By now, many of you may have already seen the ABC News report:
In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program.
***
“I do believe strongly that (telecoms) should be granted that immunity,” former CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane Harris in the interview. “They were told to (cooperate) by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context.”
“I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that’s the right thing to do,” added Brennan, who is an intelligence and foreign policy adviser to Obama.
That wasn’t just a personal opinion, Brennan made clear to Harris. “My advice, to whoever is coming in (to the White House), is they need to spend some time learning, understanding what’s out there, identifying those key issues,” including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, he said — the law at the heart of the immunity debate.
“They need to make sure they do their homework, and it’s not just going to be knee-jerk responses,” Brennan said of the presidential hopefuls.
A fair amount of the buzz on this story focused on the “Obama is rebuked by the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center” angle, which is unsurprising and understandable in the heat of the campaign — though Brennan was careful to couch his language in more general terms.
As that angle has been well covered, I would add that Brennan — as someone advising Obama — is obviously not acting with a narrow partisan or ideological agenda in making these types of public statements.ÂÂ
Nor, for the most part, is Congress acting in an overly partisan or ideological manner in this instance. The Senate bill on these issues passed 68 to 29. The House is moving toward passage as well, either by splitting the bill, or through a ping-pong strategy with the Senate.
Indeed, it is the essential bipartisanship on these issues that gives people like Rick Ellensburg a conniption, causing them to rail about the destruction of the rule of law and the trampling of the Constitutional separation of powers. However, those paranoid about the doctrine of the “unitary executive” — a doctrine held by presidents since Jefferson – overlook that after 9/11, the “big eight” — the House and Senate majority and minority leaders and the co-chairs of the Intelligence Committees — were briefed on the terrorist surveillance program. In addition to the formal check of a co-equal branch of government, there is the informal check established by both branches of having the group be bipartisan. Although the top secret nature of the program might prevent public complaint about the program, at that time, none of those briefed introduced any proposals to amend the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act — an action within the perogative of any legislator.ÂÂ
After the secret program was blown by the New York Times, members of the big eight questioned the legality of the program, even while conceding the program is necessary. That necessity is a defense generally available to those accused of breaking the law was left unmentioned, and still has not occurred to those opposing the program, or the telecoms’ cooperation.ÂÂ
Mind you, in this instance, I am not speaking of the necessity defense in its narrowest legal sense. Rather, I am speaking of it in its historical sense. After Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration, with help from people like then California Gov. Earl Warren, interned Japanese, German and Italian Americans. Roosevelt also invoked national security as justification for ignoring both Congress and the Supreme Court on the issue of wiretapping. Neither can be listed among US history’s brighter chapters, but neither were thought cause for impeaching Roosevelt at the time and they are not reflexively raised anytime someone calls Roosevelt a great president. They are understood in their historical context.
A similar point is made by Brennan in one of the less-quoted portions of the National Journal interview:
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the threshold, quite frankly, was low, because we didn’t know the nature of the threat we faced here in the U.S. Every effort was made by the government to try to get as much understanding and visibility into what else might be out there that’s going to hurt us again. Now that a number of years have passed, we need to make sure the calibration is important. But maybe in a period of heightened threat you have to recalibrate that based on new information you have — new intelligence that’s going to give you a better sense of where to aim your magnet.
Such programs may require oversight by the DOJ’s Inspector General, as the currently circulating House proposal suggests. In a broader sense, Congress will exercise its oversight powers as well. FBI employees have improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic, though this appears to have been largely the result of agent error and shoddy record-keeping. This is in marked contrast to the continuing problem of IRS employees snooping through confidential taxpayer records — a problem which very few claim as cause for dismantling the IRS database. But these are not (as the Ellensburgs of the world claim) examples of the dangers of unchecked governement power. Rather, they are examples of problems and abuses which may arise in any large bureaucracy, to be detected and (when appropriate) punished under our constitutional system — which, as most reasonable people have noticed, still endures.
Related: AJ Strata has an interesting post about those being touted as “experts” in the lawsuits brought against the telecoms relating to these issues.
Why should they be granted immunity? They cooperated with ChimpyMcBushHitler and they deserve to be sued.
IMPEACH
hey. PW gets a mention at 26:45 or so from Liz. Also, FISA.
It seems that Obama is publishing one thing at his website for consumption by Kos but his experts are addressing reality to adults in other venues.
Karl, you are the first person I’ve ever seen mention the fact that it was not just the Japanese, but Germans and Italians as well, who were interned during WW II.
However, you do make the common error of referring to them as “Americans”. They were not. They were Japanese, German or Italian NATIONALS, who were living in the US at the time, but not US citizens. A nontrivial difference that has been “overlooked” for a very long time.
Sure, many of their children were citizens, by dint of having been born here, and they were generally taken along with their parents. But it was highly unlikely that the Feds were going to leave a bunch of kids wandering the streets unsupervised, so the kids went with them.
Something else that is very seldom mentioned is that at war’s end, those people who were still interned (many of all groups had been released before then) were immediately released…except the Germans. Apparently these people were such rabid Nazis that even after the war was over and Germany defeated, the government was afraid that they (the Germans) might still get up to some mischief, hence they were held an additional six months after hostilities were over.
You misunderstand. Bureaucracies that do awful things in the name of preferred Leftist policies are okay. They only care about rights and liberties under threat from the ‘Right’. Remember, “There is no enemy on the Left.”
Cave Bear,
It is true that many, if not most, internees may not have been US citizens, though you concede that some (mostly children) were. However, many of the “aliens” were permanent residents and would qualify as “US persons” as defined by FISA. That is why I would argue that the difference, while nontrivial, is not determinative as a precedent in this context.
The Clinton/Obama kerfluffle is turning into Godzilla vs Mothra.
after 9/11, the “big eight† the House and Senate majority and minority leaders and the co-chairs of the Intelligence Committees  were briefed on the terrorist surveillance program.
Number that didn’t realize they didn’t understand what they were hearing. Over/under: 2 1/2.
I’ll go “over” for $50, guinsPen.
Regards,
Ric
Maybe that is low.
There are Democrats involved.
And Republicans.
I’ve taken myself to the cleaners and I don’t even know my pants are off.
7 1/2. Like Henry Fonda in12 Angry Old White Guys.
If you haven’t read Malkin’s book on internment, you really should check it out. It is well documented and thought out, a very interesting read. Reading it makes it painfully obvious that none of its critics on the left have bothered to read it.
whatever.
I will not debate this issue anymore.
Just do not forget that I had warned you all about the distant signs of slowly creeping in an authoritarian BS.
Enjoy the next president with the same powers, wonder who that will be.
P.S. btw, Karl, that article in WiKi admits that it need legal expert.
So it means the expertise of whoever wrote that article is close or equal 0
Nancy won’t bring a bill to the floor in full knowledge that it has majority support and you’re whinging about authoritarianism?
c’mon, HF.
Nancy’s authoritarianism is as much powerful as my ability to score 10 home runs against A.Petit in the first inning….
I’m not going to debate this with you.
I was just kidding. Who’s A. Petit?
lol.
that was good….
My hope is that you guys will never find out how right I am right now….
NY pitcher
Bioterrorism is scarier, sashal. It’s the future.
Oh. I googled and nothing came up.
try not to think about that too much, it may cause the depression.
We can only hope that the future father of the nation, will bring order and quiet to our great country, and all dissidents and other assorted independently thinking individuals will be subjected to the exile in the healthy climate of Alaska…
Alaska is expensive.
Oh. Not so bad I guess. Can you imagine? I guess it’s just when you go salmon fishing.
#21 Sergey Brin must know that google needs the improvement
#24, don’t forget about guards and other personnel available to shoot in the back guys trying to escape.
They need place to live.
You make it sound so grim.
sorry.
It actually should be fun if you are on the right side….
Oops, got to go.
My personal labor camp commander just came back home.
Poka…
In spite of Karl’s very reasoned contextual treatment of the FISA program, sashal insists:
Just do not forget that I had warned you all about the distant signs of slowly creeping in an authoritarian BS.
Enjoy the next president with the same powers, wonder who that will be.
No, it’s your paranoia and you’d do well to try to understand it, instead of projecting it as a feature within and ruling everyone else necessarily.
And as I’ve already explained by means of my personal example, the “legal”, non-WOT related way of truely wiretapping and setting up anyone – regardless of their identity group or because of it – is a much greater reality. Try to contain your paranoia when contemplating this fact, sashal.
sashal is done debating this because I have just pointed out that Roosevelt intruded on liberty far more than Bush has, without the US turning into the USSR. I understand that sahsal is inclined to that sort of paranoia by biography, but it did not happen in the US then and is not happening now.
It may shock sashal, but imho, if HRC or BO is the next president, it’s still not going to happen. The occasional Billy Dale may get completely screwed, but that went on before 9/11 also.
My hope is that you guys will never find out how right I am right now….
In other words, you hope you are wrong. Don’t worry, this is the land where dreams come true.
I should add on the unitary exec link that I picked Wiki because its slant is actually leftward. The history, however, is correct. If sashal would prefer the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy on the history, there it is.
So I should just lay down like a stunned cow and be butchered for the sake of this fearmongering government? No thanks. I don’t care what or who you quote, Karl. I will vigorously oppose the government snooping into our private communications. If law enforcement isn’t good enough, that’s their problem.
Oh. Well it was a good idea.
What legitimate argument do you have to justify eavesdropping in on our calls, and requiring providers to comply?
Because the guy who punctured my tires last week is an annoyance, nothing more.
Cause smallpox ruins your face and you never ever get laid after without paying for it is why.
Also my phone calls are really a lot mostly pretty lame.
So I should just lay down like a stunned cow and be butchered for the sake of this fearmongering government?
Yeah, cynn, because everybody knows the ovens are the next step after phone monitoring.
Merciful fucking God[1], cynn, you pick up on and repeat this crap and then accuse us of fearmongering? It’s two fucking micrograms of truth, bent backwards, blown all out of proportion, and mixed with sixteen tons of speculation, misdirection, paranoia, and outright fucking lies, then sprayed from the housetops for the aggrandizement of Gleen(s) and a few other nitwits.
You aren’t stupid. Think about it for fifteen seconds. It’s one fucking building, not all that big, full of Government bureaucrats in exactly the same proportion of time-servers and careerists to actual workers of any other government bureaucracy — which means there’s an absolute maximum of a couple hundred people who do anything at all but shuffle papers, and they work eight-hour shifts with time off for lunch, coffee breaks, surfing the Internet, and arguing on the phone with the tenants of the slums they manage, like any other Feducrats. Now: stand on any street corner. How many people do you see talking to their hands or to the air? Multiply that by three hundred million. They aren’t “snooping into private communications”. Not because they’re pure as the driven fucking snow, but because they ain’t got fucking time.
And they’re an intelligence agency, not cops. They don’t prosecute anybody. They don’t have the fucking power to prosecute anybody. Their relationship to the machinery of Government is that of paid informers. Buggsy the Nose tells the beat-cop somethin’s goin’ down, but if they bring him into court the judge’ll toss the prosecutor out on his ass. It might — might! — be enough to con the judge into issuing a warrant that’ll let the police collect evidence leading to a charge, but the information itself is fucking useless for anything else.
Sheesh. It’s not the lies. It’s not the misdirection. It’s the God[1]-damned huffing and puffing to inflate a fucking ant-mound into Kilimanjaro with a cherry on top. Have a sense of proportion, woman.
Regards,
Ric
[1]Allah to Zeus, pick one or more as appropriate, not forgetting Bob.
cynn,
Your remarks about “annoyance” would be better directed to the families of the 9/11 dead. Some of them are nutballs who opposed invading Afghanistan, but I suspect most of them would pop you in the moosh. And likely get away with it before any jury.
It’s no use, he thinks “Jake 2.0″,”Enemy
of the State” and other works where the CIA and the NSA are confused are real. COMINT the predecessor to the NSA
had a much more massive data collection
than anything the TSP had; and no one really complained about it, till Mark Felt, one of those operators, used his
authority, to undermine Richard Nixon, and as a result, ended up undermining
the entire national security bureaucracy. The extent of the limited
data on enemy factions is truly remarkable. The file on Mullah Omar, courtesy of the National Security Archive,for instance, had his presumed D.O.B. and the fact he had been a mujahadeen fighter. It didn’t mention details like his mentor was Maulvana
Younis Khalis, one of the more extreme
Deobandi/Wahhabi graduates of the famous
madrassa just east of Peshawar. The file
on Bin Laden, probably wasn’t much better; the Saudis not having volunteered his chief mentors was the brother of Syed Qutb, ideologist of the
Moslem Brotherhood and the fact he was
instructed by Effendi Ahmed Badeeb, who would eventually become an aide to Saudi
General Intelligence chief and future ambass to UK and the US, Prince Turki
overlook that after 9/11, the “big eight† the House and Senate majority and minority leaders and the co-chairs of the Intelligence Committees  were briefed on the terrorist surveillance program.
Gosh I wish I saved the article I read recently (I’ll see if I can find it) but a well informed guy at some institute wrote that Cheney and the head of NSA (at the time) briefed congress on the FISA wiretap deal to those members of the Intel committee and not only did those members -DEMOCRATS – praise the program, Cheney specifically said we need you peeps to understand this 100% but DO YOU THINK WE NEED TO DO ANYTHING LEGISLATIVELY TO SEE THIS PROGRAM THROUGH? Answer – NO, IT’S LEGAL and GREAT!! CARRY ON – Good WORK!!
If Gleen Grennwald gets his puppets in a bunch over this program and Democrats bipartisanship, it’s because they have been lying to him to please him. They made the program happen because they agreed with it and Gleen is a little poof for believing their forked tongues and their coward jellyfishness isn’t to Bush but to just telling Wilson Ellesberg to sit and spin.
In essence, it would do the cynn’s of the world good to just except, no matter how hard they try to the contrary, Democrats were complicit in seeing the wiretaps through and ponder that either Democrats are too stupid to be in positions of power to make decisions (I’ll grant that Cynn) or they did so because they aren’t stupid and agreed with it.
Cynn won’t like answer 3 – Democrats are smart enough to know the program is necessary but thought it to be an issue worth politicizing – craven assholes gambling american lives (I’ll grant that too)
But the gov’t is trying to avoid your being butchered like a stunned cow. That’s why they’ll bypass a cheeseweenie FISA court judge to listen to any suspected terrorist communication between suspected terrorists calling from outside the U.S. into the U.S.. I don’t want to see you, Cynn, lying mangled and gushing torrents of blood while begging to die because the shrapnel buried deep inside your soft tissue continues to burn at over 800-degrees long after its initial embed, after the explosion, outside the preschool daycare center, where so many happy children had innocent smiles blown off their faces by a bomb tossing Islamic studies student on a J-1 visa from a far away place where milk goats have more rights than women of breeding age.
Feel my Obama love and realize it’s out of love the CIA listens. Peace.
So I should just lay down like a stunned cow and be butchered for the sake of this fearmongering government?
If it were not for humans cows would be extinct.
Anyway, I love cows. They’re delicious.
Wow. I never thought of that before. I find that really cheering. About the cows.
I do not even want Billy Dale happening, Karl.
I am sure his fate and life does not concern you and me, but that B.Dale could be anybody else next time…
Remember Stalin’s favorite saying:” ûõѠруñÑÂÑ‚, щõÿúø ûõтÑÂÑ‚”.
You know what it means, right?
BTW, whatever happened 60 years ago under Roosevelt ( with real super dangerous war and enemy) , should not be excuse for us in contemporary 21 century USA.
After all between civil rights movement and right now even less time passed….
And finally: with your mouth to God’s ears, Karl, that “this will never happen hear”.
What are the safeguards for this , Karl, and how easy those safeguards could be subverted? That’s the real question…
B.Moe at #32.
You are absolutely correct.
I want to be wrong about it….
Comment by cynn on 3/8 @ 9:04 pm #
So I should just lay down like a stunned cow and be butchered for the sake of this fearmongering government? No thanks. I don’t care what or who you quote, Karl. I will vigorously oppose the government snooping into our private communications. If law enforcement isn’t good enough, that’s their problem.
Just the bad guys Cynn.
Like I told cleo, there is nothing you have that the NSA wants, except tax dollars.
sashal. The diffence here is the peoples got guns. Lots and lots of guns. Politicians are afraid of the peoples with guns.
Get thor, he’s ginchy. I’ll go beyond the newsletter, I wanna wear his used fishnets.
[…] wishes about the Terrorist Surveillance Program, juxtaposed against the reality of Obama’s intelligence adviser supporting legal protection for the telecoms who cooperated with the government after […]
If your looking for even more information on PC security then I would head over here as they have plenty of stuff on identity theft, antivirus software etc.