SCOTUS-Backed Surveillance Law Built on a Bush-Era Lie

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http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-03-06/news/surveillance-law-built-on-bush-era-lie/


The Bush administration used the disappearance of Alex Jimenez to loosen restrictions on wiretapping.

Army Spc. Alex Jimenez died without ever learning he would be used to advance the Bush agenda. Jimenez, a U.S. soldier originally from Queens, was abducted in Iraq alongwith two others in May 2007. But he quickly became more than another missing soldier. The Bush administration decided to spin his capture, plunging Americans into a civil-liberties head game, and leading to a Supreme Court ruling last week that activists fear will leave the Fourth Amendment permanently weakened.

After he was captured, Jimenez became the focus of media attention not because there was anything exceptional about his mission or the attack on his unit, but because his case was used to highlight a law the Bush administration blamed for delaying the search for his captors. Bush officials said the hunt was hampered by the bureaucratic hurdle of what's known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which was enacted in 1978 to require the approval of a special court before wiretapping people inside the U.S. suspected of terrorism or espionage. That requirement cost Jimenez's would-be rescuers precious hours, the Bushies' narrative explained. The FISA requirement could lead to the loss of American lives.

The supposed delay in wiretapping Jimenez's captors was reported by the Associated Press on August 3, 2007, just as the Protect America Act (PAA), the law President Bush had sought as a "fix" for FISA, was being voted on in Congress. The Christian Science Monitor reported that the delay was again discussed in September by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell as he urged Congress to pass a law making permanent the changes contained in the temporary PAA. (A few weeks later, in October, according to an Army statement, Jimenez's weapons, including an M-249 "squad automatic weapon," were recovered in an Iraqi village, but not his body.)

And so a drama of violence and death in Iraq became part of a debate in Washington about wiretapping and the Fourth Amendment. It is part of a narrative that stretches back to The New York Times' 2005 revelation about warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency. It is a debate that takes place with almost no concrete evidence about how, exactly, the government has used those powers: No public record exists of the NSA program or FISA court orders. And it is a debate that was rekindled a week ago with the Supreme Court's dismissal of a lawsuit by a group of plaintiffs who had sued to block the expanded wiretapping powers of 2008's FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which also gave telecoms immunity against lawsuits brought by those who believed they had been illegally wiretapped. The FAA was renewed for five years in 2012.