Breaking the law or good citizenship?
So it’s okay to break the law if you do it in good faith to maintain national security?
Those follow-on attacks never materialized. Not, we know, from lack of effort on the part of al-Qaida. But success in deterring terrorist attacks has bred a sort of complacence that has spawned punitive lawsuits against companies that were acting in good faith to assist the intelligence community.
A good way to end that kind of sensible corporate citizenship is to let the post-9-11 lawsuits go forward, as Democratic House leaders want. That would be a congressional mistake the next president, Republican or Democrat, and the nation may come to regret.
These companies broke the law. Not all companies cooperated and for some strange reason the executive branch didn’t go to court to get them to cooperate. Furthermore, the Bush administration was given several opportunities, actually solicited by members of Congress, to change the FISA law in the aftermath of 9-11. The administration turned it down saying the current law meet it’s needs.
Taking this sort of thinking to a ridiculous extreme, we would grant companies immunity if they had murdered people in cooperating with the government. It’s a matter of degree only. The Bush administration had the tools available at the time to legally compel the companies to cooperate.
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But there’s just one problem: law enforcement already has the ability to
move as quickly as Bush wants through existing, warrant-requiring legal
channels. Put another way, the president’s legal obligation to obtain a
warrant for domestic spying in no way inhibits the speed with which
surveillance operations can be ordered and deployed.How is that possible? Because domestic spying warrants are granted by secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA). In these FISA courts, the government is permitted to obtain warrants retroactively. The government can immediately order surveillance operations, and then go back and get a warrant, meaning the warrant process never precludes “the need for speed.”
And it’s not like getting a warrant from a FISA court is difficult. As journalist/blogger Josh Marshall pointed out, the government’s own data shows that “in a quarter century, the FISA Court has rejected four [out of more than 15,000] government applications for warrants.”
As former Secretary of State Colin Powell said when asked about it on ABC’s Nightline, “It didn’t seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go and get the warrants.” Powell noted that “even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it [begin surveillance]. The law provides for that. And three days later, you let the court know what you have done, and deal with it that way.”
For some reason, the Bush administration didn’t want to take the uncooperative companies to court under the already existing FISA laws. For some reason, the administration told Congress not to worry about modifying the laws. Why? Because it found it easier to just break the law in the name of national security.
Technorati Tags: FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, San Antonio Express News
Filed under: FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, San Antonio Express News
