FISA, Feingold, and a Filibuster?

Watch video, courtesy of the New America Foundation, in which Sen. Russell Feingold fields a question from The Media Consortium’s Brian Beutler.

In the wake of the House of Representatives’ passage of a bill last week that grants the White House wide latitude to spy on American citizens, and that effectively forces courts to throw out lawsuits against lawbreaking telecommunications companies, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., predicted today that the Senate would likely follow suit, despite strong protests from civil liberties groups and a majority of Democratic party members.”I’m very worried we’re not going to be able to prevail,” Feingold said.Feingold was the featured guest at a New America Foundation event where he discussed systemic gaps in the country’s collection of foreign intelligence. But during a question and answer session, he fielded several questions about the controversial wiretapping law.The Wisconsin Democrat voiced considerable frustration with members of his own party, who, he says, have enabled the sweeping new legislation. “Sen. Dodd and I and Sen. Leahy are going to do everything we can to stop this mistake,” Feingold noted, referring to fellow opponents of the bill. “But I’m extremely concerned that not only virtually every Republican… but far too many Democrats will vote the wrong way.”"We met with Sen. Reid on Friday morning,” said Feingold, speaking of himself and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., “and we indicated our desire that this thing not just be jammed through, we’ll be requiring key procedural votes and we’ll also be taking some time on the floor this week to indicate the problems with this legislation.”This won’t be the first time the duo has tried to stall the enactment of broad surveillance powers by using procedural tactics. Last December, amid the uproar over the possibility that the government would retroactively immunize telecommunications companies who participated in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, Dodd spearheaded a filibuster of a similar set of FISA amendments — a move that ultimately prompted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to pull the bill from the floor.

Progressive activists and civil libertarians hailed the filibuster, and the Democratic party’s greater decision not to cave in to White House demands on a national security issue. Nonetheless, several senior Democrats spent the intervening months trying to accommodate the Republicans. And despite containing less than a handful of narrow improvements over the previous amendments, the new legislation has much wider support among Democratic leaders. Many of them claim the bill represents a worthy compromise.

“That’s a farce and it’s political cover,” Feingold said. “Anybody who claims this is an okay bill, I really question if they’ve even read it. ”

“Democrats enabled [this],” Feingold went on. “Some of the rank-and-file Democrats in the Senate who were elected on this reform platform unfortunately voted with Kit Bond, who’s just giggling, he’s so happy with what he got. We caved in.”

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., is the ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and has been the Bush administration’s chief congressional point man in its attempt to secure both retroactive immunity for telephone companies and much wider authority to conduct surveillance on both foreign and domestic targets.

Feingold also described critics’ chief concern with the provision of immunity — specifically that it will mean the eventual dismissal of a number of lawsuits that might otherwise have shed some light on the president’s legally dubious Terrorist Surveillance Program. “It doesn’t simply have the impact of potentially allowing telephone companies to break the law,” Feingold said. “It may well prevent us from getting to the core issue, that I’ve challenged since December 2005, which is the president ran an illegal program I think that was essentially an impeachable offense.”

Immunity, though, may ultimately constitute a distraction from an even larger spectacle. “Frankly, the tremendous and legitimate focus on the immunity has covered up and sat on top of this issue,” Feingold said. “I think the big story is ultimately not going to be that the telephone companies got immunity… it’s that our personal conversations are now in a giant database somewhere over which we have no control.”

Holding up his BlackBerry, Feingold warned, “Every time you e-mail my daughter or text-message her in England, anybody contacts their son or daughter in Iraq, anybody has kids [spending] junior year abroad, anybody that has a business associate anywhere around the world, all of that is now sucked up into a database over which there is essentially no control for the first time in American history.” All of this has happened to you, and your communications, in a way that you never would have thought was possible in this country…. we’re going to fall over on this.”

The Senate will most likely take up FISA later this week, and one source of disappointment for activists and civil libertarians alike has been presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s position on the issue.

“I don’t know for sure what Sen. Obama’s going to do,” Feingold said.

In October, the Illinois Senator promised to support a filibuster of any bill that grants amnesty to telecommunications providers. In a statement last week, though, Obama indicated he would support the House bill.

See more tagged with: FISA and warrantless wiretapping

House Passes FISA

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed moments ago in the House by a vote of 293-129.

Joining the significant majority were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silveste Reyes. An angry John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, opposed it.

The bill will in practice provide legal immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the President Bush’s Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) through a provision that will result in the dismissal of lawsuits that might have shined some light on the particulars of the administration’s warrantless wiretapping activities. It does mandate an inspector general report on the particulars of TSP, but whether that mandate survives the president’s signing-statement pen remains to be seen.

During the floor debate, most of Democrats who supported the legislation pointed to a provision that makes FISA the exclusive arbiter of the nation’s wiretapping activities — a provision that will allow the supporters of the bill to express their shock and disappointment when this or any future president decides to ignore the law anyhow.

Now the bill moves over to the Senate where all of these, and other provisions will be debated further.

See more tagged with: FISA, Rep. John Conyers and Rep. Nancy Pelosi

FISA Update

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a press conference a few moments ago where she endorsed the new FISA language. It will be up for debate (and possibly a vote) on the floor of the House tomorrow.

See more tagged with: FISA and Rep. Nancy Pelosi

FISA, Compromised

After Democrats stood their ground and refused to pass a series of draconian FISA amendments in February, negotiations over the wiretapping law went behind closed doors. In the months since then, news reports have occasionally suggested that another Democratic party sell-out was imminent, only to be superseded by other reports indicating that negotiations were ongoing. Until today.

A few moments ago, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer released what he refers to as a “bipartisan” “compromise” bill: The FISA Amendment Act of 2008, which he authored along with Jay Rockefeller, Kit Bond, and Roy Blunt (respectively, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence committee, and the House Minority whip). The word “bipartisan” is technically indisputable. The word “compromise”, by contrast, is a total farce.

The most controversial elements of the February legislation were provisions that would have allowed the White House to wiretap American citizens without a warrant, and that would have immunized telecommunications companies from participating in the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program back in the halcyon days when warrantless wiretapping was unquestionably illegal.

Here’s how the new bill deals with the immunity question.

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a civil action may not lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be promptly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the district court of the United States in which such action is pending that…the assistance alleged to have been provided by the electronic communication service provider was in connection with an intelligence activity involving communications that was authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007.

That’s the game. Non-profit groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation can sue the telecoms if they want, but if Attorney General Michael Mukasey says “presto”, the lawsuits must be dismissed.

As for the nitty gritty of surveillance powers the bill authorizes, here’s what the ACLU says: “This bill allows for mass and untargeted surveillance of Americans’ communications…. The process by which this deal has come about has been as secretive as the warrantless wiretapping program it is seeking to legitimize.” And the media blackout over the last few months is testament to that. None of Congress’ civil liberties stalwarts partook in these negotiations. Neither John Conyers, nor Patrick Leahy–chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees respectively–got a say. Nor did Sens. Chris Dodd or Russel Feingold. Nor did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Leahy says “the legislation unveiled today… is not a bill I can support.”

Nonetheless, it looks very much as if Pelosi–who has substantial power to control what does and does not appear on the floor of the House–will allow this to come to a vote.

I’ll keep my eye on the comings and goings.

See more tagged with: FISA and Rep. Nancy Pelosi

A General’s False Testimony on KBR

Sen. Byron Dorgan, in a May 21, 2008, meeting with reporters, speaking about the April 2007 testimony of Major Gen. Jerome Johnson - 29 seconds.

Will the Pentagon correct Major Gen. Jerome Johnson’s tainted testimony on the contaminated water KBR provided to the troops?

By Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium

When Major Gen. Jerome Johnson appeared under oath before a congressional
committee last year, he told enough untruths about KBR’s work for the
military that the US Army took the unusual step of retracting a portion of
his testimony. Now it appears that Johnson also misled members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on another KBR-related matter: its provisioning of contaminated water to U.S. troops in Iraq.

Nearly three months ago Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., chair of the
Democratic Policy Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates
on the subject of Johnson’s testimony, but he has yet to received a reply.
“This was either an attempt by General Johnson to deliberately deceive the
Congress, or a display of negligent disregard for facts,” Dorgan wrote in
the March 12 letter. “I hope you will review this matter and take
appropriate action.”

In April 2007, Johnson, then the commanding general of the US Army
Sustainment Command, which is responsible for providing food, lodging, and a
range of logistical support to the troops, appeared before the Senate Armed
Services Committee to answer questions about the Pentagon’s primary
logistics contract in Iraq. During the hearing, the committee’s chairman,
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., alleged that the Army had reimbursed KBR, then a
Halliburton subsidiary, for the cost of overpriced trailers the company had
purchased through a subcontractor.

“[T]he [Defense] department has not paid KBR the $100 million for the
trailers,” Johnson told Levin. “As a matter of fact, KBR’s cost is still
suspended.” Johnson when on to say that the DOD document from which Levin
drew his information was “inaccurate.” But it was Johnson who didn’t have
his facts straight.

More than seven months passed before the Army acknowledged Johnson’s
misstatement. “We sincerely regret the confusion that arose during the
testimony and apologize for any impact to the Committee’s deliberations,”
wrote Claude Bolton, assistant secretary of the Army, to Levin. In his
“correction for the record,” Bolton wrote that the Army had indeed paid KBR
for the trailers, even though the Defense Contract Audit Agency had called
the purchase “unreasonable due to KBR purchasing the [trailers] from someone other than the low bidder without…adequate justification.”

The media paid little attention to the slip-up and subsequent correction,
perhaps in part because, as the Army Times noted, “Bolton’s letter ends the argument between the Army and Levin’s committee because there is no way to recoup the money.”

Overlooked entirely, though, was a different part of Johnson’s testimony,
when he claimed the Army was unaware of reports that KBR had also been
supplying military bases with contaminated water. Because of their
negligence, a 2006 investigation by Dorgan’s policy committee found,
soldiers had unwittingly bathed in and brushed their teeth with water that,
by the senator’s account, was more polluted than the Euphrates river. The
committee’s findings prompted Dorgan to request an investigation by the
Pentagon’s Inspector General.

When Levin raised Dorgan’s charge that water provided to troops in Iraq
had tested positive for E. coli and other bacteria common to animal feces,
Johnson disputed the allegations
[PDF]. Acknowledging the inspector general’s then-ongoing investigation,
Johnson told the committee, “No issues have been found thus far that I’m
aware of.” Johnson did confirm that allegations had been raised about
contaminated water at Camp Ar-Ramadi, a base about 70 miles west of Baghdad, but said “we found no issues with the water there. After an inspection, we did not confirm the allegations that were made.”

Johnson even denied that KBR had anything to do with the provision of
water to troops at the base. “KBR was not operating the water site,” he told
the panel. But this March, when the inspector general’s office released its
report, investigators noted that the Pentagon had been notified on March 31,
2007 — three weeks before Johnson’s testimony — of KBR’s role in
providing polluted water to military bases, which “may have degraded to the
point of causing waterborne illnesses among US forces.”

Investigators found that KBR was indeed in control of water quality at Camp Ar-Ramadi, and that at three of four US bases subject to inspection, including Ar-Ramadi, KBR had shirked its contractual obligation to test the water it supplied.

At a meeting with reporters last month, Dorgan described his efforts to
uncover the extent of the unsanitary water conditions at US bases in Iraq in
the face of denials from both the Army and its contractor, KBR. “It’s clear
everyone was lying, including [Gen. Johnson], who came to the Senate
committee and deceived the committee,” Dorgan said.

At press time, Levin had not responded to a request for comment.

Johnson now serves as deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Army Forces Command in Fort McPherson, Georgia. The Pentagon declined to comment on Johnson’s testimony or why Dorgan’s letter to Gates has gone unanswered.

More from Sen. Dorgan’s May 21 meeting with reporters - 1:51

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Looking For a Few Good Republicans:
Byron Dorgan’s Quest For Wartime Oversight

The North Dakota senator has made investigating contractor corruption his mission, but will he succeed in creating a congressional committee devoted to it?

By Brian Beutler

In the wake of a recent Defense Department report from the Office of Inspector General that documents (PDF file) the improper accounting of billions of dollars in war contracting funds, the issue of waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq is once again in the spotlight on Capitol Hill.

Those findings were amplified on Tuesday when the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-based watchdog group, obtained a separate inspector general report that found that the number of Pentagon auditors overseeing military contracts has not kept pace with defense spending, which has doubled under the Bush administration — creating conditions that are ripe for corruption and abuse.

While Congress has launched sporadic inquiries into contracting fraud, one legislator, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., has made it his mission to investigate contractor corruption.

Dorgan chairs the Democratic Policy Committee, a Senate entity tasked with gathering and distributing policy, strategy, and oversight information to congressional staff and other Democratic officials. (There is also a Republican Policy Committee.) Since 2003, the DPC has held 14 hearings dedicated to exposing the corruption of the Iraq reconstruction effort, and last month the committee released an encyclopedic report detailing major examples of fraud.

When the war in Iraq began, says Dorgan, “no one really [decided] to say, ‘All right, now we’re going to be an investigative committee so there’s accountability.’” In order to fill the void, Dorgan decided to use his committee for that purpose — though its oversight authority is somewhat diminished by the fact that the panel, as a partisan committee, lacks subpoena power. In light of this, since 2005 Dorgan has attempted to establish a congressional committee with full oversight clout to oversee military contracting. Dubbed the Special Committee on War and Reconstruction Contracting, the proposed panel is modeled on the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (commonly known as the Truman committee), which was charged with investigating the waste and corruption of billions of dollars of World War II-era defense contracts.

So far legislation to create a committee to oversee contracting for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq hasn’t gained traction. During the previous Congress, which ended in December 2006, Dorgan’s resolution was swatted down three separate times along partisan lines. (In each case, presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain voted with the Republican majority to nix the committee.)

A Dorgan aide says that the third-term senator plans to introduce his proposal again within the year, and is currently looking for Republican co-sponsors, which he believes will improve his chances of passing the bill. In the past, the only Republican to vote in favor of the commission was Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, who lost his seat during the Democratic landslide in November of 2006. So Dorgan’s contracting committee is still a long shot.

Other senators have taken a milder approach to the idea of a modern-day Truman committee. Last year, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. — along with all of his fellow freshman Democrats in the Senate — sponsored a measure mandating the creation of an independent bipartisan commission (distinct from a congressional committee, which has subpoena power) to “investigate U.S. wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The measure passed unanimously last September as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act, only to be written out of existence by a presidential signing statement when the bill hit President Bush’s desk in January.

If Dorgan gets his way, it could substantially bolster the Democrats’ efforts to uncover and deter acts of fraud and corruption in war contracting. Currently those efforts have been driven almost exclusively by House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich. Since taking the House oversight gavel in January 2007, Waxman has held a host of hearings on defense contracting fraud, with a particular emphasis on the companies, like Blackwater and KBR, that have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of the war in Iraq.

Levin has spotlighted the issue of contractor fraud on a number of occasions, but, like Waxman, the focus of his committee extends well beyond contracting oversight. The existing congressional committees, Dorgan says, “have not had the investigators and the time,” to give this issue the focus it deserves. “So, we have held these hearings, and the waste, the fraud, and the abuse is staggering.”

——–
Brian Beutler is the Washington correspondent for The Media Consortium, a network of progressive media organizations.

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Border Harassment

On May 11, the Rio Grande Guardian reported that customs agents in the Rio Grande Valley have devised a plan to check the documents of evacuees who attempt to board evacuation buses in the event of a hurricane.

The article [no link] reads reads:

Anyone who is not a citizen or is not a legal resident will be held in specially designed areas in the Valley that are ‘made to withstand hurricanes’ said Dan Doty, a Border Patrol spokesperson for the Valley sector.

When the weather clears, of course, they’ll be deported.

This incident–and with several other examples of the threat the national security state poses to civil liberties–have come to the attention of Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who chairs the House Judiciary committee. On Friday, he brought the issue up before the Congress: “[T]he Border Patrol [has] said that they have reassessed the policy in light of last week’s exercise. They told us that [their] ‘primary role in such events will be the safeguarding of life. No enforcement role will be undertaken that will in any way impede the safe and orderly evacuation of any member of the south Texas population.’”

That’s a slightly different tune. And unfortunately, we may only learn the Border Patrol’s true intentions when a real disaster strikes.

See more tagged with: Homeland Security and john conyers

Lost Iraq Funds

An Inspector General report released today confirms what just about everybody already knew–that the Department of Defense has squandered billions of American dollars due to contracting fraud and abuse in Iraq.

In response, House Oversight and Government Reform committee chairman Henry Waxman held a hearing today to spell out some of the reports findings, which include:

• That of the $8.2 billion in contracting funds audited by the IG between April 2001 and June 2006, 95 percent were improperly accounted for, and $1.4 billion in payments “were missing critically important documentation.” Some commercial payments were distributed without the documentation of any promised service. As a result IG officials have referred 28 suspicious cases to criminal investigators
• That of the $2.7 billion congress has appropriated for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP)–created to help foreign agents to provide humanitarian relief–the IG found that $134.8 million was distributed without a complete audit trail. The IG was “unable to ensure that CERP funds provided to Coalition Partners have been used for their intended purposes. In other words, the money was handed to foreign governments without any meaningful strings.
• That none of the $1.8 billion in seized Iraqi assets–intended for humanitarian purposes, and audited by the IG–was adequately accounted for.

To these findings, Waxman intoned that “there is something very wrong when our wounded troops have to fill out forms in triplicate for meal money while billions of dollars in cash are handed out in Iraq with no accountability.”

Though concerned with the potential for corruption and waste, Republicans on the committee sought to downplay the importance of the IG’s findings, and to divorce the issue of waste from any questions about the conduct of the war itself.

“Few people operating in an active combat zone would refer to the documentation requirements…as ‘mission critical’ work,” said Ranking Member Tom Davis. “Similarly,” he went on, “no one should deny the imperative to tell American taxpayers how their money is being spent. So we need to balance these two truths…. We should not let a focus on the war blind us to the government-wide need for veteran finance officials to watch over large, and growing, expenditures.”

Waxman invited Defense officials to testify at today’s hearing, but the department refused to cooperate. At the end of the hearing, Rep. John Tierney–who chairs the National Security subcommittee–suggested that the committee consider compelling their appearance. “I think we have subpoena power, and I’d ask [Chairman Waxman] and the ranking member at some point in time to consider using it where appropriate so the Department of Defense wouldn’t think they can avoid… public scrutiny.”

Perhaps in an echo of hearings to come, Waxman responded: “I think you make an excellent point. I think we need to hear from the Defense Department. “

See more tagged with: Blackwater, iraq and Rep. John Tierney

Torture at Guantanamo

Murat Kurnaz, a young Turkish citizen born and raised in Germany, traveled to Pakistan to learn more about Islam in October 2001, weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. In short order, arrested and held by U.S. forces in Kandahar, and then shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Bad timing was his only crime.

By 2002, according to documents obtained by his attorneys, both the U.S. and German governments had determined conclusively that Kurnaz was neither a terrorist, nor a terrorist sympathizer or supporter, but American military officials nonetheless refused to release him and instead held him in solitary confinement for five years. For much of that time, he was unaware that anybody in his family knew where he was or if he was alive. And for the entire stretch he was subjected to torture.

In his account before the House Foreign Affairs’ Oversight Subcommittee on Tuesday, Kurnaz detailed a technique visited upon him in Kandahar called “water treatment”–a perverse twist on a more widely known technique called waterboarding–wherein the victim’s head is forced into a bucket of water while he’s punched repeatedly in the stomach, causing him to inhale water.

Additionally, he said, he was subjected to religious and sexual humiliation, administered unknown drugs against his will, and electrocuted via wires attached to his feet.

In a bitter irony, Kurnaz’s innocence became the rationale for his continued incarceration. He was told repeatedly that he’d be held forever unless he signed a statement admitting his role in a suicide bombing that was alleged to have happened in 2003. Kurnaz was, of course, in prison in 2003, and the suicide bombing he supposedly helped to orchestrate turned out to be a fiction.

“America’s adherence to the rule of law… and American values [have been] ignored. The treatment of these detainees–both in Gitmo and elsewhere–has been appalling,” said William Delahunt, the subcommittee chairman.

The two committee Republicans to attend the hearing were sympathetic to Kurnaz’s plight, but ranking member Dana Rohrbacher remained incredulous that the treatment he faced was anything other than an aberration. “I don’t believe it,” Rohrbacher intoned, suggesting that torture is not part of the military’s detainee treatment policy. To support his contention, Rohrbacher noted that none of the congressmen who have visited Guantanamo–Democrat or Republican–has returned with any evidence that torture is a systemic problem

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who sits on the House Judiciary committee scolded Rohrbacher, noting that American politicians are not allowed access to prisoners when they visit the installation, and have no other way of ascertaining how endemic the torture problem really is.

Rohrbacher’s disbelief also flies in the face of scores of media and watchdog reports, which show that prisoner abuse has been a matter of policy at Guantanamo and other U.S.-operated facilities around the world for years. And on the same day as the hearing, the FBI’s inspector general released a report praising the Bureau for not participating in the abusive interrogations conducted by other agencies–a direct insinuation that other agencies do indeed torture prisoners.

For his part, Kurnaz says stories like his are common among the prisoners who’ve been held at Guantanamo, 250 of whom remain in captivity. “Often people were released because their countries demanded it,” he said. “Others remain because their countries do not.”

See more tagged with: civil rights and torture

Contempt In Court

On Friday, White House lawyers filed a motion in civil court, arguing
against the House’s own filing last month in its attempt to enforce
subpoenas against Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers. As I reported at the
time, the White House appears to be arguing that the courts ought to
stay out of the fight and let the House use other means of leverage
to get the information it seeks from the executive branch.

the Legislative Branch may vindicate its interests
without enlisting judicial support: Congress has a variety of other
means by which it can exert pressure on the Executive Branch, such as
the withholding of consent for Presidential nominations, reducing
Executive Branch appropriations, and the exercise of other powers
Congress has under the Constitution.

The entire document runs 83 pages. I’ll try to get my hands on a
copy, to see what other dubious arguments the administration is making.

See more tagged with: contempt citation and house judiciary