By now, I hope you’ve had the opportunity to read Glenn Greenwald’s overly patient evisceration of Joe Klein and Time magazine. As often happens with Glenn, he is so thorough that he doesn’t offer fellow bloggers much to add. Joe Klein did a horrible piece of reporting and then followed up with one giant joke of a non-apology. The subject? The House Democrats’ passage of a bill to amend FISA so that the NSA can spy on foreigners without a warrant even if the communication is routed through the U.S. in some way. Except, Joke Line didn’t report it that way. Instead, in the print version of Time that is now in every doctor’s and dentist’s office in the country, Klein put it like this (emphases mine):
The next day, I suffered through Rush Limbaugh lambasting the dopey Dems, who actually — can you believe this, friends? — put the rights of terrorists above the nation’s security! That was ridiculous…
…That sort of clarity has been rare in the presidential campaign and almost totally nonexistent among the Democrats in Congress, who are being foolishly partisan on two key issues: continued funding for the war in Iraq and updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)…
…The Democratic strategy on the FISA legislation in the House is equally foolish. There is broad, bipartisan agreement on how to legalize the surveillance of phone calls and emails of foreign intelligence targets. The basic principle 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.
If you are confused, you should be. Joke Line actually reported something 180 degrees opposite of the truth. The bill the House Democrats passed explicitly allows the government to do exactly what Klein claims it does not allow them to do. From the bill:
Sec. 105A. (a) Foreign to Foreign Communications-
(1) IN GENERAL – Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.
As Greenwald points out, Joe Klein didn’t read the bill, still hasn’t read the bill, and makes a comically pathetic attempt to correct the record.
I may have made a mistake in my column this week about the FISA legislation passed by the House, although it’s difficult to tell for sure given the technical nature of the bill’s language and fierce disagreements between even moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Committee about what the bill actually does contain.
Democrats say that I was wrong to report that the bill includes a FISA court review of individual foreign terrorist targets who might communicate with U.S. persons, although it does include an annual “basket” review of procedures used by U.S. intelligence agencies to target foreign suspects. The Republican Committee staff disagrees and says my reporting is correct.
It’s straight forward. The bill explicitly does the opposite of what Klein claimed it did. If Klein is confused on this matter he can read the bill and settle it for himself. You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand it, and the pertinent language isn’t technical at all. Is Klein confused by technical words like ‘surveillance device’?
Greenwald focuses on the process…why does Klein report on legislation he hasn’t read? Why does he take the Republicans word at face value? Why don’t his editors insist he do a better job…or, at least, issue corrections?
But I have a different concern? Why is Joe Klein so indifferent to erosion of our civil liberties? Why does he see this controversy in completely political terms? Here’s a sampling of Klein’s take on the issue:
Another larger point I made is also true: In the coming campaign, Republicans will try to misrepresent any partisan FISA Democratic bill as providing “civil rights for terrorists.” There are those who say, So what? Democrats should stand for what they believe. To which I say, it depends on the issue and the details and the principle…
…The current House legislation requires that every foreign terrorist target be passed through the FISA court because that target may potentially communicate with U.S. Citizens or resident aliens. It thereby, as I reported, obliquely gives foreign terrorists the same procedures as American citizens, if not the same rights…This will be very easily twisted by Republicans…
This is all a partisan waste of time, fodder for lawyers and civil liberties extremists.
Never mind that Joe Klein was wrong on the facts, why does he think those of us that are serious about our civil liberties are merely playing at partisan politics? Why does he call us extremists? He seems concerned that our extremism is going to be used, or twisted, into devastating campaign commercials. There are many problems with Klein’s take on this. Let me take them one at a time.
1) Obviously, the biggest problem is that Klein was wrong on the facts. In fact, he was 180 degrees away from the truth. So, unsurprisingly, his logic isn’t valid because it is based on a faulty premise.
2) Whenever he expresses a political preference, Klein favors the Democrats. His concern here is that the Democrats are damaging their electoral prospects. At least ostensibly, Klein is slamming the Democrats out of concern. He is trying to offer constructive advice. So, why, once he realized he was wrong on the facts, didn’t he tell his readers that the Republicans had lied to him and to watch out for misleading and deceitful political advertisements in the upcoming election? Why did he instead say, ‘The Republican Committee staff disagrees and says my reporting is correct’?
The Republican Committee staff lied. Klein knows that now. And, now that he knows it, shouldn’t he warn his readers that they should expect to be lied to as well? Isn’t he even offended that he was lied to and that this resulted in him reporting something that is 180 degrees away from the truth? Doesn’t his credibility mean anything to him?
3) Why does Klein so blithely trade away our civil liberties?
…Democratic concessions (on immunity for telecoms who allowed access to information, after receiving a direct written request from the government, in a way that would be legal under the new law) are a small price to pay for the larger principle of defining the 4th Amendment rights of US residents in the light of new technologies.
I have ridiculed Joe Klein many times in the past. But I ask these questions with sincerity. I actually want to know the answers to these questions. And, in the interest of clarity, let me set out why I reject Klein’s view on the both the politics and the principles.
While I acknowledge that technological changes have given individual terrorists more lethal means to create murder and mayhem and that this requires us to aggressively monitor suspicious communications, it is also true that technological changes have given the government a much greater ability to invade our privacy. And it isn’t just my privacy that I am concerned about. I am concerned about the privacy of the political campaign of the eventual Democratic nominee for president. How can they use email and cell phones with any expectation of privacy if there is no FISA court overseeing wiretaps, if judges will grant warrants based on flimsy standards, and if the FBI can issue National Security Letters without judicial oversight?
Am I going to take the word of George W. Bush? Bush’s Department of Justice?
Let me ask Klein this? In your experience, has the Bush administration been truthful? Do you not recall the Pentagon spying on anti-war Quaker groups? Do you not recall former Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge comments about the terror alerts of 2002:
“More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it,” Ridge told reporters. “Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on (alert). … There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?'”
Klein, do you remember when Jose Padilla was plotting to blow up a radiological bomb? Do you remember when the government dropped that accusation? Do you remember how many times Dick Cheney claimed that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague? Did you ever read about how Zarqawi was largely a myth?
THE US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program.
For the past two years US military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicise Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the “US home audience” as a target of a broader propaganda campaign.
Even beyond the deplorable record of the Bush administration’s relentless hype, distortion, fear-mongering, scapegoating, and false accusations, and even beyond their illegal warrantless wiretapping, unconstitutional use of National Security Letters, their violation of habeas corpus, their use of torture…we have the potential for political mischief.
Who are the real extremists in this situation, Joe? Are the civil libertarians extreme? Or, are the Republicans extreme? And what do we say about the good people that did nothing while their rights were violated and then taken away?
We went through this before. Remember the Nixon administration? Back then we knew how to deal with criminals in the White House. Back then we had reporters that did not settle for misleading explanations from the Republicans. Why is the media failing us now?
If you’re really honest with yourself, Joe, you’ll realize that you are part of the problem. It’s not only your lousy reporting. It’s not only your weak advice. It’s your lack of concern. You act as though the Bush administration is just business as usual. We civil libertarians are desperately trying to make sure that the Bush administration does not become ‘usual’…that it is branded as criminal…and that no future administration can use this one as a precedent to justify similar criminality and executive power. Why are you fighting us?
