House Debates Surveillance in Rare Secret Session
March 13th, 2008The United States House of Representatives went into closed session Thursday night to debate a version of the latest a surveillance bill without retroactive immunity for the telecom giants. The debate will continue in open session on Friday.
House Closes Doors for Secret Session on Spy Bill
A Brief History of the “Secret Session” in the House
Preparations are being made for the U.S. House of Representatives to go into a “Secret Session” of Congress. The House has convened such a session only five times over the past 196 years.
The last Secret Session was called in 1983 – with the House exchanging sensitive information regarding America’s support for the Contras in Latin America. Twenty-five years later, the House is preparing to go into Secret Session once again – this time to engage in a critical debate over the need to update and modernize the current terrorist surveillance laws.
Secret sessions were called on December 27, 1825, to receive a confidential message from the President regarding relations with Indian tribes; On May 27, 1830, to receive a confidential message from the President on a bill regulating trade between the U.S. and Great Britain; On June 20, 1979, to implement legislation on the Panama Canal Act of 1979; On February 25, 1980, to discuss Cuban and other Communist-bloc countries involvement in Nicaragua; and on July 19, 1983, to discuss U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua.
Over the course 1-2 hours, Capitol Police will escort members from the House floor, secure the chamber, and sweep the premises for listening devices and other possible breaches of security. Once the House is fully cleared, members who have signed the oath of confidentiality will be recalled to the chamber, select staff with appropriate clearances will be administered an oath of secrecy, and an hour of debate will ensue. At the conclusion of that hour, the Secret Session will dissolve.
The Clerk of the House maintains a list of members who have signed such an oath, and all but a handful have.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) responded to the President Bush’s remarks Thursday morning that the House bill will “undermine America’s security”:
QUESTION: Don’t you think the president is lying?
PELOSI: Am I saying the president is lying?
QUESTION: Yes.
PELOSI: That’s the same question I got in 2001 when they asked me — when I said the intelligence on Iraq does not support the threat of — an imminent threat to our country that the administration is contending.
That’s what they said to me then. They said, “Are you saying the president is lying?” I said then and I say now, “I am stating a fact.”
The president is wrong and he knows it.
For more, see TPMMuckraker
Also, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) released the following statement after review of the Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) report on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) use of National Security Letters (NSL) and 215 orders in 2006, as well as subsequent corrective actions taken last year.
“At the same time the Administration is trying to intimidate the Congress into giving it additional spying power, we find out yet again that it has abused its authority to pry into the lives of law abiding Americans. Although the FBI has taken important steps to repair the abuses identified in earlier reports, I remain disappointed. We will continue to hold the Administration accountable for its actions and look forward to exploring the issues raised in this report at the Committee’s oversight hearing with the FBI next month.”
