Civil Liberties Board Goes Vacant Under Obama
When President Bush two years ago failed to name members to a federal board to monitor the protection of civil liberties, Democrats and activist groups were duly outraged, seeing it as one more example of his administration's indifference to the subject.
But more than a year into a new presidency, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board—created by Congress in 2007—remains as much a cipher under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The White House has yet to nominate a single person to sit on the five-person board. It has no members, no staff, and no office.
Until now, the reaction to all this from the same civil-liberties groups and Democrats that bashed Bush has been largely muted. But that is starting to change. "I'm appalled," said Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel of the Constitution Project, a legal-affairs advocacy group that has usually been aligned with the Obama administration.
This week, Franklin's group and more than 20 other civil-liberties and privacy groups—including a few with Republican ties—sent a letter to the White House urging that civil-liberties board members be appointed "without delay." That follows two similar letters from Democratic representatives Jane Harman, who chairs a subcommittee on terrorism, and Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee—one in October and another more recently in late January, both of which have gone unanswered.
All the letters noted there would be no shortage of issues for a civil-liberties oversight board to investigate, ranging from the impact of Patriot Act reauthorization proposals to the administration's plans to install body scanners and other new security measures at airports. And then there's the mounting controversies over new technologies, such as the Justice Department's expanding collection of cell-phone tracking data gathered surreptitiously.
But when she recently raised the issue of the vacant board with Denis McDonough, one of the president's top national-security advisers, Harman said the response she got back was "nothing," just "we're working on it."
Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, reaffirmed a previous statement from the White House more than a month ago that the president will nominate members "soon." But he declined to specify how soon. "The president is committed to constituting the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board," he said.
But others are getting skeptical. According to Franklin, nobody at any of the civil-liberties groups that signed off on this week's letter is aware of anybody even being contacted by White House personnel about accepting such a job. Another leading civil-liberties activist (who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities) said he suspects top White House officials like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are reluctant to staff a board that can only give them political grief.
An earlier version of the civil-liberties board, created by a White House executive order in order to fulfill one of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, was later criticized for being a lap dog for the Bush administration. As a result, the Democratic Congress, when it passed the 2007 legislation, insisted that the newly authorized panel be an independent agency with full subpoena powers to investigate executive branch actions. It also wrote into law that the chairman be a full-time position, making it difficult for any White House to find anyone of stature to take the job if he or she was not going to have real powers—and access.
All this may explain the White House's slowness in filling the positions on the board. But it doesn't fully explain the relative indifference of political Washington. "What seemed so imperative under Bush has just dropped off the radar screen," laments Alan Charles Raul, who served as vice chairman of the earlier Bush civil-liberties advisory board. Now, he says, "No one seems to care."
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Michael Isikoff has been an award-winning investigative correspondent for Newsweek since 2004. He has written extensively on the U.S. government's war on terrorism, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, presidential politics and other national issues. His book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," co-written with David Corn, was an instant New York Times best-seller when it was published in September, 2006. The book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "fascinating reading" and "the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations" in the run up to the war in Iraq. Since January 2009, Isikoff has been an MSNBC contributor, making regular appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball w/ Chris Matthews.
Ever since the events of September 11, Isikoff has broken repeated stories about the U.S. government's war on terror and won numerous journalism awards. His blog "DeClassified: Investigative Reporting in Real Time," which appears regularly on Newsweek's Web site and is written with MarkHosenball, has become a must-read for senior U.S. intelligence officials. Isikoff and Hosenball won the 2005 award from the Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online.
Isikoff's June 2002 Newsweek cover story on U.S. intelligence failures that preceded the 9-11 terror attacks, along with a series of related articles, was honored with the Investigative Reporters and Editors top prize for investigative reporting in magazine journalism. He was honored, along with a team of Newsweek reporters, by the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. For that coverage, Isikoff obtained exclusive internal White House, Justice Department and State Department memos showing how decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration led to abuses in the interrogation of terror suspects. Isikoff was also part of a reporting team that earned Newsweek the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2002, the highest award in magazine journalism, for their coverage of the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Isikoff's exclusive reporting on the Monica Lewinsky scandal gained him national attention in 1998, including profiles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and a guest appearance on "Late Show with David Letterman." His coverage of the events that lead to President Bill Clinton's impeachment earned Newsweek the prestigious National Magazine Award in the Reporting category in 1999. Isikoff's reporting also won the National Headliner Award, the Edgar A. Poe Award presented by the White House Correspondents Association and the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2001, Isikoff was named on a list of "most influential journalists" in the nation's capital by Washingtonian magazine.
Isikoff is the author of "Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story," a book that chronicled his own reporting of the Lewinsky story and was hailed by a critic for The Washington Post-Los Angeles Times news service as "the absolutely essential narrative of the scandal with revelations that no one would have thought possible." The book, also a New York Times bestseller, was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Book of the Month Club.
Isikoff came to Newsweek from The Washington Post, where he had been a reporter since September 1981. There he covered the Justice Department and the Persian Gulf War, reported on international drug operations in Latin America and worked on the Post's financial news desk. Isikoff graduated from Washington University with a B.A. in 1974 and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1976.
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