Time Magazine's FISA Fiasco shows how Beltway reporters mislead the country

From Glen Greenwald:
On Wednesday, I documented that Joe Klein's column in this week's Time Magazine contained multiple false statements about the new FISA bill -- The RESTORE Act -- passed by House Democrats last week. The most obvious and harmful inaccuracy was his claim that that bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court" and that it therefore "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." Based on those outright falsehoods, Klein called the House Democrats' bill "well beyond stupid."

That day, Klein responded on his blog to what I wrote without acknowledging that he was doing so and without even telling his readers what the criticisms were. He insisted that everything he wrote was accurate ("as I reported, [the bill] obliquely gives foreign terrorists the same procedures as American citizens, if not the same rights"). He also said that the RESTORE Act was just "a partisan waste of time, fodder for lawyers and civil liberties extremists."

Yesterday -- Saturday night on Thanksgiving weekend -- Klein returned to the Time blog to write an extremely conditional, weaselly, self-justifying and partial "correction" to what he wrote in the print magazine. There's no indication whether any correction will appear in the print magazine, but the online version of Klein's article contains no such correction and still contains all of his grave misstatements.

I don't want the focus here to be on Klein himself. It's beyond well-established what he is and what a slothful, easily manipulated and dishonest "reporter" he is. As deceitful as the correction itself is (for the reasons set forth below), at least he returned to the issue and finally admitted wrongdoing (Klein: "Clearly, I didn't do sufficient vetting of the facts"), which is more than most of this type of pundit typically does.

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What I want to do is examine Klein's conduct here to illustrate how so many Beltway reporters (though not all) function. This is not a matter of some obscure error involving details. Because of what Klein did, Time Magazine told its 4 million readers that the bill passed by the House Democrats "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans" and thus shows how Democrats still can't be trusted on national security. The whole column was built on complete, transparent falsehoods about the key provisions of that bill.

Yet look at Klein's first statement in his "correction":

I may have made a mistake in my column this week about the FISA legislation passed by the House, although it's difficult to tell for sure given the technical nature of the bill's language and fierce disagreements between even moderate Republicans and Democrats on the Committee about what the bill actually does contain.
One can debate whether Klein's original, inaccurate claims about the House FISA bill in his Time article can fairly be called "lies" (as opposed to inexcusably reckless inaccuracies). But this statement by Klein in his "correction" unquestionably is a lie.

There is no confusion possible about whether the House bill -- as Klein originally wrote -- "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court." Anyone who told that to Klein was lying. All you have to do is read the House bill in order to know that. Here is Section 2 of the RESTORE Act -- the very first section after the "Definitions" section:


'CLARIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE OF NON-UNITED STATES PERSONS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES'

Sec. 105A. (a) Foreign to Foreign Communications-

(1) IN GENERAL - Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.

Nobody who can read basic English can fail to understand what this says. As clearly as it can, the bill says that no warrant is required for communications involving non-U.S. persons outside of the U.S. In fact, individual warrants are not even required when a foreign target communicates with someone inside the U.S.; only general approval by the FISA court of the procedures used to eavesdrop is required (see Sec. 105). Thus, Klein's statements about the bill were indisputably, unquestionably false, and all one had to do is read the painfully clear language of the bill to know that.

But Klein, of course, never bothered to read the bill and still hasn't (even though he is published by Time to "report on" and opine about this bill). Instead, even now, he says that he has spoken with both Republicans and Democrats, and while Democrats insist that what he wrote was false, "the Republican Committee staff disagrees and says [his] reporting is correct."

In other words, Klein's GOP source(s) blatantly lied to him about what the bill does and doesn't do in order to manipulate him into uncritically feeding Time's readers the Rush Limbaugh Line -- namely, that Democrats are giving equal rights to Terrorists and preventing the Leader from eavesdropping on foreign Terrorists. And Klein dutifully wrote down what he was told in Time without bothering to find out if it was true and without ever bothering to talk to any of the bill's Democratic proponents. And no Time Editor knew enough or cared enough to bother correcting any of it. And thus, the unfortunate 4 million Americans who read and trust Time now think that the Democrats' FISA bill does the exact opposite of what it actually does.

That is the real story here. That's how our political system works. Scheming GOP operatives feed whispered lies to their favorite, most gullible, most slothful and/or dishonest Beltway journalists. Gleeful and grateful that they have been chosen for this dirty task, these journalists then scamper and write down what they were told and think that, by doing so, they are engaged in what they call "original reporting" -- which means uncritically passing on what they're told by government sources. As a result, they continue to obfuscate every key political issue and mislead Americans by doing the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.

Even now that Klein knows that he was lied to by his GOP source(s), he still won't say that. Indeed, he does the opposite. He claims that there's some super-complex, clouded ambiguity here that people of good faith (such as his lying GOP operative-source) can see differently (Klein: "I reported as fact a provision of the bill that seems to be disputable, to say the least" and "I was clearly wrong to state as fact something that might not actually be in the bill"). Again and again, Klein defends his lying GOP source by pretending that there is some genuine grounds for disagreement here among good faith ladies and gentlemen that accounts for what he was told.

Worse, Klein now says that none of this really matters anyway, because "we are talking about relatively obscure and unimportant technical details" and his "larger point" about Democrats' excess partisanship is "still true." So Klein's column smeared House Democrats as wanting to protect Terrorists, based on a lie fed to him by GOP sources, and now that it's exposed for what it is, he says that none of that really matters anyway. What matters is that Democrats are still being foolish by not agreeing to the demands of the House Republicans and giving amnesty to telecoms and passing a bill that Republicans like, too.

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What a repugnant though vivid microcosm this is for how so many of our Beltway journalists function. They think that their only job is to write down faithfully what they are told by both sides (if we're lucky) and call it a day. If one side is blatantly lying and the other side is telling the truth, that isn't for them to say.

Exactly like a stenographer in a court proceeding, their only job is to record the words that they hear accurately, not to identify what actually is true. And here is Klein admitting -- finally -- that this is exactly what he did (although in this case, he wasn't even a good stenographer since he only wrote down what one side said, not both).

The very idea of a reporter and a major news magazine publishing a piece about a crucial bill that neither the reporter nor any editor has ever even bothered to read is amazing. No blogger that I read regularly would ever think about doing that. But that's how the Bush administration has been able to depict all of its false statements about Iraq, and its illegal spying on Americans, as some sort of complex, impossible-to-resolve "controversy." GOP operatives say "X" and reporters write it down, and it would be terribly "partisan" for them to point out that "X" is actually an outright lie.

Had Klein even bothered to read the Democrats' bill before calling it "well beyond stupid" and passing on lies about it, he would have had a real story. This:

Last week, House Democrats passed a bill that allows the government to eavesdrop on foreigners outside of the U.S., but requires court approval to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens inside the U.S. But GOP operatives/politicians have spent the week telling reporters that the bill does the opposite, falsely claiming that it gives the same rights to Terrorists that it gives to U.S. citizens.
Those are the objective facts. That is actually what happened. Yet Klein's function -- like those of most of his colleagues -- isn't to report what actually happened, so he'll never say that. And thus, Time has yet again completely misled its readers on a critical political issue by passing on GOP falsehoods as fact, and they are highly unlikely to do anything in the way of alerting their readers to what they did, let alone reporting the real story here: how and why that happened.

Senator: U.S. has become haven for war criminals

WASHINGTON — More than 1,000 people from 85 countries who are accused of such crimes as rape, killings, torture and genocide are living in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.

America has become a haven for the world's war criminals because it lacks the laws needed to prosecute them, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Wednesday. There's been only one U.S. indictment of someone suspected of a serious human-rights abuse. Durbin said torture was the only serious human-rights violation that was a crime under American law when committed outside the United States by a non-American national.

"This is unacceptable. Our laws must change and our determination to end this shameful situation must become a priority," Durbin, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, said at a hearing of the subcommittee Wednesday.

He's trying to get more information about specific cases.

One is that of Juan Romagoza Arce, the director of a clinic that provides free care for the poor in Washington. In 1980, Romagoza was a young doctor caring for the poor in El Salvador during the early period of his country's civil war when the military seized him and tortured him for 22 days. An estimated 75,000 people died in the 12-year war.

Romagoza told Durbin that he was given electric shocks until he lost consciousness, then kicked and burned with cigarettes until he came to. He also told of being sodomized, nearly asphyxiated in a hood containing calcium oxide — which can cause severe shortness of breath when inhaled — and subjected to waterboarding, including being hung by his feet with his head immersed in water until he nearly drowned.

Romagoza and two other torture victims brought a civil suit in U.S. federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., against two Salvadoran generals who moved to Florida in 1989: Jose Guillermo Garcia, who was the minister of defense, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who was the director general of the Salvadoran National Guard.

In 2002, a jury found them liable for the torture of the three, and a judgment of $54.6 million was entered against them and upheld on appeal.

Romagoza said he didn't expect to see any of the money.

He testified that he'd received many threatening phone calls and letters at the time of the trial but that he'd overcome his fears and testified.

"I felt like I was in the prow of a boat and that there were many people rowing behind that were moving me into this moment," he told Durbin's panel. "I felt that if I looked back at them I'd weep, because I'd see them again, wounded, tortured, raped, naked, torn and bleeding. So I didn't look back, but I felt their support, their strength and their energy."

He said he and others were angry and frustrated that the two men "live in the same country where we have found refuge from their persecution."

Durbin said he'd send a letter asking the U.S. attorney in South Florida what was being done in the case.

"If he says he doesn't have authority, we should change the law. If he has the authority and is not using it, we should change the U.S. attorney," Durbin said.

Durbin and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., have introduced legislation that would authorize the government to prosecute anyone found in the U.S. who's guilty of genocide, human trafficking or recruiting child soldiers.

David Scheffer is a Northwestern University law professor who was the ambassador at large for war-crimes issues during the Clinton administration. He testified that after the experience of war-crimes tribunals after World War II and international tribunals prosecuting many atrocities over the past 15 years, "one would be forgiven to assume that surely in the United States the law is now well established to enable U.S. courts — criminal and military — to investigate and prosecute the full range of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. . . .

"That, however, is not the case."

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NOV. 14

The date of Wednesday's hearing is significant in the history of war crimes, Justice Department official Sigal P. Mandelker told the subcommittee:

On Nov. 14, 1935, the Third Reich issued regulations that deprived Germany's Jews of their citizenship and established a system to classify people as Jews based on their ancestry and affiliations.

On Nov. 14, 1945, the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremberg, Germany, to try Nazi leaders.

On Nov. 14, 1995, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued its first indictments on genocide charges over the massacres of as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. Two of the leaders indicted, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remain fugitives.

NBC's Miklaszewski minimized House waterboarding prohibition as "poke in the eye of the administration"

On the November 16 edition of MSNBC Live, NBC News chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski suggested that a House bill contained a prohibition on the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, "even though ... [the U.S. military's] own Army field manual prohibits" the technique. "Congress," he claimed, "wants to throw that in, well, pretty much to ensure that it doesn't happen, but also ... [as] a poke in the eye of the administration, clearly." In fact, the Army field manual's prohibition on the use of waterboarding currently applies only to the Department of Defense; the "waterboarding clause" in the House bill would expand that prohibition to cover "the United States Government." As Media Matters for America has noted, the CIA -- which is not a part of the Defense Department -- has reportedly used waterboarding as an interrogation method on several detainees since September 11, 2001, and although the U.S. government has, according to The New York Times, stopped using waterboarding, the administration has reportedly asserted its authority to use the technique.

Miklaszewski made his assertion at the end of his report on the House's passage of a bill appropriating $50 billion for war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, when host Mika Brzezinski asked him about the "waterboarding clause in that bill." Miklaszewski replied that the provision was included in the bill, even though the U.S. military's own Army field manual prohibits the use of waterboarding, and concluded that the clause was "clearly" "a poke in the eye of the administration." Brzezinski then said, "Yeah, yeah, little politics at play."

However, under current law, only the Defense Department must obey the Army field manual's rule on waterboarding. Section 1002 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA) states that "[n]o person in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense or under detention in a Department of Defense facility shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation." The current version of that field manual, released in September 2006, and now titled the Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations, explicitly states that "[i]f used in conjunction with intelligence interrogations, prohibited actions include, but are not limited to ... 'Waterboarding.' "

The DTA applies a different standard to the rest of the U.S. government, requiring, per Section 1003, that "[n]o individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment." However, as Media Matters has noted, the Bush administration has reportedly claimed that the use of waterboarding was still permissible under that standard. According to an October 4 New York Times article, "Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that 'shocks the conscience' was unconstitutional," a 2005 Justice Department opinion "found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said." Another Justice Department opinion, from February 2005, reportedly authorized the administration's use of the "harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the [CIA]" and provided "explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures."

By contrast, section 102(a) of the just-passed Iraq war funding bill -- the one Miklaszewski was discussing with Brzezinski -- would require the entire U.S. government to obey the Army Field Manual's more-specific requirements on interrogation techniques, stating that "[n]o person in the custody or under the effective control of the United States Government shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual FM2-22.3 Human Intelligence Collector Operations" [emphasis added].

From the 9 a.m. ET hour of the November 16 edition of MSNBC Live:

BRZEZINSKI: And Jim, there's also a waterboarding clause in that bill, is there not?

MIKLASZEWSKI: Yes, there is, even though the U.S. military, according -- their own Army field manual prohibits the use of such techniques as waterboarding, Congress wants to throw that in, well, pretty much to ensure that it doesn't happen, but also, you know, a poke in the eye of the administration, clearly.

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah, yeah, little politics at play. Jim Miklaszewski at the Pentagon, thank you very much.

MIKLASZEWSKI: OK, Mika.

NPR Offers Program “Is Waterboarding Torture?

Lord, save us from the idiots that are still unsure about this. I have an idea: how about any person that hasn’t yet figured this out line up to experience it? I’m pretty sure once you’ve got up close and personal with a near-drowning, it won’t be too hard to come down one way or the other on the issue.

MediaBloodhound:

A recent segment on WNYC, New York’s flagship National Public Radio (NPR) station, underscored not only the level to which public broadcasting standards have degraded during the Bush years, increasingly adopting the same intellectually dishonest frames and “fair and balanced” debate as those aired on commercial media networks, but also how, simultaneously, public broadcasting deceptively benefits from, and is protected by, its vaunted and entrenched reputation for providing quality information.

WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show hosted the segment “Is Waterboarding Torture?” preceding Judge Michael Mukasey’s controversial confirmation for U.S. Attorney General. On its face, of course, this frame is straight out of the worst of network news and commercial talk radio.

“Lots of questions abound. Just what is waterboarding? Does it work? Is it torture? And waterboarding figures heavily in today’s news….Do you agree that there are degrees of waterboarding? And so, you know, again in Mukasey’s defense, he may not know to what degree this technique is actually used, how close to drowning somebody in the drowning experience, in actually filling their lungs with water, as our previous guest was describing, they actually go. Which also makes it difficult for him to take a position on whether the administration is using a torture technique.” — host Brian Lehrer

You know, I expect this kind of stuff from the Fox Networks, but man, how can you not grieve for NPR?

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

A Devastating Failure By Gov.Bill Richardson

Real leadership requires having the strength to stand up, even when it isn't easy and victory isn't guaranteed. The Senate's confirmation last night of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General was a devastating failure of leadership, and a serious set back in our fight to take back America.

Mukasey's waffling about waterboarding and torture was unacceptable -- and should have been a deal-breaker from the start. Since the Spanish Inquisition, the rest of the world has been able to identify torture. Why is it too much to expect our attorney general to be clear on what torture is and whether or not it is illegal?

Waking up this morning with another attorney general who won't steadfastly stand against torture was a shock. Even more shocking was that four Democratic U.S. Senators running president failed to even show up for the fight.

I may not be perfect, but I can tell the difference between right and wrong.

Torture is wrong. Torture is un-American. This is a black and white issue. There is no gray -- torture of any kind is a crime.

And I will stand up and say so unequivocally: when I'm president, I will ensure that any form of torture, including waterboarding, will never be used. Furthermore, I will direct the Department of Justice to vigorously investigate and prosecute ANY individual responsible for the use of torture No one is above the law. No one.

This may have been forgotten by the Bush administration, but the attorney general's job is to steadfastly defend the Constitution and execute the laws of the land, without exception or equivocation. Judge Mukasey's willingness to let politics distort such a clear-cut moral issue was disappointing. But, by allowing him to be confirmed as attorney general, the Senate has allowed the Bush administration to move the moral line-in-the sand once again. Have we not learned that when you give this man an inch he will take a mile?

Last night, the confirmation could have been stopped with a filibuster and 40 Democratic votes. The fact that four Senators didn't show up and speak out boggles me. I know they are all against torture, but if they had shown up and spoken out, they may well have changed the outcome.

I believe some things are worth fighting for -- even if you fail, at least you go down fighting. And if the use of torture isn't worthy of that kind of fight, I don't know what is.

You can join me in this fight.