Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty-Guest Blogger
I guess I am a little naïve, but I was shocked to read that the Obama Administration has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that is so large in its scope that some Senators consider it a whole new law! “Two Senators have been warning for months that the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law — one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the snooping.
“There is a significant discrepancy between what most Americans – including many members of Congress – think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and how government officials interpret that same law,” wrote the Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. “We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret.” The Senators tried to get the government to reveal some of the law’s contents, by forcing the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to produce a report outlining when this secret surveillance has gone overboard. Yesterday, the effort failed. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said no to the report by rejecting Wyden and Udall’s amendment to the FY2012 Intelligence Authorization Act.” Crooks and Liars
If two Democratic Senators cannot convince a Democratically controlled Select Committee to accept their amendment, all hell has broken loose and pigs can now fly. If you think about it, as long as any government agency can keep their interpretation of a law secret, it amounts to a completely independent legislature that does not answer to the American people. Senator Wyden gave an interview in May of this year and he addressed this very subject.
“Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. Wyden (D-Oregon) says that powers they grant the government on their face, the government applies a far broader legal interpretation — an interpretation that the government has conveniently classified, so it cannot be publicly assessed or challenged. But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently. “We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.” Wired.com
Kudos are in order for Senators Udall and Wyden for bringing this discussion into the open. However it amazes me that Democrats in the Senate would allow an interpretation of a law be kept as a secret. Especially when that double secret interpretation hides the true meaning of how the government is allowed to spy on us all. In these times of severe fracture within the Legislature, it seems that one of the few agreements that made it out of Washington is one that holds the American people in the dark and prevents the truth from reaching our ears. It is time for Congress to understand that Americans want to know how this Administration and any Administration is interpreting the law. We are not asking them to disclose State Secrets, just the definitions of how the public law is interpreted by the Obama Administration.
Happy Birthday Mr. President, but it is time to come clean on this double secret probation that you have us under!
Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty-Guest Blogger