Published on Wednesday, July 24, 2013 by Common Dreams
Obama says proposed legislative curbs on NSA spying are not 'transparent' enough; critics retort 'like your secret surveillance program?'
(Photo: Press TV)The Obama Administration is fiercely campaigning against a proposed legislative measure
in the House—up for debate Wednesday—to curb NSA secret spying, on the
grounds that the measure is not 'open or deliberative' enough.Critics slam the hypocrisy of invoking transparency to defend a secret spying program given free reign in closed-door NSA meetings and FISA courts and conducted without the consent of millions of people caught in the surveillance dragnet.
(Photo: PolicyMic)
The White House released a statement Tuesday declaring, "[W]e oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process."
Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald—who broke the story on secret spying exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—was quick to seize on the irony of the White House statement on Twitter.
WH: We're against Amash/Conyers amendment because it's not an "open" process, unlike what the FISA court & NSA do in total secrecyMeanwhile, Senator Ron Wyden warned that the NSA spying program has a staggeringly far reach with no real accountability. Addressing an event hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund on Tuesday, he warned:
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 24, 2013
The combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown in the checks and balances that limit government action could lead us to a surveillance state that cannot be reversed.The legislative measure, introduced to the House by Michigan Republican Justin Amash, is aimed at preventing the NSA from accessing millions of US phone records without consent. This will be the first vote in Congress to curb the NSA's secret spying powers since the scandal erupted, and it has garnered bipartisan support.
The Wednesday congressional debate—with a vote expected Wednesday or Thursday—comes just days after secret courts reapproved the phone data collection program Friday. The Obama Administration has fiercely defended the spying and lobbied against any proposed curbs, and NSA Director General Keith Alexander held an emergency closed-door briefing with Congress on Tuesday to forcefully urge rejection of the proposed amendment.
Yet, the Obama Administration has been unable to contain mounting public outrage at the secret spying now making its way to Congress.
"The public was not just kept in the dark about the Patriot Act and other secret authorities," Wyden said. "The public was actively misled."
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Democratic establishment unmasked: prime defenders of NSA bulk spying
NYT: "The Obama administration made common cause with the House Republican leadership"
One
of the most vocal supporters of the Obama White House's position on
yesterday's NSA debate: GOP Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
The rabidly pro-war and anti-Muslim GOP former Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King, has repeatedly lavished Obama with all sorts of praise and support for his policies in those areas. The Obama White House frequently needs, and receives, large amounts of GOP Congressional support to have its measures enacted or bills its dislikes defeated. The Obama DOJ often prevails before the US Supreme Court solely because the Roberts/Scalia/Thomas faction adopts its view while the Ginsburg/Sotomayor/Breyer faction rejects it (as happened in February when the Court, by a 5-4 ruling, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Amnesty and the ACLU which argued that the NSA's domestic warrantless eavesdropping activities violate the Fourth Amendment; the Roberts/Scalia wing accepted the Obama DOJ's argument that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue because the NSA successfully conceals the identity of which Americans are subjected to the surveillance). As Wired put it at the time about that NSA ruling:
The 5-4 decision by Justice Samuel Alito was a clear victory for the President Barack Obama administration, which like its predecessor, argued that government wiretapping laws cannot be challenged in court."The extraordinary events that took place in the House of Representatives yesterday are perhaps the most vivid illustration yet of this dynamic, and it independently reveals several other important trends. The House voted on an amendment sponsored by Justin Amash, the young Michigan lawyer elected in 2010 as a Tea Party candidate, and co-sponsored by John Conyers, the 24-term senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. The amendment was simple. It would de-fund one single NSA program: the agency's bulk collection of the telephone records of all Americans that we first revealed in this space, back on June 6. It accomplished this "by requiring the FISA court under Sec. 215 [of the Patriot Act] to order the production of records that pertain only to a person under investigation".
The amendment yesterday was defeated. But it lost by only 12 votes: 205-217. Given that the amendment sought to de-fund a major domestic surveillance program of the NSA, the very close vote was nothing short of shocking. In fact, in the post-9/11 world, amendments like this, which directly challenge the Surveillance and National Security States, almost never get votes at all. That the GOP House Leadership was forced to allow it to reach the floor was a sign of how much things have changed over the last seven weeks.
More significant than the closeness of the vote was its breakdown. A majority of House Democrats supported the Amash/Conyers amendment, while a majority of Republicans voted against it:
The full roll call vote is here.
House Speaker John Boehner saved the Obama White House by voting
against it and ensuring that his top leadership whipped against it. As the New York Times put it in its account of yesterday's vote:In reality, the fate of the amendment was sealed when the Obama White House on Monday night announced its vehement opposition to it, and then sent NSA officials to the House to scare members that barring the NSA from collecting all phone records of all Americans would Help The Terrorists™.
Conservative Republicans leery of what they see as Obama administration abuses of power teamed up with liberal Democrats long opposed to intrusive intelligence programs. The Obama administration made common cause with the House Republican leadership to try to block it.
Using Orwellian language so extreme as to be darkly hilarious, this was the first line of the White House's statement opposing the amendment: "In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens" (i.e.: we welcome the debate that has been exclusively enabled by that vile traitor, the same debate we've spent years trying to prevent with rampant abuse of our secrecy powers that has kept even the most basic facts about our spying activities concealed from the American people).
The White House then condemned Amash/Conyers this way: "This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process." What a multi-level masterpiece of Orwellian political deceit that sentence is. The highly surgical Amash/Conyers amendment - which would eliminate a single, specific NSA program of indiscriminate domestic spying - is a "blunt approach", but the Obama NSA's bulk, indiscriminate collection of all Americans' telephone records is not a "blunt approach". Even worse: Amash/Conyers - a House bill debated in public and then voted on in public - is not an "open or deliberative process", as opposed to the Obama administration's secret spying activities and the secret court that blesses its secret interpretations of law, which is "open and deliberative". That anyone can write a statement like the one that came from the Obama White House without dying of shame, or giggles, is impressive.
Even more notable than the Obama White House's defense of the NSA's bulk domestic spying was the behavior of the House Democratic leadership. Not only did they all vote against de-funding the NSA bulk domestic spying program - that includes liberal icon House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who voted to protect the NSA's program - but Pelosi's deputy, Steny Hoyer, whipped against the bill by channeling the warped language and mentality of Dick Cheney. This is the language the Democratic leadership circulated when telling their members to reject Amash/Conyers:
"2) Amash/Conyers/Mulvaney/Polis/Massie Amendment – Bars the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act (as codified by Section 501 of FISA) to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who may be in communication with terrorist groups but are not already subject to an investigation under Section 215."Remember when Democrats used to object so earnestly when Dick Cheney would scream "The Terrorists!" every time someone tried to rein in the National Security State just a bit and so modestly protect basic civil liberties? How well they have learned: now, a bill to ban the government from collecting the telephone records of all Americans, while expressly allowing it to collect the records of anyone for whom there is evidence of wrongdoing, is - in the language of the House Democratic Leadership - a bill to Protect The Terrorists.
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