Feast...
I.
Beat-Down The First, as performed by the masterful Glenn Greenwald:
Joe Klein: Both factually false and stuck in the 1980s
For the sake of its own credibility, Time Magazine needs immediately to prohibit Joe Klein from uttering another word about the eavesdropping and FISA controversy. He simply doesn't know what he's talking about and he publishes demonstrably false statements.
Klein's latest article in Time does nothing more than what Klein and most Beltway "liberal" pundits always do and have been doing for the last twenty years -- namely, warn Democrats that they will lose elections unless they renounce their beliefs and act as much as possible like Republicans on national security issues. The article is entitled "Still Stumbling on National Security" and contains every 1980-2003 cliche about how Democrats better not oppose the big, mean, tough George Bush on war issues or else Rush Limbaugh will attack them and they'll lose. More on that in a moment.
Klein's main complaint is that "Democrats in Congress are being
foolishly partisan on two key issues: continued funding for the war in Iraq and updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)." On FISA, he claims:
Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee's bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that -- Limbaugh is salivating -- would require the surveillance of
every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of
U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.
"Well beyond stupid" is a good description for what Klein wrote here. "Factually false" is even better. First, from its inception, FISA did not "protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." Its warrant requirements apply to all "U.S. persons" (see 1801(f)), which includes not only U.S. citizens but also "an alien lawfully admitted (in the U.S.) for permanent residence" (see 1801(i)). From 1978 on, FISA extended its warrant protections to resident aliens.
But Klein's far more pernicious "error" is his Limbaugh-copying claim that the House bill "require(s) the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court." It just does not.
...
any who fail to read the rest will live incomplete lives from here on out:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/21/klein/index.html(yeah, I said it)
( ;) )
II.
Beat-Down The Second, as provided by Wired.com's techno-Jedi, Mr. Ryan Singel:
The debate over what powers the nation's spy agencies should have to wiretap America's internet and phone infrastructure without court oversight is a complicated one, but it grows even more cloudy when pundits like Time magazine's Joe Klein are allowed to spout dangerous propaganda in the nation's largest media outlets.
In a column intended to give advice to Democrats on their surveillance and Iraq policies, Klein drops this oil spill into the national debate about the pending Congressional legislation modifying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act:
The basic principle (of the Senate Intelligence committee bill) is this: if a suspicious pattern of calls from a terrorist suspect to a U.S. citizen is found, a FISA court warrant is necessary to monitor those communications. But to safeguard against civil-liberty abuses, all records of clearly nontargeted Americans who receive emails or phone calls from foreign suspects would be, in effect, erased. Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee's bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid. The whole paragraph is so wrong, it's not clear where to start.
First of all, neither bill has anything to do how the nation's intelligence services wiretap outside the country. In that case, no warrants are needed and no court oversight is involved. All that has to happen is the spooks largely can't specifically target an American inside the United States, and communications that involve anyone inside the United States, have to be minimized (e.g. remove their names) unless there's good reason not to. Say, if they are actually plotting some sort of attack or talking about importing cocaine.
It's been that way for more than 25 years and nothing in any of the bills changes that. In fact, all versions of the bills pending in Congress EXPAND the feds' legal wiretapping powers as they existed before August. In the House bill that passed last week, the FISA court only comes into play when targeting foreigners when the NSA wants to order Google or AT&T to let the NSA use their domestic facilities.
But if the NSA knows who the terrorist is and a list of the foreigners they think he's communicating with, they can order either company to help without visiting the court. If the NSA can only get at a suspected foreign target by wiretapping them inside the United States and they think the target may talk to Americans, the bill would require them to prove to the FISA court that they have probable cause to believe the target is a foreigner. If it's an emergency, they can start tapping and days later provide "probable cause" that the foreigner is a foreigner to the secret court.
That's what Klein calls giving "terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." In the case of targeting Americans inside America, the government has to prove much more - mainly that the government has good reason to believe that the American is an agent of a foreign power or is a terrorist. Moreover, Klein can't even figure out that the House bill that passed last week IS the House Intelligence Committee's bill, not some Democratic substitute masterminded by Pelosi.
...
more, see above note re: living an incomplete life, etc:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/times-columnist.htmlHoo.
Wham and splatter.
:toast:
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