The Frankfurter School

Michael Mukasey, the once-respected conservative legal scholar whose appointment as Attorney General was made possible by Democratic Senators Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, gave a speech in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago about the need to pass new surveillance legislation exactly as the Bush Administration wants it, with full immunity for telecom companies. In that speech, he choked up and almost cried as he claimed that such measures were urgently needed, and such legislation could have prevented the attacks of 9/11 by allowing the government to track a phone call that came in 2001 from an Al-Queda safe house in Afghanistan to an unknown destination in the US that they weren’t allowed to track.

No mainstream press outlet has covered this story at all. Glenn Greenwald of Salon has trained his legal brain and journalistic prowess on this speech because Mukasey, as he points out, is lying about what the 1978 FISA law already authorized (it certainly would have authorized the tracking of that call), and if the phone call was real and in fact, missed, it is new evidence of incompetence on the part of this Administration in keeping the public safe. Greenwald points out that this represents either a) new information about the events leading up to 9/11 that have not yet appeared in the public record, or b) a new low point for the Bush Administration in which the country’s chief law enforcer is completely fabricating a lie in order to use the specter of 9/11 to scare people into agreeing to a massive forfeiture of civil liberties. Greenwald has now received responses from members of the 9/11 Commission indicating that they do not know anything about the incident to which Mukasey refers.

The FISA reauthorization issue has (fortunately) stalled for the moment because the Senate passed legislation written by the Bush Administration giving on everything they asked for and granting full immunity to the telecoms, but the House has held strong in the face of GOP pressure and passed a bill that limits the scope of executive authority, refusing to grant immunity to the telecoms. The House and Senate versions have not been reconciled and the Administration continues to press for a “compromise” version, continuing to try to extract further demands from the House. Meanwhile, Michael Mukasey continues the reprehensible practice of using the Justice Department as a political arm of the Republican party and has demonstrated a great willingness to lie to achieve his ends. California and New York voters should be reminded that the Democratic caucus was lined up ready to reject Mukasey’s confirmation until Senators Schumer and Feinstein broke ranks and voted with the GOP.

Previously in The Frankfurter School: What’s All The Fuss About FISA?

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