The Day After


Ron Beasley “awoke this morning relieved to see I was still alive in spite of the fact that the Protect America Act had expired. According to the right wing Washington Times I shouldn’t have been surprised.”

Sean Lengell, the WT reporter, writes:

Many intelligence scholars and analysts outside the government say that today’s expiration of certain temporary domestic wiretapping laws will have little effect on national security, despite warnings to the contrary by the White House and Capitol Hill Republican leaders.

With the Protect America Act expiring this weekend, domestic wiretapping rules will revert to the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires the government to obtain a warrant from a special court to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance in the United States.

The original FISA law, these experts say, provides the necessary tools for the intelligence community to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists.

Timothy Lee, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, said the last time Congress overhauled FISA — after the September 11 terrorist attacks — President Bush praised the action, saying the new law “recognizes the realities and dangers posed by the modern terrorist.”

“Those are the rules we’ll be living under after the Protect America Act expires this weekend,” Mr. Lee added. “There’s no reason to think our nation will be in any more danger in 2008 than it was in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, or 2006.”

Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution said because existing warrantless surveillance begun under the temporary laws could continue for up to a year, the “sky is not falling at all.”

Steve Benen points out that “the Washington Times and the Cato Institute are not exactly partisans out to make the White House look bad — they’re usually partisans out to make the White House look good.”

“Could it be,” John Cole asks, “that our President and his lackeys in the right-wing blogosphere and conservative media have been full of shit and were lying to us??”

And could it be that maybe Senate Democrats will be more willing to stand up to the president’s bullshit next time, now that they’ve seen their colleagues in the House do it and live to tell the tale?

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