Did Bush spy powers expand because Congress 'ran out of time'?
 Shortly before Congress left Washington for the month of August -- when temperatures soar into triple digits -- President Bush threatened to extend the legislative session unless lawmakers expanded his warrantless wiretapping powers.
Over the following two days, the House and Senate passed bills that dramatically expanded the Bush Administration's ability to eavesdrop on Americans' communications.
Hours later, both chambers recessed, not to return until Labor Day.
In the quest to determine why Democrats signed on so quickly to a program they had long bemoaned, some question whether Congress fasttracked legislation under consideration for 18 months in a hurry to get out of town.
"I could hypothesize they ran out of time," Senate Intelligence Committee spokeswoman Wendy Morigi told RAW STORY, when asked why the broad expansion was adopted so suddenly in favor of a narrow compromise. "But I don't know. I don't have a good answer."
Just before passage, Bush and his Republican allies in Congress hyped terror fears to spur quick action from lawmakers, critics say. The Senate on Friday dramatically approved a law modifying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; the House followed with its own bill in a rare Saturday session.
"Give them points for political gamesmanship, but the outcome of their political gamesmanship is a net loss for the country," David McGuire, a spokesman for the Center for Democracy & Technology, told RAW STORY.
From the president's weekly radio address July 27, to reports that emerged last Thursday about vague threats of a terror attack on the Capitol within the next few weeks, lawmakers were bombarded with Republican warnings that failing to expand the government's power would leave the nation vulnerable.
The CDT opposed the FISA expansion, saying it grants the administration too much power to monitor Americans' conversation without judicial approval.
Various bills and proposals to modify FISA have been floating around Congress since early 2006, just after the warrantless wiretapping was revealed by the New York Times the previous December, Morigi said.
Congress has attempted to attach FISA updates to intelligence authorization bills last year and earlier this spring, but committees were hampered in writing new legislation because the administration would not provide requested documents outlining details of the wiretapping program and the legal justifications behind it, Morigi said.
The FISA law was updated last week in spite of the White House's continued refusal to hand over new documents. On Wednesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy imposed a "final deadline" of Aug. 20 for the administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, as RAW STORY previously reported.
The move to expand the law's provisions seemed to take on new urgency last week, when Bush urged Congress to update FISA "immediately" in his July 28 radio address. He said the intelligence community was "hampered in its ability to gain the vital intelligence we need" when the United States faced a "heightened threat environment."
"I ask Republicans and Democrats to work together to pass FISA modernization now, before they leave town," Bush told radio listeners. "Our national security depends on it."
Three days after Bush's address, House Minority Leader John Boehner revealed details about a classified FISA court ruling during an interview on Fox News. Boehner said that the court had "over the last four or five months" ruled that the NSA could not intercept purely foreign conversations that were routed through the US. Some have charged he broke the law in revealing a classified court ruling.
Two days after Boehner's interview, Roll Call, a newspaper whose primary focus is Congressional coverage, reported of a vague new threat of an attack on the Capitol between early August and Sept. 11.
"America faces a heightened threat of attack. ... The time for foot-dragging is over," Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), who sponsored the House FISA bill, warned in a statement last Thursday.
Morigi, the Senate Intelligence Committee spokeswoman, said congressional leaders had been negotiating with the administration on the approved bill since mid-June.
After the National Intelligence Estimate last month showed al Qaeda was growing stronger, "you had this increased threat environment" that necessitated a fix to the law before Congress left town, she said. Morigi denied that the Roll Call report on a possible attack had any direct impact, but she said she couldn't say whether the story was picking up on information members of Congress already were receiving in their classified briefings.
Even Democrats agree the NSA should be able to spy freely on conversations that happen strictly between foreigners outside the United States, and Republicans used fixing foreign-to-foreign surveillance as their main justification for passing the law.
In the shadow of a month-long recess -- and fresh warnings of an imminent attack on the Capitol -- a narrowly targeted bill that would have addressed just that problem was defeated, and President Bush threatened to not allow Congress to leave until it sent him a bill he could sign.
Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott "ominously advised" that Congress needed to update the law when the report of a threat on the Capitol emerged, although he did not cite any specifics.
"The disaster could be on our doorstep" if the law were not updated, Lott warned. He also advised leaving town for a month: "I think it would be good to leave town in August and it would probably be good to stay out until September the 12th."
The Senate's bill passed the day after Lott's comments appeared.
Some Democrats were then forced to choose between approving the broad expansions backed by nearly all Republicans or to leave open the loophole everyone wanted closed. Fourteen Democratic Senators and 41 House Democrats supported the expansion.
Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell spent last week on Capitol Hill, meeting with lawmakers to press passage of a FISA expansion before they left for recess. Democrats thought they had the intelligence director's support of their narrower FISA update, and some accused him of bowing to pressure from the White House in eventually pushing for the broader bill, a charge McConnell disputes.
"Congress and the administration had the opportunity to pass legislation that would've permitted legitimate, worthwhile foreign to foreign surveillance without impacting the privacy of Americans," McGuire said in a phone interview with RAW STORY this week. "And instead they passed on that alternative and passed this grossly overbroad piece of legislation."
|
