The second time as farce
In a terrific column for NRO Andrew McCarthy takes apart last weekend's New York Times story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau on the FISA-reform bill passed by Congress before its summer recess. Risen and Lichtblau are the reporters who blew the NSA's terrorist surveillance program in December 2005. McCarthy provides the background:
The Gray Lady’s latest chapter in FISA fear-mongering came this weekend, a purple page-one report from James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. They, of course, are the correspondents who got this whole ball rolling in late 2005 by informing al Qaeda and the rest of the world about a classified NSA program, fully disclosed to top Democrats in Congress as it ensued for over three years, which eavesdropped on suspected terrorist communications into and out of the United States.McCarthy can't find evidence of the ghosts that Risen and Lichtblau summon in the new bill:In Times parlance, such monitoring of international enemy contacts, routinely carried out by every wartime president in history, somehow becomes “domestic spying” when George W. Bush employs it against an enemy that has managed to attack the United States — and, according to the intelligence community’s latest assessment, is working feverishly to do it again.
That is the subtext for Risen and Lichtblau’s Sunday “news” story about what is, in reality, a very tepid and temporary reform measure, grudgingly enacted before Congress skipped town for summer recess three weekends ago … and only because Democrats fear being blamed for the intelligence crisis they have created slightly more than they quake at the wailing of their nutroots.
So I checked with the radical American Civil Liberties Union. Certainly, I imagined, it would elaborate on the hidden landmines the Times has found. After all, the ACLU so despises the bill that it has put out a “fact sheet” sniping that the new law should be called the “Police America Act” (it is actually called the “Protect America Act”). Yet for all its predictable bombast, nowhere does the ACLU repeat, much less explain, the Times’s spin that FISA reform has left us wholesale exposed to the snatching of our files, the scrutinizing of our phone usage, and even the violation of our persons.I had my say on Risen and Lichtblau's December 2005 handiwork in the Standard column "Exposure." Whereas Risen and Lichtblau's December 2005 story both made news and violated the espionage laws, their current story makes news only in the sense of fabricating it -- although no laws were broken in the process.It also turns out that no less a doctrinaire civil libertarian than the University of Chicago’s Geoffrey Stone has weighed in on FISA reform, as a guest blogger for the American Constitution Society. As he has throughout the NSA controversy, Professor Stone makes a number of misleading and inaccurate claims; but even he, like the ACLU, limits his complaints to the actual subject matter of the bill: telecommunications. Nothing about business records and the like.
The Times is engaged here in the worst kind of journalistic abuse. Risen and Lichtblau sprinkle their story with the names of several experts, but not a single one is identified as standing behind the explosive claims quoted above. Those are attributed to “experts” — unnamed. And unnamed for good reason: What the Times represents as a respectable, mainstream interpretation of the new law is actually a fringe construction unsupportable by any coherent reading.
