The Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans have rejected the call from concerned Democrats to initiate an investigation into the Bush White House's warrantless spying on ordinary Americans. Instead, they have caved to pressure from the White House to rubber stamp the White House program. Their flimsy claim--that a new subcommittee that will get reports on future illegal warrantless surveillance will somehow constitute a breakthrough in Congressional oversight. As the New York Times editorial noted today, this is a "breathtakingly cynical" position. " Faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate creates a panel to watch him do it and calls that control." The Death of the Intelligence Panel, NYTimes, Mar. 9, 2006 at A22.
The editorial notes that the seventies left us with "two groundbreaking reforms."
One was the Foriegn Intelligence surveillance Act, which struck the proper balance between national security and bedrock civil liberties, and the other was the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a symbol of bipartisan leadership. They endured for a quater of a century--until George Wl Bush and Dick Cheney left FISA in tatters and the Senate Select Committee on its deathbed in just five years.
The editorial concludes with an important point. Let's hope that our representatives in Congress are paying attention.
There are moments when leaders simply have to take a stand. It seems to us that one of them is when Americans are in danger of the kind of unchecked surveillance that they thought had died with J. Edgar Hoover, Watergate, and spying on Vietnam protesters and civil rights leaders.
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