Jack Kelly on the FISA Reorganization

Sorry this is late - I was in Canada.

I posted recently on the Congressional votes giving President George Bush even more surveillance authority.

Well my favorite local conservative pundit, Jack Kelly, chimed in on the recently retooled FISA statute. Not surprisingly, he panders and spins and throws in a healthy dose of fear mongering. J-Kel paints the retool as necessary to avoid unavoidable terrorism, though he begins with a story that's already of dubious quality:

There could have been thousands of lives lost and an enormous impact with devastating consequences for international air travel," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told ABC News Monday. Mr. Chertoff was speaking of the al-Qaida plot -- narrowly averted last August -- to plant liquid explosives on London-based airliners headed to the United States.

If al-Qaida has made similar plans for this August, there's a good chance they'd succeed

Here's the ABC coverage of what Chertoff told ABC.

Jack used to be the P-G's "national security correspondent" and unfortunately for this column's credibility, the plot he mentioned has already been debunked - by a real national security expert, former CIA employee in the Directorate of Intelligence and former deputy director at the State Department's office of counter Intelligence, Larry Johnson.

Johnson said last year that the plotters had no working device, no passports, no tickets. Futhermore, CNN reported at the time that the group was infiltrated by British Intelligence and thwarted by British and Pakistani authorities. Looks like good old fashioned police work uncovered the almost-plot.

What relevance does it have to FISA? Jack's just trying to scare us into agreeing with him.

Kelly spends the first part of his column describing the necessity of retooling FISA so that all foreign based communications that happens to be routed through the US can be surveilled warrant free. OK fine. Most critics of the retool agree that that was a necessary part. Jonathan Alter of Newsweek:

Congress had good reason to amend the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). After the shift from satellites to fiber-optic cable for most international phone calls, the statute was as out of date as disco. With Congress, the courts and President Bush squabbling over his illegal wiretapping program, the government was actually conducting less surveillance of foreign nationals than before 9/11, which was crazy. We had to do more listening in, especially with scary new intelligence "chatter" suggesting an unspecified attack on the U.S. Capitol this summer. Congressional sources who attended the late-July classified intel briefings, but won't talk about them for the record, say these threats didn't sound like spin. After all, we're not talking here about trumped-up Iraqi WMD, but Al Qaeda terrorists who have already tried to kill us.

It's the other part that's nasty. Jack Kelly:

The amended law also permits interception of foreign communications directed into the United States without a warrant, provided that the person in the United States is not the target of surveillance. So if Ayman al Zawahiri calls a Muslim student in Florida, the NSA can just listen. But if authorities want to monitor any subsequent calls that the student makes, they have to get a warrant.

See? It's ok. It's only a terrorist who's calling a Muslim. Nothing to worry about. However as Alter points out, that also means the:

authority to spy without a warrant on any American talking to a foreigner, even if it's you and the guy from Mumbai fixing your printer.

So now it's a little scarier. Alter, again:

I hate to sound melodramatic about it, but while everyone was at the beach or "The Simpsons Movie" on the first weekend in August, the U.S. government shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the one requiring court-approved "probable cause" before Americans can be searched or spied upon. This is not the feverish imagination of left-wing bloggers and the ACLU. It's the plain truth of where we've come as a country, at the behest of a president who has betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution and with the acquiescence of Democratic congressional leaders who know better. Historians will likely see this episode as a classic case of fear - both physical and political - trumping principle amid the ancient tension between personal freedom and national security.

Or maybe they just wanted to get to their vacations.