The U.S. Director of National Intelligence is lying about FISA

More than 100 Washington Post readers have responded to a Washington Post op-ed piece by new U.S. intelligence director Mike McConnell calling for changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. At last count, only five comments could be interpreted as favorable, and only one of those was genuinely coherent. A number of readers point out that McConnell, the nation’s top intelligence official, is a liar.

McConnell says that FISA, the law regulating electronic eavesdropping on non-U.S. espionage and terrorism suspects, hasn’t been updated to keep pace with changes in technology since its enactment nearly 30 years ago. He’s lying. Major amendments to the law were included in the PATRIOT Act, the massive omnibus “anti-terrorist” legislation that was hurried through Congress in the wake of 911.

McConnell knows that. So did the Post’s editorial page editors; the paper published dozens of stories about the revisions. But the Post chose, and not for the first time, to turn its paper over to a Bush administration official to use as a promotional vehicle for a blatant lie.

Op-ed columns in institutional press outlets are traditionally subject to somewhat less rigorous standards than the rest of the paper: just about anything other than profanity and libel is permitted. Newspapers aren’t, however, actually required to publish lies even when the lies are wrapped in an opinion column.

McConnell’s piece is dishonest enough without the direct contradiction of reality (see Glenn Greenwald’s Salon dissection of it for the full, gory details). He neglects to mention that the administration has repeatedly rebuffed congressional offers to revise the law even further than was done in the PATRIOT Act, he offers a nonsensical example of how the law as it stands allegedly restricts the country’s ability to gather foreign intelligence and he neglects to mention that the law permits government agents to listen first and seek warrants later.

But all that pales beside the lie. That a senior government official should feel at ease with taking to the editorial page in order to lie to the people he’s charged with protecting is disgusting, no matter how common an occurrence it is. In a sane world he’d be fired for doing so. In this world, he just racks up some frequent liar points toward his Medal of Freedom.