Greenwald on Latest Republican Spin

Ever since the arrest of a bunch of suspects in the UK and elsewhere in a plot to bomb several airplanes, the White House and their apologists have been united in their talking points: A) that this proves the need for warrantless surveillance and B) that those who oppose warrantless surveillance oppose all surveillance. Both are flat out lies. Glen Greenwald does a terrific job of showing that in both cases in this post on the subject. In particular, he blasts the Wall Street Journal for peddling those two lies in a recent editorial on the subject. On the question of whether the successful operation required warrantless surveillance:

First, most of the surveillance of the terrorist plotters was conducted by British law enforcement. British law requires the issuance of warrants before telephone conversations can be intercepted, and every warrant must "name or describe either one person as the Interception Subject, or a single set of premises where the interception is to take place." Being able to eavesdrop only with warrants did not prevent British law enforcement from stopping these terrorist attacks. It is baffling, to put it mildly, why defenders of Bush's illegal eavesdropping would think that any of this bolsters their defense that warrantless eavesdropping is necessary.

Indeed. He then points out that even that part of the operation that required American law enforcement to engage in surveillance was done with warrants from the FISA court. He cites this Washington Post report:

In the days before the alleged airliner bombing plot was exposed, more than 200 FBI agents followed up leads inside the United States looking for potential connections to British and Pakistani suspects. The investigation was so large, officials said, that it brought a significant surge in warrants for searches and surveillance from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret panel that oversees most clandestine surveillance.

One official estimated that scores of secret U.S. warrants were dedicated solely to the London plot. The government usually averages a few dozen a week for all counterintelligence investigations, according to federal statistics.

The purpose of the recent warrants included monitoring telephone calls that some of the London suspects made to the United States, two sources said.

And he sums it all up perfectly:

From the very beginning of the NSA scandal, this has been the point -- the principal, overarching, never-answered point. There is no reason for the Bush administration to eavesdrop in secret, with no judicial oversight, and in violation of the law precisely because the legal framework that has been in place for the last 28 years empowers the government to eavesdrop aggressively on all of the terrorists they want, with ease.

This fact, yet again, demonstrates the sheer dishonesty motivating those right-wing pundits claiming that "Democrats" oppose the type of eavesdropping used to stop this plot. Legal eavesdropping, within the FISA framework, is exactly the eavesdropping which Bush critics advocate, and it was precisely that legal eavesdropping which was used to engage in surveillance of suspected terrorists here.

Additionally, The Wall St. Journal is simply incoherent when it says that "Other Democrats are still saying they will censure, or even impeach, Mr. Bush over the FISA program if they win control of Congress." This claim just makes no sense. Nobody opposes "the FISA program." Bush critics want aggressive eavesdropping within the "FISA program." The censure of the President has been proposed because of the President's eavesdropping outside of the FISA program -- i.e., outside of the law. Does The Wall St. Journal Editorial Board really not understand that most basic point? Why are they falsely telling their readers that Democrats oppose "the FISA program" -- as though Democrats oppose eavesdropping itself?

The fact is that the FISA program is hardly some draconian limitation on executive power. The court operates in secret and virtually never turns down a request for a warrant for a search or for surveillance. The Patriot Act lowered the standard for issuing such a warrant significantly so that even probable cause is no longer required to get such a warrant. Yet the administration refuses to comply even with that bare minimum level of protection against abuse of power. Given that there is no evidence whatsoever that the FISA court has ever refused to issue a necessary warrant - the administration hasn't even attempted to argue that they have - one must wonder why this insistence on not complying with the law.