Wolf Howling: Patriot Act

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Progressively Surreal: The Gulf Between Words & Deeds

We learn today that the Obama administration - which came into office promising to bring us the most transpartent administration ever - has in fact been far more restrictive in answering Freedom of Information requests than the Bush administration ever thought of being. This from Raw Story:

. . . [A] provision in the Freedom of Information Act law that allows the government to hide records that detail its internal decision-making has been invoked by Obama agencies more often in the past year than during the final year of President George W. Bush.

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush's final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies.

An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.

The AP review comes on the heels of another bit of government transparency news: that the Obama Administration has threatened to veto a congressional intelligence bill because it objects to efforts to increase intelligence oversight.

Among other things, the proposed legislation would subject intelligence agencies to General Accountability Office review. US intelligence agencies are currently immune from review by the Congressional auditing office.

. . . In all, major agencies cited that or other FOIA exemptions to refuse information at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found. Agencies often cite more than one exemption when withholding part or all of the material sought in an open-records request.

All told, the 17 agencies reviewed by AP reported getting 444,924 FOIA requests in fiscal 2009, compared with 493,610 in fiscal 2008." . . .

Let us not forget, Obama promised that his would heal the divides and even slow the rise of the oceans. He was to lead us into the promised land of post-partisanship. Instead, he seems to be leading us to a period of bitter partisanship not seen since prior to the Civil War.

The left is hypocrisy unbound. Under the Bush Presidency, the left screamed from the rooftops that the Bush administration was warring on the Constitution - essentially because Bush and the right would not grant new Constitutional rights to enemy combatants and because he passed the Patriot Act as a responsible means of balancing the needs for protecting America against terrorist attack. Yet now all of that is turned on its head.

Now the left conducts a real war on our Constitution - from Obama's war on private property to Pelosi's plan to Slaughter the Constitution. That does not even begin to consider Obama and the left's larger war on our form of deliberative democracy. Nor the fact that, now that Obama is President, a Democrat controlled Congress, at the request of President Obama, has yet again extended the Patriot Act.

Now Obama, who promised us the most transparent government in office, has pulled down all the blinds on the windows into our government. There was of course his utterly opaque handling of the drafting of Obamacare. But that is one instance. The reality is that, in his first year in office, he has not merely held less press conferences than Bush, he has engaged in an effort to manipulate the press that even radical leftie Helen Thomas, sharply criticized several months ago:

White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. . . .

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.

True, Helen, true. November cannont come soon enough.

The Senate - & The Chameleon Candidate - Finally Act

The bill to correct provisions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to reflect modern realities and the needs of the War on Terror passed with a super-majority in the Senate. (For more explanation of the changes, see here). The bill had been tabled for months by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who refused to allow it to come to a vote. The bill as passed contain telecom immunity provisions previously the subject of an effort by Barack Obama to have stripped from the bill. Today, he voted for the bill with the telecom provisions intact. What changed between his prior vote and today? Certainly no relevant facts changed. All that changed was the weighing of the expediencies by the chameleon candidate.
_______________________________________________________

This from the NYT:

More than two and a half years after the disclosure of President’s Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program set off a furious national debate, the Senate gave final approval on Wednesday afternoon to broadening the government’s spy powers and providing legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the wiretapping program.

The plan, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, marked one of Mr. Bush’s most hard-won legislative victories in a Democratic-led Congress where he has had little success of late. And it represented a stinging defeat for opponents on the left who had urged Democratic leaders to stand firm against the White House after a months-long impasse.

. . . Supporters of the plan, which revised the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, said that the final vote reflected both political reality and legal practicality. Wiretapping orders approved by a secret court under the previous version of the surveillance law were set to begin expiring in August unless Congress acted, and many Democrats were wary of going into their political convention in Denver next month with the issue hanging over them—handing the Republicans a potent political weapon.

So instead, Congress approved what amounted to the biggest restructuring of federal surveillance law in 30 years, giving the government more latitude to eavesdrop on targets abroad and at home who are suspected of links to terrorism.

The issue put Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in a particularly precarious spot. After long opposing the idea of immunity for the phone companies in the wiretapping operation, he voted for the plan on Wednesday. His reversal last month angered many of his most ardent supporters, who organized an unsuccessful drive to get him to reverse his position once again. And it came to symbolize what civil liberties advocates saw as “capitulation” by Democratic leaders to political pressure from the White House in an election year.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who was Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.

The surveillance plan, which Mr. Bush is expected to sign into law quickly, was the product of months of negotiations between the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders, earning the grudging support of some key Democrats.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the intelligence committee and helped broker the deal, said modernizing the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was essential to protecting national security and giving intelligence officials the technology tools they need to deter another terrorist strike.

. . . The key stumbling block in the congressional negotiations was the insistence by the White House that any legislation include legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the wiretapping program. The program itself ended in January 2007, when the White House agreed to bring it under the auspices of the special court set up by the earlier surveillance law, known as the F.I.S.A. court. Still, more than 40 lawsuits continued churning through federal courts, charging AT&T, Verizon and other major carriers with breaking the law and violating their customers’ privacy by agreeing to the White House’s requests to conduct wiretaps without a valid court order.

The deal approved on Wednesday, which passed the House on June 20, effectively ends those lawsuits. It includes a narrow review by a district court to determine whether in fact the companies being sued received formal requests or directives from the administration to take part in the program. The administration has already acknowledged that those directives exist. Once such a finding is made, the lawsuits “shall be promptly dismissed,” the bill says. Republican leaders say they regard the process as a formality in ensuring that the phone carriers are protected from any legal liability over their participation.

. . . The legislation also expands the government’s power to invoke emergency wiretapping procedures. While the National Security Agency would be allowed to seek court orders for broad groups of foreign targets, the law creates a new, 7-day period for targeting foreigners without a court order in “exigent” circumstances if government officials assert that important national security information would be lost otherwise. The law also expands from three to seven days the period in which the government can conduct emergency wiretaps without a court on Americans if the attorney general certifies that there is probable cause to believe the target is linked to terrorism.

Democrats pointed to some concessions they had won from the White House in the lengthy negotiations. The final bill includes a reaffirmation that the surveillance law is the “exclusive” means of conducting intelligence wiretaps — a provision that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats insisted would prevent Mr. Bush or any future president from evading court scrutiny in the way that the N.S.A. program did.

The measure will also require reviews by the inspectors general from several agencies to determine how the program was operated. Democrats said that the reviews should provide accountability that had been missing from the debate over the wiretaps.