McIlheran Watch: I Spy with my Little [fill in the blank]

Robola, introducing his haiku, sums it up nicely:

After his last column, I thought Pat had given up. Writing about the minutiae of Gov. Doyle’s reasonable proposals, I sensed that Patrick’s heart just wasn’t in it.

Now I know why; he was busy working up this gem. Shanks of unimaginable falsity, logic with swiss cheese holes, all piled on top of a whole wheat bun seeded with the sesames of “teh dumb”.

Gem is among the last words I would use to describe today's McIlheran, even ironically. It's one thing for him to tippity-tappity out tepid columns following his formula (one bad joke, some misdirection, a handful of unoriginal Republican talking points); it's another thing entirely to write line after line of untruth. I mean, after reading it, I couldn't even trust the byline, the whole thing was so phony.

Knowing I haven't got all morning to dissect every lie--700 words, 700 flasehoods--I'll just take a couple of big ones. The column today is a defense of Bush's NSA domestic warrantless wiretapping program. Well, duh. Of course it is. P. Mac got the same memo everyone else did that this is "defend-the-spying week"; his column is a provencial example of GOP message coordination. What the Karl wants, the Karl gets. It's reassuring that McIlheran, like the other little Rovebots, is still able to follow directions.

Anyway, here's one whopper:

What the president did was, in war, get National Security Agency snoops to see whether they could find enemy phone calls outside the U.S., including some to people inside it. Critics say the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a warrant; the president's advisers contend that court decisions from the '70s through 2004 say otherwise--and that Congress told the president to take on terrorists "with all necessary and appropriate force."

The head spins, no? One, we're not at war. Yeah, they call it the "global war on terror," but "they" do not declare war--Congress does. And if you haven't noticed, Congress hasn't declared war. Besides, being "at war" is not any kind of a Constitutional standard--the president's power doesn't change in time of war, and to suggest that it does is to question the words and wisdom of the framers who drew a big red circle around the war powers and said, "This is for Congress." Two, there is no Supreme Court decision that says the plain language of FISA can be overridden by a president if he wants. It doesn't exist, and the administration's justifications feel like the ransom notes of kidnappers: They cut out a word or phrase from a bunch of decisions and string them together in a sentence telling us to play along or we'll never see our liberty again.

Three--and this is the big one--Congress's authorizing of force after the 9/11 attacks did not cover warrentless wiretapping of U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. The bill passed in the hours after the al Qaeda attacks is referred to as the AUMF, where the M stands for Military, not "whatever I gol-darned please." The Congress specifically rejected language from the administration that might have allowed it. You can tell that Congress did not expect that the AUMF to override the plain langauage of FISA because a month later, when they wrote and passed the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, Congress included revisions to FISA, none of which allowed warrantless searches of U.S. persons. Then yesterday comes Glenn Greenwald with this:

In June, 2002, Republican Sen. Michael DeWine of Ohio introduced legislation (S. 2659) which would have eliminated the exact barrier to FISA which Gen. Hayden yesterday said is what necessitated the Administration bypassing FISA. Specifically, DeWine's legislation [. . .] would have eliminated the "probable cause" barrier (at least for non-U.S. persons) which the Administration is now pointing to as the reason why it had to circumvent FISA.

During that time, the Administration was asked to advise Congress as to its position on this proposed amendment to loosen the standard for obtaining FISA warrants, and in response, they submitted a Statement from James A. Baker, the Justice Department lawyer who oversees that DoJ's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which is the group that "prepares and presents all applications for electronic surveillance and physical search under the Act to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court or Court)." If anyone would be familiar with problems in obtaining FISA warrants, it would be Baker.

And yet, look at what Baker said in his Statement. He began by effusively praising the Patriot Act on the ground that the 72-hour window provided by the Patriot Act had given the Administration the speed and flexibility it needed in order to engage in eavesdropping [. . . and] "the proposed change raises both significant legal and practical issues, the Administration at this time is not prepared to support it." [. . .]

The second concern the Administration expressed with DeWine's amendment was that it was quite possibly unconstitutional.

That's right--the administration itself felt that lowering the FISA standard for wiretapping non-U.S. persons was both unnecessary and perhaps unconstitutional. In what way, then, can they (and, as a good parrot, McIlheran) claim that lowering or ignoring the FISA standard on U.S. citizens is constitutional? (The facts also undercut McIlheran's assertions later in his coulmn about how the warrants were impractical.)

The other amusing bit of misdirection in McIlheran's columns is his repeated claims--one might say he protests too much--that you have to look as well at what Bush didn't do:

What the president didn't do was set the fuzz to listening in on political enemies. He didn't use the FBI to blackmail activists, didn't round up 120,000 people of a particular ethnicity into camps, didn't suspend habeas corpus. Unimpeached presidents have done all these during war. Bush hasn't. [. . . A]mid the plentiful emerging evidence that the program existed, no signs point to political abuse.

Are we supposed to jump for joy at this? I bet Bush didn't drown any kittens, either. Look, the law exists as it does because previous presidents overstepped their authority; FISA was a direct rebuke of the warrantless domestic spying going on in the Nixon-Hoover era. But this whole argument is one giant straw man, anyway. No one is offering evidence that Bush used this program against political enemies or anything like that. From the beginning, Democrats' (and some Republicans') objections have concerned Bush's violation of the plain language of FISA, the law governing situations like these.

The headline writers, I think catching on to Robola's haiku habit, offer a seven-syllable description of this column: Impeach? No, empower him. But that's the trouble. The Congress has specifically declined to do any additional empowerment--and that is their repsonsibility under the Constituion--and the administration has previously indicated that it didn't need it. Yet after all that, Bush still authorized a pogram that pretty clearly violates the law. I am not an advocate for impeachment (who wants President Cheney?!?), but there is no excuse for secret overreach of reasonable law. McIlheran's apologist stance is embarrassing.