Glenn points out that Obama’s spokesman on the FISA bill is making shit up:
“This was a deliberative process, and not something that was shooting from the hip,” Mr. Craig said. “Obviously, there was an element of what’s possible here. But he concluded that with FISA expiring, that it was better to get a compromise than letting the law expire.”
Craig’s statement is flat-out false. FISA — enacted in 1978 and amended many times to accommodate modern communications technology — has no expiration date. The Protect America Act, which Congress enacted last August to legalize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, had a 6-month sunset provision and thus already expired back in February, restoring FISA as the governing law. Thus, if Congress does nothing now, FISA will continue indefinitely to govern the Government’s power to spy on the communications of Americans. It doesn’t expire. What Craig said in defense of Obama is just wrong.
I emailed Craig this morning about his comments (here) and when I received no reply, I called him, left a message, and he called me this afternoon. After I read him his quote, explained that FISA won’t expire, and pointed out that his comment in the NYT therefore made no sense, Craig paused for awhile and then said that he meant that the “warrants under FISA would expire in August,” and Obama supported the FISA “compromise” to prevent that from happening. When I asked Craig if he was referring to the surveillance orders authorized by the Protect America Act that allow the Government to spy with no individual warrants (which have a one-year duration and do expire in August), Craig said that this is what he meant, and that Obama wanted to avoid having those surveillance orders expire.
While that last version at least generally comports with reality, it makes no sense whatsoever as an explanation for Obama’s FISA position. Back in August, when he was seeking the Democratic nomination, Obama voted against the Protect America Act. Therefore, had Obama had his way, there never would have been any PAA in the first place, and therefore, there never would have been any PAA orders possible. Having voted against the PAA last August, how can Obama now claim that he considers it important that the PAA orders not expire? How can he be eager to avoid the expiration of surveillance orders which he opposed authorizing in the first place?
I asked Craig that question several times and received completely incoherent replies, after which he started insisting that he already answered me and had nothing else to add (he then changed the subject to talk about the “improvements” the current bill achieves over the Rockefeller Senate bill). The fact is that there is no answer. In the past, Obama has opposed the type of warrantless eavesdropping which those PAA orders authorize. He’s repeatedly said that the FISA court works and there’s no need to authorize eavesdropping without individual warrants. None of that can be reconciled with his current claim that he supports this FISA “compromise” because National Security requires that those PAA orders not expire and that there be massive changes to FISA. It’s just as simple as that.
It’s bad enough that Obama is supporting a new warrantless eavesdropping scheme. They should just candidly admit that he changed his position rather than feeding incoherent and insultingly false rationalizations to the public — whereby they throw around the terms “National Security” and “balance” enough times and hope that nobody notices or cares that what they’re saying makes no sense. One of the strengths of the Obama campaign has been a willingness to have adult discussions about complex political issues, assume a fair amount of rationality and intelligence on the part of the voting public, and avoid manipulative, obfuscating sloganeering like this. It’s just adding insult to injury to resort to nonsensical justifications of the type Craig put into the New York Times today.
