The Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill has circled the wagons in defense of the party’s determination to roll the dice with American national security.
Senators Jay Rockefeller and Patrick Leahy joined Representatives Silvestre Reyes and John Conyers in penning a fatuous op-ed in the Washington Post Monday. The four are chairs of the intelligence and judiciary committees of, respectively, the Senate and House. They claim that the White House is engaged in fear-mongering when it decries the failure of House Democrats to enact a reform measure that would have preserved essential intelligence-collection authority — a bill that passed in the Democrat-controlled Senate by an overwhelming two-to-one margin and would similarly sail through the House if Speaker Nancy Pelosi would allow it to come to the floor.
The op-ed marks a dramatic shift for Rockefeller. The West Virginia Democrat championed the Senate bill, which was voted out of his committee by a 13-2 landslide. As recently as February 14, he was quite candid in
acknowledging that the consequence of allowing the Protect America Act (PAA) to lapse, as it did a little over a week ago when House Democrats refused to act, would be “degraded” intelligence-collection capacity.
Now, however, with his fellow Democrats getting hammered as unserious about protecting American lives, it’s evidently time to close ranks. Rockefeller has suddenly joined the “Everything Is Beautiful” chorus that claims the sun’s setting on the PAA is really no big deal since any security gaps can still be filled by FISA — the ill-conceived, obsolete Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
But the chorus is unconvincing and the lawyerly strains of the lawmakers’ own words give the game away. Note the strategic insertion of the word
known (which I italicize below), as they claim that
our country did not “go dark” on Feb. 16 when the Protect America Act (PAA) expired. Despite President Bush’s overheated rhetoric on this issue, the government's orders under that act will last until at least August. These orders could cover every known terrorist group and foreign target. No surveillance stopped. If a new member of a known group, a new phone number or a new e-mail address is identified, U.S. intelligence can add it to the existing orders, and surveillance can begin immediately.
Yes, as has been freely conceded by the administration and critics of the House Democrats’ dereliction, even though the PAA has lapsed, any surveillance directives that have been approved since it was enacted last August may continue to run for one year from the date they began. That helps us with all the terrorist groups we already know about. Moreover, these directives — which are classified, so we don’t know exactly what they say — apparently feature anticipatory triggers which permit newly identified operatives to come under surveillance if they are tied to known terrorist groups. Thus, there is authority for the next few months for monitoring some new players.
But not all new players. If new groups emerge, the previously issued PAA directives will not permit surveillance of them and their operatives.
And new groups are emerging all the time — highly capable new groups. Recent intelligence estimates indicate that just in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region, nearly a quarter million men have received some measure of paramilitary training in jihadist camps. Does anyone really think we have a handle on more than a bare fraction of these potential threats?
There is usually no requirement that these men join al-Qaeda or the Taliban in order to get the training. Many of them come from afar and take what they’ve learned back home to Europe, Northern and Eastern Africa, the Indian subcontinent, South and Central America, Canada, and even the United States. They recruit and train their own new cells — which are unknown to our intelligence community.
Furthermore, even without the mediating influence of known terrorist organizations and their training facilities, radicalization is a worldwide phenomenon. As I’ve previously noted, the July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate stated:
globalization trends and recent technological advances will continue to enable even small numbers of alienated people to find and connect with one another, justify and intensify their anger, and mobilize resources to attack — all without requiring a centralized terrorist organization, training camp, or leader.
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