The Failures of Our National Security Elite by Kevin

It looks as if Reid and Pelosi are going to allow telecom companies to protected for their illegal activities with regards to potential spying on Americans:

I just got off the phone with Caroline Fredrickson from the ACLU, and the news is about what you’d expect if you have witnessed Democratic House behavior over the past six months. The bottom line is that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are disorganized and giving no signals to members on the FISA wiretapping expansion and retroactive immunity to telecom companies, which is going to result in horrific legislation. In the Senate, Jay Rockefeller is once again inviting Mike McConnell into closed hearings on how to fix the FISA law, and the markup is next week. There are no drafts of legislation around, which is a bad sign. The Senate Judiciary Committee is hamstrung by Dianne Feinstein, who prevents a majority, and by the instincts of Democrat leaders who, in a conflicts between Judiciary and Intelligence, will go with Intelligence because of a perceived fear of national security weakness.

Rockefeller, in order to get something ‘bipartisan’ that can pass the Senate, is working with Kit Bond to draft something that can get to 60 votes. Bond of course is close to McConnell, and so it’s likely that the bill coming out of the Senate Judiciary is going to contain retroactive immunity for telecom companies (thank you lobbyist Jamie Gorelick) and a permanent fix to FISA that expands executive power. Reid and Pelosi, ironically, by ordering Democrats to move quickly so as to fix the problem they caused in July, are just accelerating the process of crafting this horrendous bill. This is complicated of course by the millions that telecom companies give to members on the Hill to prevent things like net neutrality from passing, though of course here too there’s no logic since much of that money goes to Republicans.

In the House, the Intelligence Committee is slightly better, but we have no drafts of legislation and it’s going to be marked up next week. Conyers on Judiciary, though opposed to FISA expansion, isn’t doing anything about this through his committee. The alternative to ‘fixing’ this legislation is to simply let the six month FISA extension of authority expire in February, and go back to the regime we had prior to August. There is literally no reason to do what the Democrats are about to do in the House and Senate.

Our national security elite is completely off the track. They have evolved, through a combination of McCarthyism, economic pressure from arms manufacturers, shallow press coverage, a romanticism of the effectiveness of violence in international affairs, and allergy to accountability into a group that has no respect for the law, for the notion that the people of the country have a right to decide the country’s direction, or any recognition that programs that take place in the dark inevitably lead to abuses. Their only answer to questions of national security is to increase the power of the security forces while decreasing the level of accountability. Anyone who suggests otherwise is branded as weak or un-serious. This has to change if the country has any hope of not devolving into a surveillance state.

And the only way to make those change is to elect better Democrats (I would say elect better democrats and Republicans, but all signs point to the authoritarian followers in this country being the base of the GOP) and to make sure that the current Democrats pay a high price for their failures here. Helping the ACLU become an NRA level political colossus would also help. Right now, the ACLU is practically the only organization that actually defends the Constitution and our personal liberty. If we are going to counter this mad rush to Biog Brother land, we are going to need a stronger Democratic party and a stronger ACLU.