Sunday, February 17, 2008

Dems Accuse Bush Administration of Politicized Fear-Mongering on FISA   [Andy McCarthy]

It is worth observing that the Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, was the Director of President Clinton's National Security Agency from 1992-'96.  He is not a partisan hack.  He was a Vice Admiral in the Navy and is an old intelligence pro.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, McConnell explained that President Bush has been following his (McConnell's advice) on intelligence reform.  As of midnight this morning, intelligence gathering powers are now back to where they were before the Protect America Act was passed in August 2007.  At that time, according to McConnell, we had lost about two-thirds of our overseas collection capacity because of the FISA court ruling which, for the first time in history, required court authorization for monitoring foreigners outside the U.S. who contact other foreigners outside the U.S.

The Protect America Act reversed that ruling for six months.  It is now expired.  We cannot collect on new targets overseas without going to the FISA court and showing probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power.  As foreigners outside the U.S. have no U.S. legal protection (or at least didn't until the FISA court ruling), and as the federal courts have no jurisdiction outside the U.S., we are not supposed to have to make any showing whatsoever to collect intelligence overseas.

When you go from no restrictions to no collection absent probable cause, that represents an enormous drop off in capacity.  It's that simple.  Democrats who claim that people like McConnell are engaged in partisan fear-mongering are talking nonsense.  And as McConnell noted this morning, every day we don't fix this problem, the problem — the investigative leads you don't get, the connections you don't make, the things you don't learn but which you should know — metastasizes.  Intelligence is dynamic:  you can't stop collecting for a day, a week, a month or more and then figure you are picking up right where you left off.  What you have lost tends to stay lost.

02/17 01:33 PMShare