OPINION - Shields and Gerson 5/22/2015

"Shields and Gerson on GOP’s Patriot Act rift, Islamic State’s victories" PBS NewsHour 5/22/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, new doubts about the Obama administration’s strategy for fighting the Islamic State, the political divide on key provisions of the Patriot Act, and the State Department’s release of emails by former Secretary Hillary Clinton emails.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  .....we turn now to the analysis of Shields and Gerson.  That’s syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson.  David Brooks is away.

Welcome to you both.

So, with that conversation coming from the Republican contenders, Mark, this is in a week where ISIS, Islamic State, is making some big gains.  They took over a key city in Iraq, Ramadi.  You’re starting to hear criticism of the administration policy toward ISIS, towards what’s going on in Iraq.

The President came out this week and said, I have got a strategy, it’s working.

What do you think?

MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist:  I think, Judy, that, politically, just speaking politically right now, for 10 years, from 2006 basically up to today, nine years, that Iraq has been a positive issue for Democrats.  They won the Congress in 2006.  They nominated the one candidate in the party who had opposed the Iraq war.  And opposition to that Iraq War and to President Bush’s policy became central in the 2008 campaign.

Mitt Romney had to walk away from his support for it in 2012 and say he wouldn’t have supported it.  And now, 2015, five years after President Obama announced the withdrawal of combat units from Iraq, keeping a promise that he had made in that 2008 campaign, we see Ramadi fall.  We see the Iraqi army in full flight, after all the training, after all the billions of dollars.

And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, said they were not driven, the Iraqi army was not driven out of Ramadi.  They drove out of Ramadi.  They aren’t a paper tiger.  They’re a paper tabby cat.

And that is the reality.  And ISIS is on the move.  ISIS is on the offensive.  And I think, politically speaking, beyond the ethics and the morals, that Democrats now are starting to feel themselves on the defensive on this issue, and Republicans are starting to feel free of what had been an enormous burden.

NSA - End of Bulk Data Collection? Not Yet

"The end of NSA’s bulk data collection?" PBS NewsHour 5/7/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The government program that collects the phone data of millions of Americans is illegal and not sanctioned by the Patriot Act, according to a ruling by a U.S. appeals court.  Gwen Ifill discusses the case with former Homeland Security Department official Stewart Baker and Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  The debate between privacy and security returned to center stage today, after a federal appeals court ruled a National Security Agency program that allowed bulk collection of millions of U.S. phone records went too far.  But where is the line?

And, as a deadline approaches for renewing the underlying Patriot Act, what happens now?

Joining me to discuss the value of such government surveillance are Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, and Stewart Baker, a former general counsel at the National Security Agency and former assistant secretary of homeland security.

Welcome to you both.

Kate Martin, was this the dropped shoe that privacy advocates were waiting on?

KATE MARTIN, Center for National Security Studies:  Yes.  This is the first time that a federal appeals court has looked at what was a secret interpretation by the government that allowed it to collect massive amounts of records on Americans under a secret interpretation of the law.

And the court said that secret interpretation of the law wasn’t, in fact, authorized by the Congress and so held the program to be a violation of the law.

GWEN IFILL:  So what does this do?  Does this stop the program in its tracks, Stewart Baker?

STEWART BAKER, Former Homeland Security Department official:  No, actually.  It’s remarkably without consequence.

It, at the end of the day, says Congress, in the view of this court, didn’t authorize exactly what the program is, and unless Congress says that it’s authorized, it’s not going to continue.  And then they send it back to the judge, letting the judge in the district court determine whether to enjoin it.

But really that just underlines what we already knew, which is that Congress has to act in the next three weeks, because, if it doesn’t, the program goes away automatically.  If it does, it’s going to have to say, yes, we’re approving this program.

POLITICS - So Called "Patriot" Act

"Patriot Abuse" by Janet Nocek, Countant

Was Gagged By The Patriot Act While The Attorney General Was Free To Tell Falsehoods About It.

When the USA Patriot Act was being reauthorized in 2005, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales claimed that not one single abuse of the "national security letters" provision had been reported.

It must be his poor memory that caused Mr. Gonzales to tell Congress that no abuse had been reported. What else would explain why he did not mention the reports that described abuses and mismanagement of NSLs - which we now discover were in his possession before his testimony?

I was one of four library colleagues who challenged an NSL in the courts around the time of its reauthorization. We were under a gag order because of the nondisclosure provision of the NSL section of the Patriot Act. This happened even though a judge with high-level security clearance had declared that there was no risk in identifying us as recipients of an NSL.

We were therefore not allowed to testify to Congress about our experience with the letters - which seek information, without court review, on people like library users.

It is more than irksome to now discover that the attorney general was giving Congress false information - at the same time that we recipients of NSLs were not allowed to express our concerns. My colleagues and I were lucky to have our gag order lifted eventually, with the help of lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, after the federal District Court found constitutional problems with that section of the Patriot Act. Unfortunately, we were prohibited from speaking to the public - or even to our U.S. senators and representatives - until after the Patriot Act was reauthorized.

A gag order is very difficult to deal with. A person cannot tell her family or friends she has received a demand from the government to turn in information on another person. Whether you agree with the security-letter provision or not, receiving such a letter is an emotionally wrenching experience.

And if the government requires you to compromise your professional and personal ethics, it can be an intensely disturbing experience. You feel like a character in an Orwellian book. You feel trapped in a world that others like you may inhabit, but you cannot reach outside of that world to find out.

Reportedly hundreds of thousands of security letters have been sent out. The recipients remain gagged and can never speak about their experience, under threat of a five-year prison sentence. They can never describe the scope and nature of the information they give to the FBI.

Therefore, it is laughable to assume that no abuse has been made of the security-letter provision. The secrecy under which the provision is administered guarantees a lack of oversight.

I don't believe the FBI is to blame for its reported mismanagement of NSLs. The Patriot Act does not effectively address court and congressional oversight. It follows that abuse and mismanagement are practically a given.

Janet Nocek is director of the Portland library and a member of the Executive Board of Library Connection, a Greater Hartford library consortium that received a national security letter in June 2005.

Fellow Americans, Orwell's book "1984" is not fiction. It is here, now, in America and other nations.

Surveillance cameras on city streets, gag orders without oversight to prevent abuse, electronic surveillance on your phone calls (no matter what the NSA claims), and more. And we seem to accept this as "protecting" us from dangers. This is the classic excuse of every totalitarian government in history, North Korea being a prime example.

All potential, if not real, abuses of government power aggressively protected by a Administration who does not believe in oversight; an Imperial Administration that believes it answers to no one.

POLITICS - Nazi "Heydrich" in Our Justice Department

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 14:31:40 -0800, sdnet.politics, Brian David Smith, San Diego, California

Alberto Gonzales infiltrating prosecutors

During World War 2, Reinhard Heydrich helped Hitler 'dig up dirt' on many political opponents. Later, as the Nazis took over Germany, Heydrich teamed up with Heinrich Himmler. Together not only did they built up the hideous Nazi SS, but they focused on infiltrating civil police forces in Germany.

The same thing is happening today. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is using a loophole in the Patriot Act to transform the ranks of the nation's top federal prosecutors. In Heydrich-like fashion, Gonzales is systematically firing the federal prosecutors and then replacing them with loyalists from the Bush administration's inner circle.

Essentially that is what happened to Carol Lam in San Diego. Obviously putting Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham in jail did not ingratiate Lam with Bush's modern-day version of Himmler and Heydrich. Perhaps Lam is lucky. She could be wearing concrete shoes at the bottom of San Diego Bay.

Any day now, I expect to see a huge gleaming brass swastika atop the Washington monument just like the one that once stood atop the Nuremberg parade grounds in Hitler's rallying stadium.

It is sad that history repeats itself.

And the GOP Regressives (far Right) salute.

POLITICS - Be Careful, They Can Spy On Emails of Non-Terrorists

In an article by Josh Gerstein, Staff Reporter, New York Sun, "Patriot Act E-Mail Searches Apply to Non-Terrorists, Judges Say" .......

Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism.

The disagreement among the jurists about the scope of their powers simmered for more than two years before coming to light in an opinion unsealed earlier this month. The resolution, which underscored the government's broad legal authority to intercept electronic communications, comes as debate is raging over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program and the duties of Internet providers to protect personal data.

A magistrate judge in Orlando, James Glazebrook, first questioned the so-called nationwide-search provision in 2003, after investigators in a child pornography probe asked him to issue a search warrant requiring a "legitimate" California-based Web site to identify all users who accessed certain "password-protected" photos posted on the site. The Web provider was not named in public court records.

Magistrate Glazebrook said that in passing the Patriot Act, formally known as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, Congress made clear its focus was on terrorism. He said there was nothing in the language Congress adopted in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that suggested the nationwide-search provision should apply to garden variety federal cases.

"The statutory language is clear and unambiguous in limiting district court authority to issue out-of-district warrants to investigations of terrorism, and that language controls this court's interpretation. The government has shown no legislative intent to the contrary," the magistrate wrote. He also noted that many of the examples given during legislative debate involved terrorism. The then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, described the nationwide-search language as applying in terrorism cases, the court noted.

Magistrate Glazebrook denied the search warrant, but it was recently disclosed that the government appealed to a federal judge, G. Kendall Sharp, who granted it without explanation.

You bet there was no explanation, he didn't have any!

Glazebrook has to think that the (so called) Patriot Act is all encompassing and is not, nor ever was, limited to protecting the Nation from terrorism. Next, the SS come knocking at your door.