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'War on Terror' II
We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We've watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of "state secrets." We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee seemed to abandon hope of bringing any real change to the Patriot Act. A lopsided and depressingly bipartisan majority approved legislation that would reauthorize a series of expanded surveillance powers set to expire at the end of the year. Several senators had proposed that reauthorization be wedded to safeguards designed to protect the privacy of innocent Americans from indiscriminate data dragnets--but behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Obama administration ensured that even the most modest of these were stripped from the final bill now being sent to the full Senate. ...

...The supposed rationale for rejecting these changes--many of which the very same Judiciary Committee had unanimously favored just four years earlier--was that any new limitations on broad search powers might interfere with an "ongoing investigation." During hearings, one Justice Department official had alluded to an "important, sensitive collection program" involving 215 orders, and Attorney General Eric Holder publicly implied--though he did not state outright--that the new powers had played a crucial role in the capture of alleged bomb plotter Najibullah Zazi.

But there is ample reason for doubt. According to a report on National Public Radio, intelligence officers became aware of Zazi thanks to a tip from Pakistani intelligence indicating that he had trained with Al Qaeda. Such a tip should have provided grounds for a full-blown FISA wiretap warrant, and would have far surpassed the mere "reasonable basis" to suspect a terror link that even the most aggressive reform proposals required for NSLs or 215 orders. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin complained that "the real reason for resisting this obvious, common-sense modification of Section 215 is unfortunately cloaked in secrecy," and worried that posterity would look unkindly on his colleagues once that cloak was lifted. Feingold, too, disputed that his reforms would hamper investigations, and hinted that classified briefings had revealed uses of Section 215 that he considered abuses of the power. ...