Topic: Department of Homeland Security
Barr on Obama (II): FISA "If freed from the limiting forces of public awareness and involvement, President Obama would follow a long line of presidents who talk of enhanced individual liberty, but practice a policy of increased government power." - Bob Barrby George Dance
(libertarian)
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Obama & FISA
In his October 29 assessment of Barack Obama, Bob Barr tells Huffington Post's readers that "it would be hard for Sen. Obama not to be an improvement over the Bush administration on civil liberties. However," he points out, "here, too, Sen. Obama has demonstrated his willingness to trim under pressure."(1)
Barr is referring to Obama's actions relating to passage of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in July, 2008.
In late 2005, the New York Times had revealed that, beginning in 2002, the Bush administration had secretly authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States for evidence of terrorist activity without court-approved warrants, in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). (2)
AT & T and other telecommunications companies were subsequently hit with more than 40 lawsuits over their illegal co-operation with the NSA. (3)
As Barr sums up:
President George W. Bush violated the law when he ignored both the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress should have held him and his appointees accountable for their law-breaking. Moreover, telephone companies that aided and abetted executive branch law-breaking should have been left liable in the courts.
Instead, Congress responded by passing the Protect America Act of 2007 (PAA) which "removed the warrant requirement for government surveillance of foreign intelligence targets 'reasonably believed' to be outside of the United States." (Obama voted against the bill.) However, opponents of the PAA (which they called the "Police America Act") managed to tack a sunset provision onto the law, which caused it to expire in February, 2008. (4) The Senate promptly repassed its major provisions as the FISA Amendments Act; but the House of Representatives refused to go along.
Obama missed that February Senate vote due to his campaign, but he denounced the new legislation, declaring: "I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty." (5)
After months of wrangling, a "compromise" was reached in June. The revised FISA Amendments Act of 2008 reinstated the principle that eavesdropping had to be warranted by a FISA court; however, it lowered the grounds for a warrant to be issued to those set by PAA: "reasonable belief" that one party to a conversation is outside the United States. In addition, it granted the telecom companies that had illegally co-operated with the NSA retroactive immunity from their pending lawsuits. (3)
After the revised bill passed the House, Obama suddenly decided to support it "despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program of suspected terrorists." He also made "a firm pledge that, as president, I will carefully monitor the program." (5)
Obama's FISA flip angered even his own supporters. An opposition group, "President Obama, Please Get FISA Right," quickly grew to become the largest social networking group on his website. (6)
Another critic was Bob Barr, who blasted Obama in a campaign press release in July:
Sen. Barack Obama has reaffirmed his refusal to live up to his promise to oppose the Bush administration, which violated the law by conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans' telephone calls. Unfortunately, the Democrats also were more enablers of government abuse than defenders of American liberty.... But when the Democratic congressional leadership decided to concede to almost all of the administration's demands in rewriting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Sen. Obama went along with the crowd.... If Sen. Obama can so easily abandon a commitment on so fundamental an issue, is there any issue on which he will take a stand? (7)
Barr is just as scathing in his October assessment:
Sen. Obama folded, backing a "compromise" that gave the administration most everything that it wanted. No individualized warrants or evidence of law-breaking is required to authorize government spying on U.S. citizens' phone calls and emails. No administration officials paid the slightest cost for engaging in illegal conduct. No private firm suffered the slightest inconvenience for helping the government violate their customers' constitutional rights. This was the moment for Sen. Obama to prove that he possessed a true dedication to civil liberties, and he failed.
Conclusion
"Of course," Barr continues, "we all hope that, as president, [Obama] will feel freer to stand up for American liberties. But there also will be voices advising him to use the executive powers so freely expanded by his predecessor. Will he be strong enough to resist this Siren's Song? No one knows, but one thing is known: If freed from the limiting forces of public awareness and involvement, President Obama would follow a long line of presidents who talk of enhanced individual liberty, but practice a policy of increased government power."
So Barr recommends vigilance: "Sen. Obama's impending big victory will tempt liberals to relax and celebrate. Yet the time of greatest danger will be the transition, when Sen. Obama will be deciding on who to appoint and what direction to take."
He also, of course, recommends that his readers vote Libertarian rather than Democrat:
In other words, the best way to encourage Sen. Obama, if he is elected president, to follow the straight and narrow is to actively and clearly demonstrate that we, the American people, are concerned both about our civil liberties and his commitment to protect them. The way to do that is to vote for Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party.
And of course that did not happen, or happened only at the margins. Barr finished his campaign with slightly more than 500,000 votes: not bad at all in Libertarian terms, but nothing for Obama to lose any sleep over.
However, that was to be expected. Obama's was not only a charismatic but an iconic candidacy, and very few of his followers could be expected to forsake him over policy lapses. That does not mean, though, that they remain indifferent to those lapses. As Mark Stark, the founder of "Please Get FISA Right," told the press last summer: "Of course I'm going to vote for [Obama] in November. (But) we're keeping score, and there's going to be a time when he needs us. We have long memories." (6)
Should that score worsen by 2010, there will be more reason for anti-war, anti-FISA liberals and progressives to be aware of another political party that shares their views. The Barr campaign did a herculean job of reaching out to conservatives this year; but an Obama administration is sure to provide many new opportunuties for outreach to the left as well -- many new reasons for liberals to be reminded, as Barr reminds them here, that
Only one party has consistently stood up for the Constitution and against expansive executive power: the Libertarian Party. Only one party has consistently demanded a quick and full withdrawal from Iraq: the Libertarian Party. Only one party has demanded that all administration officials, legislators, and bureaucrats be held accountable for violating the law or the Constitution: the Libertarian Party.
(2) James Risen & Eric Lichtblau, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," New York Times, Dec. 15, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
(4) "Protect America Act of 2007," Wikipedia (accessed Nov. 30, 2008). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_America_Act_of_2007
(5) Paul Kane, "Obama Supports FISA Legislation, Angering Left," The Trail, Washington Post, Jun. 20, 2008. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/06/20/obama_supports_fisa_legislatio.html
The views expressed in this
article are those of George Dance only and do not represent
the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. George Dance is
solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an
employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
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