House Intelligence Chairman: Bush administration withholds key information on surveillance
 As House Republicans and officials in the administration of President George W. Bush aggressively promoted reforms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said the executive branch had refused for almost two months to turn over key information on spying activities to Congress.
"It has been 54 days since Ranking Member [Pete] Hoekstra and I sent a bipartisan letter requesting information from the Administration about its surveillance activities," said the Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), Intelligence Committee Chairman, in a statement released to RAW STORY late on Tuesday. "Specifically, we asked for copies of the Presidential Authorizations and legal opinions for surveillance outside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."
Reyes warned that failure to turn over the information could hold up the legislative changes sought by the White House and the Director of National Intelligence.
"As we noted in our letter, the Committee cannot begin a serious evaluation of legislative proposals to alter the FISA system unless we have facts regarding legal authorities," Rep. Reyes added. "If the Administration is serious about the need for legislation in this area, the President will insist that Congress be given all of the facts."
Reyes' remarks came in response to a major Tuesday push by House Republicans to advance FISA reform legislation they insist is necessary. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM), ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, introduced a FISA reform package on Tuesday.
The Ranking Republican on the whole committee, Rep. Hoekstra, described the need for Wilson's legislation in stark terms.
"Terrorists are using the FISA law to shield their activities, while Congress continues to let the Intelligence Community be hamstrung by a 1978 law written for rotary telephones and the Cold War,” the Michigan Republican said in a statement. "Al-Qaeda is not going to take August off—we need to pass this bill before Congress recesses."
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales also added to those warnings in his Tuesday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"There have been sweeping changes in the way that we communicate since FISA became law, and these changes have had unintended consequences on FISA's operation," Gonzales told the committee Tuesday morning. "For example, without any change in FISA, technological advancements have actually made it more difficult to conduct surveillance on suspected terrorists and other subjects of foreign intelligence surveillance overseas."
But Rep. Reyes was dismissive of the idea that full reform of FISA was required to permit monitoring of terrorists.
"Rep. Wilson’s legislative approach is based on several faulty assumptions," the Congressman argued, pointing to a letter he wrote to her. The Reyes letter argued that FISA has been amended with modernization in mind on several occasions, and that the administration has failed to devote sufficient resources to the problems.
in a July 20 letter to the House Intelligence Committee, Attorney General Gonzales responded in kind to part of Reyes' remarks.
"(M)erely adding resources without amending FISA will not resolve the problem," Gonzales wrote in remarks circulated by House Republicans. "FISA currently requires...the Department of Justice to expend critical time and effort to provide privacy protections to foreign targets overseas – including terrorist targets – who are not entitled to them."
While the administration and House Republicans made their push for rapid action on FISA modernization, the issue might be overshadowed by another pending matter. At the end of June, the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House for various information relating to its warrantless wiretapping through the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
Last week, the White House wrote to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the committee's chairman, and requested an extension of the deadline for the subpoena, which was subsequently granted. But throughout Tuesday's hearing with Gonzales, the administration's counterterrorism surveillance operations were a constant point of discussion, which indicates that any future legislative changes will most likely not come easy for the White House.
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