Groundhog Day

by digby

This premature poll in the Wapo this morning has predictably led the little kewl kidz to conclude that the nation is so afraid of terrorism that they will go along with any number of invasions of their civil liberties. That may be true (although I have my doubts.)

But I wonder what the nation would think if they knew that the very same people who initiated this program in the name of the war on terror tried this long before there was any war on terror: more than 30 years ago. From Jason Vest at POGO blog:

None too pleased about AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth doing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bidding, Arlen Specter says he’s going to haul the three telecom companies before the Judiciary Committee for some pointed questions. Deja vu; in 1976, the now-deceased Rep. Bella Abzug did the same thing with three telegraph companies for their similar handmaiden-to-NSA roles. Looking back to those events, we can’t help but wonder if there’s more history that will repeat itself–will the Bush Administration try, as the Ford Administration did, to extend executive privilege to private industry.

After the Church Committee revealed the existence of NSA’s Project SHAMROCK, Abzug, the chair of the House Committee on Government Operations Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, wanted to go deeper. Abzug promptly subpoenaed not just current and former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and NSA officials involved in SHAMROCK, but also the CEOs of Western Union, ITT and RCA Global.

The Ford White House responded by ordering, on the grounds of executive privilege, the FBI and NSA employees to remain silent before Abzug. But Ford also went one amazing step further: “For the first time in history,” James Bamford wrote in The Puzzle Palace, “the concept of executive privilege was extended to a private corporation.” Attorney General Edward Levi actually asked Western Union’s president not to comply with Abzug’s subpeona as a means of “honor[ing] this invocation of executive privilege.” He later making a similar request of RCA.

While the FBI and NSA officials did as ordered by Levi and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Western Union and RCA didn’t, with both companies’s executives testifying and furnishing the Abzug Subcommittee with documents. (Apparently acknowledging their failure, Ford officials refrained from trying to muzzle ITT, which also cooperated with the committee.)

When the history of this period is written, one of its most important characteristics will be this zombie conservatism. Their leader, Richard Nixon, was destroyed by hubris at the very zenith of his power but it didn’t stop them. They just keep coming back with the same imperial presidency theory whenever they get the chance.

Vest quotes an old intelligence hand who recalls meetings at the time:

There were some meetings, he said, that were particularly memorable because of the vehement opposition voiced by two men who were intractably hostile to the notion that executive privilege did not allow for things like surveillance without oversight and gagging civil servants and CEOs before Congress.

“Their great fear was that oversight and procedures and legislation would fatally undermine the presidency by neutering executive privilege,” he recalled. “I don’t know where all of this will ultimately go, but I don’t think this Administration would be at all unhappy for hearings that have NSA and telecom [company] guys subpeoaned, which they’d regard as an opportunity for a showdown over executive privilege.”

Those two men? Guess who…

In light of this history, I think Specter’s plan to haul the telcos before the committee is the best approach, just as Abzug did in the 70’s. Many people may not think there’s anything wrong with the government collecting their phone records, but I seriously doubt that they will be happy to see the government claiming executive privilege to keep a telco corporation from having to testify before congress.

I’ll bet money they are going to do just that. These zombies just keep doing the same stuff over and over and over again. Who on earth ever said they were the ones with the new ideas?

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