The White House’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has been an open joke ever since it was launched as a result of a recommendation from the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report. The panel was supposed to keep a sharp eye on the government’s possible infringement on citizens’ civil liberties. But it turns out that it’s a bigger joke than people even realized.
Yesterday, one of the board’s five handpicked members, Lanny Davis, resigned. Davis, a former Clinton White House official, left over “administration attempts to control the panel’s agenda and edit its public statements.”
Justin Rood described the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board last November:
The board can’t demand documents; it can’t force bureaucrats who actually implement the program — and who might be aware of malfeasance — to speak with them under oath. Instead, its sole and complete authority is to take the administration at its word.
Well, actually, its sole and complete authority is to be a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration. John Solomon and Ellen Nakashima write in today’s Washington Post:
The Bush administration made more than 200 revisions to the first report of a civilian board that oversees government protection of personal privacy, including the deletion of a passage on anti-terrorism programs that intelligence officials deemed “potentially problematic” intrusions on civil liberties, according to a draft of the report obtained by The Washington Post. …
… one section deleted by the administration would have divulged that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s civil liberties protection officer had “conducted reviews of the potentially problematic programs and has established procedures” for intelligence officials to file complaints about possible civil liberties and privacy abuses.
The passage would have been the first public disclosure of an internal review identifying such potentially intrusive intelligence programs. In its place, White House officials suggested more modest language, which ended up as a substitution in the final report.
What exactly is the point of having a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, again?
The panel was created by Congress to address concerns about the government’s growing anti-terrorism surveillance powers but placed under the supervision of the White House without investigative tools such as subpoenas. Some in Congress are pushing to make the board completely independent.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called the editing “standard operating procedure,” saying it was appropriate because the board remains legally under the supervision of the Executive Office of the President.
In other words, anything Bushies can get away with is, by definition, “appropriate.”
The document obtained by The Post shows the length that White House officials went to make some changes.
One deleted passage divulged that the board had sent a letter in late January asking Bush to issue an executive order to all federal agencies to fully cooperate with the privacy board. It was prompted by board members’ concerns, including a lengthy delay in receiving a briefing on the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program and White House efforts to keep the media from attending a planned public board meeting scheduled just weeks before last November’s election.
Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.” Nah, Schopenhauer was wrong. The Bush crowd never had any honor to lose.