Political wind

Political wind, Terrorist Surveillance Program, War on Terror

House GOP halts wiretapping bill

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In the Washington Times this morning:

House Democrats, confounded by a Republican procedural maneuver that would force an embarrassing vote on terrorism, yesterday called off a vote on an electronic-surveillance bill that the White House opposes.

Republicans would have forced Democrats either to vote to effectively kill the bill that restricts federal wiretap power or to vote against authorizing the government to spy on Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups.
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Mr. Boehner said the Democrats faced “a very simple choice.” “They can allow our intelligence officials to conduct surveillance on the likes of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda or prohibit them from doing so and jeopardize our national security,” he said. “Every member of the majority will now have the opportunity to go on record.”

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer said it was not a setback for the bill, which the White House warns would open intelligence gaps the Democrat-led Congress voted to close just two months ago when updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). “We are going to finish it next week,” said Mr. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, adding that the procedural move had only slowed action.
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Republicans stopped the legislation, which was expected to pass easily in a vote scheduled for early yesterday afternoon, by announcing plans to submit a motion to recommit. The move, rarely used before this session, lets the minority party try to change bills as they approach final passage. If it passes, the bill is sent back to its originating committee with instructions. Being sent back effectively kills the proposal.

The instructions are what made this motion so potent. It would have ordered the bill amended to prohibit the law from interfering with “surveillance needed to prevent Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization” from attacking the U.S.

Iraq, Political wind, Turkey

Where is the upside to the current Armenian resolution?

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The Turkish parliament is about to vote to let the Turkish Army cross the Iraqi border and attack the P.K.K.

The Wall Street Journal questions this morning why Senator Tom Lantos offers now an amendment to label the death of a million Armenians during WWI ‘genocide’ when he and Bill Clinton were both against doing so in 2000:

The bill is opposed by eight former U.S. Secretaries of State, including Madeleine Albright. After Tom Lantos’s House Foreign Affairs Committee voted out the resolution last week, Turkey recalled its ambassador from Washington. Turkey serves as a primary transit hub for U.S. equipment going into both Iraq and Afghanistan. After the Kurdish terrorist group PKK killed 13 Turkish conscripts last week near the border with Iraq, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, asked the parliament to approve a huge deployment of the army along the border, threatening an incursion into Kurdish-controlled Iraq. This of course is the one manifestly successful region of post-Saddam Iraq. In a situation teetering on a knife-edge, President Bush has been asking Mr. Erdogan to show restraint on the Iraq border.
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Pointedly, Jane Harman, the Southern California Democrat who Speaker Pelosi passed over for chair of the intelligence committee, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times Friday, questioning the “timing” of the resolution and asking why it is necessary to embarrass a “moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world.”

Why indeed? Perhaps some intrepid reporter could put that question to the three leading Democratic Presidential candidates, who are seeking to inherit hands-on responsibility for U.S. policy in this cauldron. Hillary Clinton has been a co-sponsor of the anti-Turk genocide resolution, but would she choose to vote for it this week?

Back when Bill Clinton was President, Mr. Lantos took a different view. “This legislation at this moment in U.S.-Turkish relations is singularly counterproductive to our national interest,” he said in September 2000, when there was much less at stake in the Middle East. According to Reuters, he added that the resolution would “humiliate and insult” Turkey and that the “unintended results would be devastating.”

Senator Lantos and Speaker Pelosi clearly intended to create a diplomatic impasse and undermine America’s military efforts in Iraq. When people go beyond merely being against a war and act towards their own nation’s defeat in that same war, some people question their patriotism; some people might even say Lantos and Pelosi are aiding and abetting the enemy.