McConnell: FISA Debate Will Kill Americans

With a heavy heart, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told a Texas newspaper last week that due to the public debate over revising the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Americans will die.

McConnell, who before the late July-early August FISA legislation enjoyed broad bipartisan respect, placed the predicted deaths of Americans at the doorstep of an open society. Thanks to widespread efforts to understand what the NSA’s highly classified warrantless surveillance program is — from journalists, from legal scholars, from national security experts, from elected officials — the Bush administration was forced last month to reveal too much about how the program operates, in order to correct misunderstandings. And that means, McConnell said, “Americans are going to die.”

…So that’s, we’ve got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we’re doing things we’re not doing.

Q: Even if it’s perception, how do you deal with that? You have to do public relations, I assume.

A: Well, one of the things you do is you talk to reporters. And you give them the facts the best you can. Now part of this is a classified world. The fact we’re doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die, because we do this mission unknown to the bad guys because they’re using a process that we can exploit and the more we talk about it, the more they will go with an alternative means and when they go to an alternative means, remember what I said, a significant portion of what we do, this is not just threats against the United States, this is war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Emphasis added.

McConnell, when questioned by the reporter, seemed to understand that he had gone too far — but nonetheless reiterated his point:

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate. The reason that the FISA law was passed in 1978 was an arrangement was worked out between the Congress and the administration, we did not want to allow this community to conduct surveillance, electronic surveillance, of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required. So there was no warrant required for a foreign target in a foreign land. And so we are trying to get back to what was the intention of ’78. Now because of the claim, counterclaim, mistrust, suspicion, the only way you could make any progress was to have this debate in an open way.

If McConnell really believes that Americans are going to die as the result of debating the FISA bill, then he cannot possibly mean that “sunshine’s a good thing” here. That would entail him blessing the needless deaths of Americans at the hands of super-adaptable terrorists who now know what procedures they can undertake to avoid detection from the NSA. The likelihood of them actually knowing that, however, from either the debate or the incredibly complex Protect America Act it produced, is incredibly low — not least of which because not a single NSA surveillance method was disclosed by either. In fact, in his interview with the paper, McConnell gave more details — the effort isn’t “massive data-mining,” or that it takes 200 man-hours to prepare a FISA-warrant request, for instance — about the program’s operation than did the entire Congressional debate.

Is Congress going to be satisfied with being told that its attempt to debate a landmark piece of legislation represents a threat to national security? It should be noted that McConnell gave the interview on a trip arranged jointly with Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who has not objected to McConnell’s comments.