DAILY TRIFECTA: Still Fighting Over The War On Terror
We've got a bad case of Santayana's Revenge
TITLE: Trump Wants Congress To Kill Law He Claims Was Used To Spy On Him—While Biden Wants It Reauthorized
https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/04/10/trump-tells-congress-to-kill-fisa-as-house-prepares-vote-on-hotly-debated-surveillance-program/?sh=7a9979b25188
EXCERPT: Former President Trump urged Congress to tank reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ahead of an expected House vote on the legislation this week—as President Joe Biden urges lawmakers to move forward with the bill, while right-wing members are calling for stricter surveillance controls.
KEY FACTS:
· “KILL FISA,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday, alleging the law “was illegally used against” him to spy on his campaign.
· Trump gave the directive as the House is set to vote as soon as Wednesday to advance the bill, which would extend intelligence officials’ ability to monitor the communications of foreigners and U.S. citizens overseas using an FBI database under FISA Section 702.
· The FBI improperly obtained two of four warrants used to surveil former Trump campaign associate Carter Page in its investigation of his campaign’s links to Russia, the Justice Department determined in 2020, citing misrepresentations on the warrant applications submitted to the FISA court—but the warrants were obtained under a different section of FISA, Title I, that is not up for reauthorization.
· The latest version of the House bill related to Section 702 includes multiple oversight reforms designed to tamp down on abuse among intelligence officials, namely regarding the surveillance of U.S. citizens abroad, including requiring sign-off from an FBI supervisor or staff attorney to query a U.S. citizen in the database.
· But Trump’s right-wing allies in Congress, along with some progressives, are calling for the new provisions to go a step further and include a warrant requirement to surveil U.S. citizens abroad, with some arguing that it protects Americans’ civil liberties—a measure the Biden Administration has said would hamstring intelligence officials.
TITLE: A vital intelligence tool needs reauthorization. The House might wreck it instead. [by the Washington Post’s Editorial Board]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/09/fisa-section-702-warrant-congress/
EXCERPT: For FBI agents to access this NSA data, current law requires that they have an authorized purpose, a reasonably designed search that’s not overly broad and a specific factual basis to believe that they’re reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information.
True, the FBI failed to satisfy those requirements thousands of times in 2020 and early 2021. Agents searched the 702 system to see whether people arrested at Black Lives Matter protests and after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection had links to foreign intelligence services. One agent searched the names of 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign. In other cases, investigators queried the names of a senator and congressman. After the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court revealed these abuses, a coalition of strange bedfellows on the right and left coalesced to cut off the FBI’s access.
But a chastened FBI implemented many changes to prevent misuse. Now an agent must type a specific justification for every search, receive annual training and get approval from an attorney before any “batch job” that will run more than 100 names against the system. The Justice Department says these changes led to a 98 percent drop in the number of U.S. person queries of the 702 database, from 2.9 million in 2021 to 119,383 in 2022 and 57,094 in 2023. Audits have shown virtually all of them complied with the rules. The FBI has also established escalating consequences for misusing the system, from taking away access to criminal referrals.
The House bill under consideration this week would codify into law every change the FBI made, so the next administration couldn’t unwind them. It would also ban the bureau from running searches for evidence of crimes unrelated to national security, require an FBI supervisor or attorney to approve all U.S. person searches and prohibit political appointees from being involved in the approval process. In addition, it would tighten up the part of the FISA law that federal investigators abused during the 2016 campaign to authorize surveillance on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Civil libertarians should take the win, but instead they’re insisting on a warrant requirement that could cripple the program. Getting a warrant can take days or weeks. Exceptions written into the warrant proposal — to allow searches when there’s an imminent threat, for certain cybersecurity purposes or if the U.S. person consents — are too narrow and impractical. The data gathered under 702 has typically been most useful in the early stages of an investigation, before probable cause can be established. At that stage, agents often know little about a U.S. person of potential interest beyond that they’re interacting with or being talked about by a foreign intelligence target.
Imposing a warrant requirement risks re-erecting the wall that existed between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence gathering before Sept. 11, 2001. The House should embrace 702 reform — not the mistakes of the past.
TITLE: “Quaint and Obsolete?”: The Peril of Forgetting Guantánamo
https://tomdispatch.com/quaint-and-obsolete/
EXCERPT: Although 22 years later it’s still home to 30 detainees from the war on terror, Guantánamo attracts little attention these days. If it weren’t for the invaluable work of Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, who has reported on Gitmo since Day One in January 2002, as well as a handful of other dedicated reporters including John Ryan at Lawdragon, few could know anything about what’s going on there now. As sociology professor Lisa Hajjar points out, “Media coverage at Guantánamo has become a rarity.” While the press pool for the hearings of the military commissions that are still ongoing there averaged about 30 reporters until perhaps 2013, it’s now been whittled down to, at most, “about four per trip,” according to Hajjar.
Gitmo media coverage (and so public attention) has essentially disappeared — hardly a surprise given the current globally crushing issues of war and deprivation, injustice and extralegal policies, not to speak of the mad discomfort of election 2024 here in America. Guantánamo, whose last inmate arrived in 2008 and whose viable path to closure has remained blocked year after year (no matter that three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — each declared his desire to shut it down), persists, its deviations from the law unresolved.
As it happens, flagging interest in Guantánamo has coincided with an eerie larger cultural phenomenon — a turn away from history and memory.
In the world of social media and the immediate moment, a malady of forgetfulness about past events should be a cause of concern. In fact, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn recently published a striking piece on the phenomena. Citing an Atlantic article by psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman, Corn noted that, while forgetting can help people get on with their lives after a traumatic experience, it can also prevent trauma survivors from learning the lessons of the past. Rather than confront the impact of what’s occurred, it’s become all too common to simply brush it all under the rug, which, of course, has its own grim consequences. “As clinical psychiatrists,” they write, “we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger — exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.” In other words, events like the 9/11 attacks and what followed from them, the Covid pandemic, or even the events of January 6, 2021, as Corn’s psychiatrists point out, can bring such pain that forgetting becomes “useful,” even at times seemingly “healthful.”
Not surprisingly, an increasing forgetfulness about traumatic events is echoed on an even broader scale in a contemporary trend toward the abandonment of history, presumably in favor of the present and its megaphone, the social media universe. As historian Daniel Bessner has pointed out, this country is now undergoing a profound reconsideration of the very purpose and importance of the historical record. Across the country, universities are reducing the size of their history faculties, while the number of undergraduates majoring in history and related fields in 2018-2019 had already declined by more than a third since 2012.
No wonder Guantánamo has been relegated to the past, a distant chapter in the ever-diminishing war on terror and no matter that it continues to function in the present moment. For example, two death penalty cases are currently in pretrial hearings there. One involves the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, which resulted in the deaths of 17 American sailors. As the intrepid Carol Rosenberg points out, the case has been in pretrial hearings since 2011. The other involves four defendants accused of conspiring in the attacks of September 11th. A fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al Shibh, was recently removed from the case, having been found incompetent to stand trial due to the post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from his torture at American hands. As for the remaining defendants, originally charged in 2008 and then again in 2011, no trial date has yet been set. The ever-elusive timetable for those prosecutions tells you everything. Evidence tainted by torture has made such a trial impossible.
It’s hard to fathom how my father’s generation, stubbornly rose-colored in their vision of the country, swallowed the blatant failures of the post-9/11 years. My sense is that many of them, like my dad, just shook their heads, certain that the true spirit of American democracy would ultimately prevail and the wrongs of indefinite detention, torture, and judicial incapacity would be righted. Still, as the country spiraled into January 6th and its aftermath, the reality of America’s lost grip on its own promises of justice, morality, lawfulness, and accountability actually began to sink in. At least it did with my dad, who expressed clear and present fears of a country succumbing to the specter of his childhood, fascism, the very antithesis of the America he aspired to.