Civil Liberties versus National Security

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

By John Scott, Fox News

May 15, 2006

Transcript

John: President Bush’s nominee for CIA director headed to Capitol Hill on Thursday. Senators will surely grill him about a controversial phone call database collected after 9/11. And, new reports that Vice President Dick Cheney favored an even broader surveillance program. Let’s talk about it with Tim Roemer, president of the Center for National Policy and a former member of the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman Roemer, a lot of people− your committee said that we weren’t ready for the events of 9/11, we were sort of asleep at the switch. So given that, why not try something like this surveillance program?

Tim Roemer: Well you’re right to ask the question John, and one of the answers to that was provided by President Bush, in saying that these phone calls would be targeted at people who were calling from outside the United States and somebody from al-Qaeda was on one end of these. Now we learned that it could be, that it’s collecting phone records of Americans in the United States. Now, I think there are a lot of questions to be answered about that, including the one Quest asked. Quest, one of the telecommunications companies in the country said, they believe they had enough concerns about cooperating with the NSA on this that they thought that that cooperation without a court warrant might result in breaking federal privacy laws. Another question John, is what do they do with this information? If they detect certain trends by collecting the phone records on a certain number of phone calls made by Americans, and they detect a pattern, what do they do then with that pattern? Do they further look into that American’s records? I think those are questions that the oversight committee should ask about this.

John: Well, you know I’m not fond of the notion of a government, sort of keeping tabs on my phone calls, but at the same time I also know I’m not calling anybody that’s going to raise suspicions. It just seems like you’re in a new age here, with terrorists flying airplanes into buildings and knocking them down, that maybe we do have to give up some of our freedoms in order to fight this new enemy.

Tim Roemer: I think you put your finger right on it John. It needs to be a balance between making sure we aggressively use technology for security reasons, and we protect our civil liberties. The 9/11 Commission said that we should create an aggressive, fully-funded board to oversee these civil liberties. The president has nominated some people, but they don’t have subpoena power to really protect Americans’ civil liberties parts of this. And finally, John, I would say this: let’s stop in Washington for a change and look at the important questions in addition to NSA. The United States did not protect us on 9/11 adequately. The United States went to war without good intelligence. Is General Hayden the right person to rebuild our human intelligence capabilities, recruit and train spies so we have better information going into Iran or Iraq, or other parts of the world on al-Qaeda? That is really one of the serious questions that is being overlooked in all of this.

John: The point is made in some circles that we haven’t been attacked in almost five years, domestically as a result of something. Are some of the administration’s policies post-9/11, are they working?

Tim Roemer: I think there are some that are working John, no doubt about that. I think the initial attack in Afghanistan, to disrupt the Taliban and al-Qaeda worked. It was good cooperation between the CIA and covert intelligence with the military or para-military and DOD. That is a good model for us to look at in the future. But that is starting to wane, and more and more attacks in Afghanistan. I worry John that we’re starting, even with the Republican administration, to build the Department of Homeland Security into too big a bureaucracy. That the department can’t act as quickly and we should need it to act. And even the Directorate of National Intelligence is becoming a little bit too big. Let’s make sure we are creating agile, quick acting institutions and agencies to take on a very, very agile threat in al-Qaeda.

John: Former 9/11 Commissioner, and Congressmen Tim Roemer. Thank you.

Tim Roemer: Thanks John.

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