Month: February 2008

That Answers That Question

Legislation often gets odd names and acronyms. Sometimes (usually when authored by Republicans) they don’t really mean anything and are just branding. Sometimes they have meaning. I’ve been writing a fair bit about the House RESTORE Act, but never explaining what the full name is. Reading John Deeth’s post on the FISA fight in the House and Blue Dog Leonard Boswell, he actually spells it out: Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed, and Effective.

I think the job of making acronyms that work for legislation is probably a step above the job of naming military missions (Operation Iraqi Liberation, anyone?).

Boooooooooooooooo!

Via Dean Barker at Blue Hampshire, it turns out two Democrats cast “present” votes on legislation that the rest of the caucus had the courage to stand up and vote for:

H RES 960 RES 960: “Congratulating the National Football League champion New York Giants for winning Super Bowl XLII and completing one of the most remarkable postseason runs in professional sports history”

The two weak-kneed Dems? Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire and Steve Kagen of Wisconsin. I suppose CSP and Kagen are just bitter that the Giants steamrolled the Patriots and the Packers.

At least Patrick Murphy had the courage to be the lone “No” vote. Sheesh.

Blue Dogs & Telecom Money

The Blue Dog Democrats in the House are threatening to vote with Republicans if they don’t get legislation that grants the big telecom companies retroactive immunity. These twenty-one Dems have the power to derail the good, immunity-free House RESTORE Act.
We were wondering what sort of money these Dems have received from the telecom industry. I went through to identify the donors, though when there are multiple contributions from PACs, I’m just attributing it to the industry. I’m also not counting contributions from QWest, as they’re the one telecom that we know refused Bush administration requests to provide records or wiretaps without court order.

In total, the telecom industry as sent $134,502 to these twenty-one congressmen in the 2008 cycle alone. And keep in mind – it’s early in the cycle and these numbers are likely to grow and the congressmen who’ve been in the House more than one term have received even more money than this.

The question is – will these Democrats take their telecom money and work with Republicans to give the big telecoms retroactive immunity? Or will they stand up for the rule of law and vote with their Democratic colleagues for legislation that doesn’t include immunity?

Please take action and call the Blue Dogs today and ask them to oppose retroactive immunity.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.

Flip-Flops: McCain Has Them

John McCain in November on using the Army Field Manual to govern interrogation techniques:

I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not 24 and Jack Bauer. Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective. And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The army general there said that techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn’t think they need to do anything else. My friends, this is what America is all about. [Via ThinkProgress]

ThinkProgress has more on McCain’s previous anti-waterboarding stance:

McCain has said the practice “is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.” He has previously called waterboarding “very exquisite torture.”

John McCain today voted against Intelligence Authorization conference report, which makes the Army Field Manual the governing document when it comes to torture. Here’s the relevant section:

SEC. 327. LIMITATION ON INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES. (a) Limitation- No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations….

Let’s be clear. McCain has said he’s against torture, he thinks waterboarding is torture, and he thinks the Army Field Manual is the best guideline for how we should treat prisoners. Then he votes against making the Manual the benchmark, which would have banned waterboarding and torture. That is, McCain was for banning torture before he was against banning torture.

Another WSJ Editorial Farce

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an editorial attacking Senate Democrats like Barack Obama and Chris Dodd for their work to stop retroactive immunity and pass legislation that includes congressional and judicial oversight of domestic surveillance. Not surprisingly, a paper that has cheered every rollback of rights under the Bush administration doesn’t miss this opportunity to proudly display their urine-soaked bedsheets of fearful anti-constitutionality.

“We lost every single battle we had on this bill,” conceded Chris Dodd, which ought to tell the Connecticut Senator something about the logic of what he was proposing.

Really? How, exactly, does the lack of political will to defend the rule of law challenge the logic of standing up for the rule of law? I suppose the WSJ thinks something is only worth doing if you know you’ll win in the end, an attitude reflecting a complete lack of guiding principle. I don’t doubt that the WSJ would be happier if Dodd and others let the Bush administration shred the Constitution and give the big telecom companies special treatment behind closed doors, with no prying eyes, questioning journalists, or engaged citizens. Business was certainly better for the telecoms when customers weren’t running away in response to their behavior. To the extent that Dodd et alia were able to bring attention to what the Bush administration and companies like Verizon and AT&T have perpetrated, the WSJ has had to watch their pals get smeared with the truth.

It says something about his national security world view, or his callowness, that Mr. Obama would vote to punish private companies that even the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee said had “acted in good faith.”

But what does it say about the WSJ’s national security world view or their editorial board’s callowness that the other three congressional committees that considered retroactive immunity – the Senate Judiciary, House Intelligence, and House Judiciary Committees – all said that the telecoms did not act in good faith, but rather should be held accountable through normal judicial processes for their behavior? The WSJ and the Republican Party on whole have tried to spread the myth that because the SSCI thinks retroactive immunity is a good idea, all relevant committees think they do. It simply isn’t true, though it’s been used effectively and helped secure retroactive immunity in the Senate (praise be to Jay Rockefeller).

Had Senator Obama prevailed, a President Obama might well have been told “no way” when he asked private Americans to help his Administration fight terrorists. Mr. Obama also voted against the overall bill, putting him in MoveOn.org territory.

Really? Because according to the US Senate and, um, history Obama did not vote against the overall bill. He voted for a number of good amendments earlier day and he voted against cloture, but the WSJ is not only playing fast and loose with the facts, but actually making things up. I’d have to guess Obama did not do what MoveOn.org wanted on final passage.

Getting to the actual hypothetical levied in this bumbling attack by the WSJ, I’d hope telecoms say no if President Obama asks for their help. If he makes the simple step of getting a warrant, I’d certainly expect the telecoms to comply. I haven’t heard of a single documented case where the telecoms refused to help the US Government spy on suspected terrorists when a warrant is forthcoming; to do so would surely land them in far greater legal hot water than their current plight.

The defeat of these antiwar amendments means the legislation now moves to the House in a strong position.

Read that sentence again. One word should stand out. Antiwar? This legislation had nothing to do with the war. It didn’t have anything to do with Iraq – it didn’t even have anything to do with Afghanistan. It’s a broad package of laws governing how the US government can monitor Americans. Pretending otherwise goes beyond the realm of Republican framing and circles right back to, well, where they were in the previous paragraph, making things up about Obama’s votes. It’s lunacy, derived from their need to lie about what is going on in order to present a favorable case for their positions.

I’d say that this editorial farce is an embarrassment to their paper, but it’s the Wall Street Journal, so this is pretty standard for them.

Stating the Obvious

Harry Reid, speaking on his incompetence as Majority Leader, following FISA votes yesterday:

There was a measure of frustration in the voice of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, as he told reporters during a break in the daylong debate, “Holding all the Democrats together on this, we’ve learned a long time ago, is not something that’s doable.”

While I appreciate the value in someone knowing that they are incapable of doing their job, when the Constitution is at stake, isn’t that a good time to step aside and let someone more willing to get the job done handle things?

The larger strategic question is if Harry Reid wants to pass a bill that includes congressional oversight and does not contain retroactive immunity, and he knows he has a good chunk of his caucus that doesn’t share those goals, why in the world would he chart a legislative course that requires caucus unity to win? That is, why did he set process in terms that require he unify Dems and march uphill to stop the SSCI bill? Why not, instead, use his powers as Majority Leader in favor of his policy agenda and force the anti-Constitution senators to work uphill themselves?

Simply by setting the Senate Judiciary Committee’s bill as the underlying bill would have given Reid better chances of seeing legislation he favors passing. But he didn’t do that. And he couldn’t hold the caucus together.

It’s time for Harry Reid to step down as Majority Leader.

Oh and it’s worth noting that the other members of the Dem Leadership – Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer – were absolutely silent in this fight. Neither, in my view, demonstrated any qualities that suggest they would be an improvement on Reid.

In Case You Missed It!

Scarecrow at FireDogLake gives us the rundown of what the Senate approved yesterday, just in case you missed it.

— The President can direct US spy agencies to intercept every e-mail, telephone or internet communication of every American and anyone legally in the US with only the most minimal safeguards. Although the bill was supposed to deal with exclusively “foreign” communications, the techniques it sanctions will in fact sweep up domestic and foreign combined.

— Acting without individual or particularized warrants from any court, spy agencies can sweep up millions of communications without differentiating between those warranting surveillance and those not. Procedures for separating out totally innocent persons or communications that have nothing to do with foreign intelligence or any security threat to the US are minimal to non-existent. Procedures allowing a secret court to review such procedures have been weakened, along with measures to correct violations of even these limited procedures.

— Persons spied upon have no ability to determine what information the government has collected, or to affect what the government does with the information. Americans will never know which persons or government agencies were shown private information about them, and if restrictions are placed on their activities or travel because of this secret information, it will be impossible for victims to determine why or to challenge the information.

— Telecommunication companies who participated in government’s illegal spying activities, and those who ordered this, would be forever immune from any consequences for their actions and cannot be required to disclose what they did.

— As bad as the Senate Bill is, the Senate rejected an effort to make the bill the exclusive means by which surveillance can be authorized. So the President arguably can conduct further spying on Americans even without the minimal protections left in the Bill.

Shorter US Senate: In the beginning the Senate was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

A Progressive Win

Above: Epic Fail 

Last night progressive challenger Donna Edwards defeated corrupt Dem Al Wynn in Maryland’s 4th Congressional district. This is a huge win for the netroots and a great sign of the willingness of new voters who are coming to take part in the presidential primary to embrace progressive candidates.

The good news is that it looks like Al Wynn has more class and principle than Joe Lieberman:

“The deed is done,” Wynn told reporters at a Lanham union hall where his supporters had gathered after the polls closed. “I think the only thing that remains is to support the winner.”

Markos makes a great point about the value of this victory for the netroots.

…we don’t have the money to buy off our politicians, and the bad Democrats know we’re not about to start voting for Republicans. So the only way we can hold our caucus accountable is to send notice that we will primary them. And sure, they may survive such primaries. But sometimes they won’t.

We’ll be working this fall for “more” Democrats, but today we struck a blow on behalf of better Democrats.

Congrats to the folks at Open Left, FireDogLake, Daily Kos and elsewhere who have long championed Edwards’ campaign.

Review: Still Broken

AJ Rossmiller of AmericaBlog has a great new book out today, Still Broken: A Recruit’s Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon. There have been a few posts giving it strong praise so far: Matt Yglesias, Jill at Feministe, and I expect there to be many more as people pick it from book stores. AJ himself has a great statement of why books matter at AmericaBlog.

Still Broken is an account of Rossmiller’s desire to serve America following the September 11th attacks. He ends up working at the Defense Intelligence Agency, as a civilian analyst doing critical work for one of the key agencies in our intelligence community, particularly given the ongoing war in Iraq. Rossmiller volunteered to serve in Iraq, spending six months doing strategic and tactical analysis in Baghdad and earning high praise for his work. He returned to the Pentagon following his deployment and continued to analysis intelligence from Iraq, primarily on politics in Iraq. After almost two years in the DIA, Rossmiller left because of problems internal to the intelligence community, from structural incompetence to the pressures of policy having influence on factual analysis.

Still Broken is a frightening book. Throughout his tenure at the DIA, but most particularly in his time at the Pentagon, Rossmiller feels the pressure of people higher up the chain in command to confirm his analysis to the policy desires of the administration. In the book he frequently relates stories of he and his analyst colleagues watching in horror as higher-ups with no expertise in Iraq change their findings without basis. Their work is second-guessed as “too pessimistic.” Yet time and again, the superiors are proved wrong, while the analysts are proven right.

What makes Still Broken so scary isn’t that analysts butt heads with their superiors, but rather that their superiors never look retrospectively at their own judgments and edits of intelligence. Not only is work shifted towards the administration assessment that things are getting better, that the positive isn’t being reported, and the intelligence should optimistically reflect that, but the editorial pressure on the analysts never changes.

In her review of the book, Jill at Feministe describes a Rossmiller’s narrative style particularly well.

AJ is skilled at never assigning motives to people, and never drawing hard and fast conclusions as to why things are going the way they are. He writes like an analyst: He observes what’s happening, and then follows it up by giving several reasonable explanations as to why those things could be happening. The dozens of anecdotes he tells certainly lead a halfway astute reader to understand exactly why certain events are occurring and why particular decisions are being made, but AJ has enough respect for his audience to simply present the facts as he sees them, rather than force a particular conclusion.

I think this is a very fitting description of how Rossmiller writes a narrative that reflects his experience while demonstrating his competence at presenting information factually, without obvious ideological bent. That is, in many regards his book shows his skill as an analyst. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t know what intelligence findings on Iraq from the DIA normally read like, but this book is fast paced and exciting.

Separate from the insight Rossmiller provides to the DIA’s dysfunctional structure for handling intelligence and the challenges facing us in Iraq, Still Broken is a story of patriotism. Rossmiller serves his country with distinction, doing good work that he deserves to be proud of for the rest of his life. We’re lucky to have him as a story-teller documenting the problems facing our intelligence community. But beyond that, we’re lucky to have his experience, expertise, and sharp analytical prowess working in the progressive political community, fighting for a better America.

I hope that this isn’t the most in-depth review of Still Broken that you read, but for whatever it’s worth, I highly recommend you pick up a copy and give it a read.

Check out the StillBroken.com for more updates on the book.