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A Long, Not So Gentle Backslide: Ersatz Oversight

I'm reminded of the "With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies" quote when I consider current events in our Democratic-majority Congress, more specifically, the Intelligence Committee and the FISA/Telecom Amnesty Issue. What passes for oversight and checks and balances these days, while a distinct improvement over the sad history of the first six years of this new century, still has a long way to go to get back to where it was a generation ago after the reforms that followed Watergate and the Nixon resignation.

Broadcast journalist, author, and social commentarian Studs Terkel has a great Op/Ed piece in the NY Times, The Wiretap This Time, where he puts recent events regarding FISA and Telecom Amnesty into perspective. And this guy has perspective:

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1934 with a law degree but says instead of practicing, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel and also joined a theater group. He joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, working in radio, doing work ranging from voicing soap opera productions and announcing news and sports, to presenting shows of recorded music and writing radio scripts and advertisements.

Terkel is well known for his radio program titled The Studs Terkel Program that aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997. The one-hour program appeared each weekday during all of that time. He interviewed guests as diverse as Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein and Alexander Frey. Wikipedia

This Op/Ed is valuable read, as Terkel reflects with first-hand experience on an inglorious past that saw the travesties of McCarthism move on to domestic spying and wiretapping of political opponents (think Martin Luther King), etc., etc. While we thought hoped we had put this behind us with the Church Amendment in the 1970s, apparently there is no rest when it comes to defending the Constitution, especially when you're defending it against assaults from within your own government.

In 1978, with broad public support, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which placed national security investigations, including wiretapping, under a system of warrants approved by a special court. The law was not perfect, but as a result of its enactment and a series of subsequent federal laws, a generation of Americans has come to adulthood protected by a legal structure and a social compact making clear that government will not engage in unbridled, dragnet seizure of electronic communications.

The Bush administration, however, tore apart that carefully devised legal structure and social compact. To make matters worse, after its intrusive programs were exposed, the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a bill that legitimized blanket wiretapping without individual warrants. The legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, requiring the government to obtain a warrant before reading the e-mail messages or listening to the telephone calls of its citizens, and to state with particularity where it intends to search and what it expects to find.

Compounding these wrongs, Congress is moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a "get out of jail free card" to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers. Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it's impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them.

And it is not as though the telecommunications companies did not know that their actions were illegal. Judge Vaughn Walker of federal district court in San Francisco, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, noted that in an opinion in one of the immunity provision lawsuits the "very action in question has previously been held unlawful." The Wiretap This Time

Posted on October 29, 2007 at 01:39 PM

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