Pelosi’s Reckless Gamble on FISA

Pelosi’s Reckless Gamble on FISA

By: Jed Babbin

With great fanfare, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her agenda for her first 100 hours last January. One of the seven things she promised to do was to enact all the remaining recommendations of the 9-11 Commission. One year later, with few of those items accomplished, Pelosi is gambling recklessly that terrorists will miss the opportunities given them by the House’s failure to pass essential fixes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 

When the 9-11 Commission’s report came out in July 2004, its most scathing criticism of the intelligence community was for failing to “connect the dots:” to cooperate in gathering, analyzing and using the information we have on terrorists’ intentions and capabilities. The “connect the dots” mantra was the basis for legislative reorganizations of the intelligence community, including the creation of the new Director of National Intelligence to coordinate all the agencies and the role of the new Department of Homeland Security in analyzing intelligence on terrorist threats. 

But before you “connect the dots” you have to gather them. The National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program, created in secret by presidential order, was enormously successful in intercepting cell phone calls, e-mails and other electronic communications between terrorists and their sympathizers. It resulted in the gathering of huge amounts of data and the interdiction of a number of terrorist attacks. It has also helped battlefield operations in Iraq and Afghanistan because the separation of national intelligence gathering assets and armed forces operations has – wisely — been almost completely eliminated.

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Nancy Pelosi and the most of the House Democrats are erasing the dots, not helping intelligence analysts to connect them. Last week Pelosi blocked a vote by which the House would have passed the bipartisan Senate version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reforms legislation essential to fixing the problem created by the FISA court and keeping the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program going. Pelosi did that despite a letter she received from most of the “Blue Dog” Democrats telling her they’d vote for the Senate bill. Added to Republican numbers, the Blue Dogs’ votes would have enabled Pelosi to pass the bill on a simple majority vote. 

Instead, she killed the effort, the House recessed and the August patchwork FISA legislation expired on Saturday.   

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The House’s failure comes at a critical time. Imad Mugniyeh, one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, was killed in Syria last week. His terrorist network, Iranian-backed Hizballah, has threatened revenge against the US and Israel, but NSA is left nearly blind to new intelligence targets. Pakistan – after the Bhutto assassination — is holding an election this week that al-Queda and the Taliban want to disrupt. And they may, without NSA interference.