warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens."

And the president himself also several times as a senator and during the campaign said the program was illegal. Now that you are the attorney general, is there any doubt in your mind that the warrantless wiretapping program was illegal?

HOLDER: Well, I think that the warrantless wiretapping program as it existed at that point was certainly unwise in that it was put together without the approval of Congress and as a result did not have all the protections, all the strength that it might have had behind it, as -- as I think it now exists with regard to having had congressional approval of it. So I think that the concerns that I expressed in that speech no longer exist because of the action that Congress has taken in regard...

FEINGOLD: But I asked you, Mr. Attorney General, not whether it was unwise, but whether you consider it to be an illegal, because that's certainly the implication of what you said in the quote I read and the explicit statement of the man who is now president of the United States.

HOLDER: Yes, well what I was saying in that speech was that I thought the action that the administration had taken was inconsistent with the dictates of -- of FISA, and I think I used the word "contravention," and as a result I thought that the policy was an unwise one. And I think that the concerns that I expressed then have really been remedied by the fact that Congress has now authorized the program.

FEINGOLD: But did you think it was illegal?

HOLDER: Well, I thought that, as I said, it was inconsistent with -- with the FISA statute and unwise as a matter of policy.

And that sound you hear is the soul of Eric Holder breaking.

The rule of law was nice to have around for a while. But it's completely broken and it's not coming back.

Powder Un-Drying?

I agree with emptywheel, John Conyers has kind of had it. He's been in Congress long enough to know how decayed the current one-way relationship between the legislative and executive branches truly is. So after months of wheedling, cajoling, strongly worded letters, even more strongly worded letters, and the like, he's finally starting to understand that jail is probably the only thing that the Bush Administration cronies will respond to. And so he reminded everyone today that there's a jail in the Capitol basement:

Madam Chairwoman, Ranking Member Drier, members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify on two related resolutions: 1) H. Res. 979, the Judiciary Committee’s resolution recommending that the House find White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas duly issued by the Committee, and 2) H. Res. 980, a privileged resolution I introduced today authorizing the Committee to initiate or intervene in civil judicial proceedings to enforce those subpoenas.

Recommending that the House cite someone for contempt of Congress is a step that the Committee, and I as Chairman, take with great reluctance. Unfortunately, it is a step that is clearly necessary to preserve the role and constitutional prerogatives of Congress as an institution, in addition to getting to the bottom of the U.S. Attorney controversy.

The Judiciary Committee voted on July 25 to recommend the contempt resolution because, despite months of effort to secure voluntary compliance, the White House has refused to provide access to crucial information requested by the Committee. In fact, as of today, I have written nine letters over more than eight months trying to resolve this matter. But despite duly issued subpoenas, the White House has determined that it has the unilateral authority to prevent Mr. Bolten from providing us with a single piece of paper and to prevent Ms. Miers from even showing up at a Committee hearing.

If the executive branch can disregard Congressional subpoenas in this way, we no longer have a system of checks and balances. That is the cornerstone of our democracy, and it is our bipartisan responsibility to protect it. As our former colleague, Republican Mickey Edwards, has explained, taking action is crucial in order to defend Congress “as a separate, independent, and completely equal branch of government.”

I'll tell you, when I saw a hint of this in today's New York Times I dismissed it entirely. But I think Conyers finally understands that at stake is the legitimacy of the Congress itself. And as emptywheel notes, he has gone further than just bringing up the contempt citiations, calling on the House Judiciary Committee to intervene in civil lawsuits to force the US Attorney and the Justice Department to enforce the subpoenas. Conyers is trying to go over the head of the Attorney General here, and he has the ability to do it.

This really is a long time coming. I hear that Rahm Emanuel wants to keep the powder dry until after the elections because the Congress could lose in a court fight and would not have the ability to enforce their contempt citations in the future. But an unused weapon never struck anybody. The time to fight this out is now, before the precedent is established that a rogue President can grab whatever power he wants for himself and will face no resistance from the co-equal branches of government. I also agree with Kagro X on this:

And here's another consideration: the contempt vote was last postponed in order to avoid poisoning the atmosphere of "bipartisan cooperation" (cough, cough!) supposedly necessary for the passage of the economic stimulus package. With that out of the way, the stage is apparently set for this more confrontational issue.

But the House is also now wrapped up in the FISA issue, where the pressure is increasing for them to stand firm behind their already-passed RESTORE Act rather than agree to go along with the horrible, Rockefeller-backed betrayal passed by the Senate.

Will the House panic and back off of the contempt vote again, for fear that confrontations on both FISA and contempt at the same time is simply too much to bear? Quite possibly.

Here, it might be time to borrow a page from the White House playbook, and pursue a "flood the zone" strategy. When the White House has multiple outrages to perpetrate (as is so often the case), it does so in overwhelming waves, with no mind paid to pacing or any insistence on decent intervals in between. Indeed, the strategy seems to be to flood the public, the media, and the Democratic opposition with everything it can throw at them, all at once. And each time they've done it, the national media have been for the most part unable (or uninterested) in keeping up. Light five fires at once, and four go relatively unnoticed.

So perhaps it's time to bring out all the grievances against the executive now roiling beneath the surface inside the Congress. Why not deal with contempt at the same time as we (hopefully) fight on FISA? And why not encourage the Senate to add its pending contempt votes to the pile as well? And why not get down to issuing subpoenas aimed at the "administration's" stonewalling on questions surrounding the missing e-mails? The destruction of the torture tapes? The withholding of key documents and testimony by the Department of Education? By NASA? In fact, by virtually every department of the executive branch that's been asked to comply with Congressional oversight over the past several years?

It looks to me like the House may put up a fight on the FISA issue. Note that Speaker Pelosi very clearly lays out that a lapsing of the Protect America Act, which expires on Friday and will not be renewed (the Progressive caucus helped Republicans put a stop to that today), would not mean that any surveillance of foreign targets would stop whatsoever. Seems to me like a great strategy to have all of these fights at once, considering that a public and media distracted by the Presidential race won't take the time to figure it out.

And of course, there's the fact that whatever George Bush is screaming about on the teevee, Democrats who want to be loved by the public should do the exact opposite. Their approval numbers will skyrocket.

My encouragement is to fight. Support Conyers, support the progressives like Rush Holt who want to go back to the original FISA statute, and make Bush and his pals mental. It'll work.

Joke Line, American Idiot

The Joke Line/FISA saga has reached car wreck proportions. It's painful to watch, and yet you can't look away.

To summarize, Klein wrote a pathetic piece for the Time print magazine, delivered to thousands of homes, about the new FISA bill, that included the demonstrable lie that the Democrats' bill would "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans". When he was excoriated for buying Republican spin, he responded that telecom immunity is OK if they responded to direct orders from the President, which describes some different system of government, alien to the United States. Then he wrote this crappy correction wherein he admitted that he doesn't read the content of the subjects on which he reports.

But Klein, of course, never bothered to read the bill and still hasn't (even though he is published by Time to "report on" and opine about this bill). Instead, even now, he says that he has spoken with both Republicans and Democrats, and while Democrats insist that what he wrote was false, "the Republican Committee staff disagrees and says [his] reporting is correct."

In other words, Klein's GOP source(s) blatantly lied to him about what the bill does and doesn't do in order to manipulate him into uncritically feeding Time's readers the Rush Limbaugh Line -- namely, that Democrats are giving equal rights to Terrorists and preventing the Leader from eavesdropping on foreign Terrorists. And Klein dutifully wrote down what he was told in Time without bothering to find out if it was true and without ever bothering to talk to any of the bill's Democratic proponents. And no Time Editor knew enough or cared enough to bother correcting any of it. And thus, the unfortunate 4 million Americans who read and trust Time now think that the Democrats' FISA bill does the exact opposite of what it actually does.

After all of this - being burned by a source, buying Republican spin to repeat a lie - Klein then pulls the all-timer with this quote:

I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right.

So this guy is paid to write about subjects and inform his readers, and he's basically throwing up his hands and saying he really can't figure it out so we should all have pity on him? Incredible. There is no dispute over the meaning of the RESTORE Act. Klein created one in order to hide his blatant falsehoods. And now, when they are revealed, he claims he can't possibly know anything about it. This is the problem with American journalism; you have a bunch of lazy dilettantes who aren't really interested in policy, who rely on official sources for their own opinions and then pass them on without comment.

Thus, for now, I just want to ask that everyone ponder the extreme lack of professionalism and corruption required for someone like Klein to write the article that he did accusing Democrats of wanting to give Terrorists the same rights as Americans (therefore showing, as always, that Democrats can't be trusted on national security), and then -- once he is exposed for having spewed outright falsehoods -- he announces that he really isn't interested in bothering to find out (and isn't even capable of determining) if anything he wrote was accurate.

As my post earlier today here demonstrates, that is hardly unusual behavior for Time. But that doesn't make it any less flabbergasting, or repugnant. Doesn't it go without saying: if Klein doesn't have the time or background to understand what he's writing about, then he ought not to write about it? Doesn't anyone at Time agree with that?

Turns out that the editor of the piece for the print magazine doesn't take well to criticism, hanging up on Jane Hamsher within ten seconds (Get the same treatment by calling her at 212-522-2022!). And now one of the authors of the bill has taken notice.

Let me repeat: our bill gives the intelligence community the tools and flexibility it needs to listen to the conversations between those who wish to do us harm. This bill provides exactly what the Director of National Intelligence asked for earlier this year: it explicitly states that no court order is required to listen to the conversations of foreigners that happen to pass through the U.S. telecommunications system. It does not grant Constitutional rights to foreign terrorists.

What we have not agreed to do is give this or any other President a permanent blank check to spy on you, your family, the members of your congregation, or any other American citizen without any judicial oversight - a position shared by an overwhelming majority of Americans according to the latest public opinion surveys on the topic.

If federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies want to read the email or listen to the phone call of an American citizen, they have to get - except in emergencies - a judge to issue a warrant allowing them do so, as the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution requires. Such a court order would be easy to get if there is cause to believe that the American's communications are important intelligence for the protection of our security. And in such "emergencies" there would be quick after-the-fact review by the courts. These are not "unimportant, obscure technical details" - this is the heart of the bill.

Look, Rep. Holt, Joke Line doesn't have the time to read your post. Just dress up as a Republican operative and write his column for him, that'll go much better.

In a sane world, this would be the end of Klein's career.