Michael Mukasey, George W. Bush’s Attorney General, and Michael Hayden, George W. Bush’s director of the CIA, both used the Patriot Act to conduct massive surveillance operations while they were in power. There’s also evidence that, while they held leadership positions in the Bush Administration’s surveillance infrastructure, abuses of Patriot Act powers were commonplace.
Still, yesterday, the Washington Post saw fit to give Mukasey and Hayden special access to its editorial page, where they wrote in opposition to efforts to reform the Patriot Act. The assertions they made in their Op-Ed were baldly in contradiction to facts gathered from documents produced while Mukasey and Hayden themselves were in power.
One argument put forth by Mukasey and Hayden in their editorial outshines all others in its shameless dishonesty. The two claim that reforms of the Patriot Act are unnecessary because they would “duplicate oversight already conducted by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.”
What Mukasey and Hayden don’t acknowledge in their editorial is that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, for all intents and purposes, does not exist. President Barack Obama has refused to nominate the number of people to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that would constitute a quorum. Without a quorum, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board cannot meet. What’s more, the U.S. Senate has refused to conduct confirmation hearings even for the two people President Obama has nominated.
There is no Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Oversight of the Patriot Act isn’t happening, except by private organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which obtained evidence of tens of thousands of abuses of Patriot Act powers only by wrenching documents from the federal government through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey are right about one thing, though: They are correct in their conclusion that the time for Patriot Act reforms is not right. The Patriot Act is so corrosive to public trust, in both its design and its implementation, that the only effective way to prevent further damage to American democracy by the surveillance law is to repeal it completely.
This Saturday at noon, a protest calling for repeal of the Patriot Act will take place outside the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C.
You can send a message to the likes of Michael Mukasey and Michael Hayden that you won’t put up with the kind of arrogant dishonesty they displayed in their Washington Post editorial yesterday. Join the protest on Saturday.
In Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee markup of a Patriot Act reauthorization bill, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy openly mocked the inaccuracies of the Mukasey-Hayden op-ed. Here’s a sample of their reaction to it:
“Dianne Feinstein: What I want to say is, we’ve done our due diligence on the Mukasey op-ed today, and some of the facts are quite incorrect. So when that comes up, Mr. Chairman, I’d very much appreciate the opportunity to address it.
Patrick Leahy: I tend to agree with the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that the Op-Ed — Michael Mukasey, I assume, has a lot of facts and would understand and read the bill before he would write that, and understand of course the Office of National Intelligence has supported the bill, and that the current law does not, (as Mr. Hayden and Mr. Mukasey so erroneously and almost unbelievably write), allow for presumptive authority in the NSL context. They mix up Section 215 with NSLs. I mean, such a basic misunderstanding of the law, and there’s a lot of others of course, it almost makes me wonder whether they wrote this themselves or they had a ghost writer who was having a bad day.”