Who's Watching the Spies?

The White House has rejected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pick for a newly created U.S. government civil liberties board--a move that may doom efforts to get the panel up and running while President Bush remains in office.

Without any public announcement, the White House recently sent a letter to Capitol Hill stating it would nominate only one of two names recommended by congressional leaders to sit on the five-member civil liberties panel. The candidate whose name it would not forward: Morton Halperin, a veteran and sometimes controversial civil liberties advocate who has a famous role in the history of modern debates over government wiretapping. While serving on the National Security Council during the early days of the Nixon administration, Halperin's phone was secretly wiretapped by the FBI because his then boss, Henry Kissinger, suspected he was leaking to the press.

The White House gave no explanation for why it had vetoed Halperin from serving on the civil liberties panel. But the move prompted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to tell the White House that the Senate, in retaliation, will not move any of President Bush's three candidates for the panel (one of whom, Ronald Rotunda, was once a legal adviser to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld).

"How would we ever get our nominees confirmed if we could only confirm Republicans?" explained Jim Manley, Reid's spokesman, when asked about the majority leader's hardball stand.

A White House spokesman declined comment on the dispute. But neither White House officials or congressional sources (most of whom declined to be quoted by name talking about politically sensitive confirmation issues) agreed that there is one major consequence of the stalemate: the only government board specifically charged with monitoring the impact of U.S. government actions on civil liberties and privacy interests has a decreasing chance of ever actually meeting, much less doing anything, for the rest of the year.

Although it was first mandated by Congress in Dec. 2004, and reauthorized with newly independent powers nearly a year ago, the civil liberties board exists today in name only. It has no office, no staff and no members. (An earlier incarnation of the board—attacked by critics as a rubber stamp for the White House—went out of business last February.) .  "It's disgraceful," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the 9/11 commission, which first recommended that the board be created to protect civil liberties affected by the war on terrorism.