Exclusive: Pandering to the Far-Left Fringe: Democrat Leadership Sets Stage for National Security Battle Royal
Joel Himelfarb


Author: Joel Himelfarb

Date Published: 2007-08-20


Recent legislation temporarily has aided the intelligence community to monitor terrorist communications, but some congressional leaders want to make sure the legislation does not become permanent. FSM Contributing Editor Joel Himelfarb has the troubling details.

 

Pandering to the Far-Left Fringe:

Democrat Leadership Sets Stage for National Security Battle Royal

 

By Joel Himelfarb

 

If Gen. David Petraeus were to issue a progress report on Iraq that proved to be more positive than expected, that would be "a real big problem for us."-- House Majority Whip James Clyburn, South Carolina Democrat, quoted in the Washington Post on July 30th.

 

Rarely will an American politician in wartime speak so candidly about how invested his party is in seeing his country fail on the battlefield. Clyburn, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic leadership are worried that if Petraeus' September 15th report illustrates that progress is being made in Iraq, it would split the Democratic Caucus between antiwar leadership loyalists and members of the relatively moderate 47-member Blue Dog Coalition. Until now, the Blue Dogs (responding to public-opinion polls showing deep public frustration with the war in Iraq) have overwhelmingly supported Pelosi and Rep. John Murtha's (PA) unsuccessful efforts to implement a "slow-bleed" strategy of crippling the war effort by imposing restrictions on funding and troop levels that would make it impossible for Petraeus to do his job.  

 

One reason why success against people who want to murder us would be "a real big problem" for many Democrats is that their left-wing political base – Daily Kos and other left-wing blogs who operate as ideological enforcers for the party – would go ballistic. As innumerable postings make clear, these people have been growing increasingly unhappy and frustrated over the failure of antiwar Democrat politicians to act on their convictions and cut off funding for the war in Iraq.

 

Now they have a new reason to be angry: the fact that 41 House Democrats, nearly all of them Blue Dogs, and 16 Senate Democrats responded to pleas from Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and the Bush Administration and voted to ensure that U.S. intelligence agencies can monitor terrorists' e-mail, faxes and telephone conversations for the next six months. The Senate vote was 60-28; the House vote 227-183. Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid denounced the legislation and vowed to revisit the issue when Congress returns. 

 

That this legislation – literally an issue on which millions of innocent lives could hang in the balance – ever became the subject of such a knockdown, drag-out political debate is testament to how far left the Democrat Party leadership currently is. Back in 1978, the Democratic Congress passed and President Carter signed into law the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allowed warrantless surveillance of foreign telephone calls – the overwhelming majority of which were relayed wirelessly. As a result of technological advances over the past 29 years, the majority of foreign telephone calls now pass through wires (many of them fiber optic cables located in the United States.) Until earlier this year, this was very good news for agencies charged with protecting us, such as the National Security Agency. If the NSA wanted to monitor a suspected terrorist phone call placed from Karachi to London, Karbala to Beirut or Kandahar to Tehran, it was very easy and perfectly legal to place a wiretap in this country.

 

In March of this year, all of that was called into question, when a judge on a special court overseeing FISA issued a ruling that challenged the government's ability to collect data from wires in this country – even if they were monitoring foreign terrorist targets. In May, another judge told the administration that the wording of the law required that the government get a warrant every time it wanted to obtain information from a fixed wire.

 

Here's the way Washington Post correspondents Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus described what happened next:

 

The decisions had the immediate practical effect of forcing the NSA to laboriously ask judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court each time it wanted to capture such foreign communications from a wire or a fiber on U.S. soil, a task so time-consuming that a backlog developed.  “ We shoved a lot of warrants at the court' but still could not keep up,” [a senior administration official] said. “We needed thousands of warrants, but the most we could do was hundreds.'” The official depicted it as an especially 'big problem' by the end of May, in which the NSA was 'losing capability' to monitor suspected terrorists.

 

Beginning in late April, Admiral McConnell (who headed the NSA during President Clinton's first term) had been attempting in earnest to persuade the Democrat Leadership to work out an agreement on language clarifying that FISA permits U.S. intelligence agencies to carry out warrantless surveillance of foreign terrorist communications, but the Democrats dragged their feet. In the weeks leading up to the August recess – as U.S. intelligence agencies began to hear increasing terrorist "chatter" which suggested that a terrorist attack on the American homeland might be coming soon – McConnell embarked on a whirlwind lobbying campaign to persuade Congress of the urgency of the problem.

 

Senior Democrats wanted to postpone a FISA fix until after the August recess, but McConnell warned that the situation had grown so dangerous that a fix couldn't wait until next month. It soon became apparent that Pelosi, et al, had no intention of agreeing to anything that would restore the intelligence community's prior capability to monitor terrorist suspects' electronic communications. The Democrats, said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) , and ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, were insisting that U.S. intelligence agencies jump through myriad bureaucratic hoops by demonstrating "a connection to a terrorist group" in order to bug suspected terrorists; it was insufficient to demonstrate a mere link to terrorist-sponsoring countries like Iran, North Korea or Syria.

 

As it became apparent that the Democratic leadership had no interest in passing something that would give U.S. intelligence agencies the ability to do their jobs, McConnell focused on courting the Blue Dogs – with remarkable success, as it turned out. But even among the Blue Dogs, McConnell was treated to an example of how rough the Democrats can play. On Aug. 2, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Cal.) sounded like she was interested in working out a solution with McConnell. She told The Hill newspaper she had heard about increased terrorist chatter, that she believed there was a real risk that terrorists could strike the United States this month, and that an overhaul of the bill could help the NSA deter it. One day later, however, she was joining with House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) to sandbag McConnell, and Harman (who has become a veritable human punching bag for left-wing bloggers) subsequently attacked the White House for playing "the fear card" on FISA.

Look for things to get much, much uglier in the past few weeks. The fringe-left bloggers are furious with Pelosi for being outmaneuvered by the administration over FISA and will demand that the Democrats do everything possible to prevent Adm. McConnell from getting the permanent fix he needs to the FISA law when Congress returns. The first battle will likely involve retroactive liability protection for telephone companies (a provision not included in the temporary, six-month FISA fix that President Bush signed into law). Trial lawyers and self-styled "civil libertarians" will fight for the right to file lawsuits against companies that voluntarily comply with the terrorist surveillance program.  Look for politicians like Reid, Pelosi and Harman to be in the corner of such trial lawyers and “civil libertarians”, and look for Republicans and sane Democrats to push back very, very hard.

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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Joel Himelfarb is the assistant editor of the editorial page of the Washington Times.

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