Andy McCarthy has an outstanding deconstruction of the political grandstanding that resulted in this piece from top Democrats involved in intelligence and judiciary oversight. McCarthy points out that Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, not long ago had the opposite view of the one he put forward in today's Washington Post.
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.
Rockefeller does this regularly. He did it on Iraq, and on surveillance. Yet he somehow manages to escape the kind of truth-squadding regularly visited on the Bush administration and others who hold more (consistently) hawkish views.
On surveillance, Rockefeller was one of a select group of congressional leaders notified about the National Security Agency's "Terrorist Surveillance Program," shortly after that program started. When the program was exposed in the New York Times back in December 2005, Rockefeller's office quickly released a handwritten letter he wrote to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003. Rockefeller introduced the letter by claiming he was writing to "reiterate" concerns he had about the program. But those familiar with the briefings on TSP say Rockefeller had never before expressed any reservations.
Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert recalled one briefing in which then-NSA Director Michael Hayden described the program and spoke of its benefits. Haster said that Cheney spoke next. "I remember him specifically saying, 'OK, we need your understanding to go forward. Does anybody have any objection? Do we need to do anything legislatively? It was a question Cheney asked. And everybody agreed: No, we don't need to do this in legislation. We need to let our intelligence go forward and do what they're doing. So he laid it out very specifically to everybody. I remember everybody was present at the time."
Another participant in those meetings put it this way: "It was [the Democrats'] unanimous recommendation that we continue the program and that we not seek legislative authorization. Jay Rockefeller was sitting at the table."
Senator Pat Roberts, who was then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said when the program was exposed that Rockefeller's opposition to it was something quite new. "On many occasions, Senator Rockefeller express to the vice president his vocal support for the program; his most recent expression of support was only two weeks ago."
On Iraq, Rockefeller's screeching u-turn came in public. Before the war, he spoke of the "unmistakable evidence" that Saddam Hussein was "working aggressively" on nuclear weapons and described the grave threat posed by Iraq's "existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities." After the war, Rockefeller went after the Bush Administration as "fundamentally misleading" for saying the exact same things.
In fact, Rockefeller went further than the Bush administration, calling the threat from Iraq "imminent."
There has been some debate over how "imminent" a threat Iraq poses. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. It is in the nature of these weapons, and the way they are targeted against civilian populations, that documented capability and demonstrated intent may be the only warning we get.
And though Rockefeller voted in favor of the war, he said later that he did so based on inadequate intelligence. But before the war, he said he had all of the information he needed:
To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? We cannot!
So Rockefeller's latest reversal is part of a long pattern. He supports aggressive national security measures until they are politically unpopular. And yet he has the audacity to claim, as he did once again in today's op-ed, that it is the White House and Republicans who are playing "political games?"
