(updated below)

On July 8, 2008 -- the day before the U.S. Senate voted for the new FISA bill -- Morton Halperin wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times announcing that the bill "has my personal support" and that "it represents our best chance to protect both our national security and our civil liberties." His Op-Ed was a great surprise to many people -- not only because Halperin was formerly the head of the D.C. office of the ACLU, which vigorously opposed the bill; not only because virtually every other civil liberties group and every other civil libertarian in America also vehemently opposed the bill as a profound assault on the Fourth Amendment; and not only because the organization of which Halperin was (at the time) President -- the Open Society Policy Institute ("OSPI") -- was so opposed to the FISA bill that (as Halperin reveals for the first time in my interview with him) they asked him to step down as President as a result.

All those things are true, but those facts aren't what was most baffling about Halperin's Op-Ed. What made his Op-Ed particularly confounding was that a mere one month earlier -- on June 9, 2008 -- Halperin had signed a letter on behalf of OSPI, also signed by numerous other civil liberties and advocacy groups, in which he expressed steadfast opposition to the FISA "compromise" (which was then known as the "Bond compromise," after GOP Sen. Kit Bond). A copy of that June 9 letter opposing the FISA bill, which Halperin joined on behalf of his group, is here (.pdf).

Bizarrely, virtually every surveillance provision that was cited in that June 9 letter that made the bill so unacceptable was present in the ultimate bill that passed. Identically, virtually every so-called "compromise" measure that was in the ultimate bill was also in the Bond compromise that the June 9 letter vehemently opposed (the June 9 letter said "these modest concessions do not offset the vast new unchecked surveillance powers the bill confers on the government"). What makes Halperin's behavior so mystifying, then, was that the Bond compromise he vehemently opposed on June 9 was, in virtually every material respect, identical to the FISA compromise that the Senate ended up voting for (and which Halperin ended up supporting) one month later, on July 8. What possibly could have motivated Halperin to change his position so radically -- from vocal opposition to the FISA bill on June 9 to vocal support on July 8? That is a question that has been asked in many circles, and it is that question I explore with Halperin.

Manifestly, there was only one meaningful change that occurred between Halperin's June 9 opposition and his July 8 support: namely, it was in that interim -- on June 20 -- that Barack Obama announced that he would support the FISA bill, and many have speculated (and it is just speculation) that Halperin, who has served in numerous administrations over the past four decades (beginning with the Nixon administration) and is eager for a high-level appointment in the Obama administration, offered to give Obama cover by coming out and supporting the FISA bill even though, only weeks earlier, he had vigorously opposed it. Lending even stronger support to that hypothesis is a document I obtained that Halperin wrote and which Obama's office circulated to numerous Democratic Senators, dated June 22 (only two days after Obama announced his support for the bill), in which Halperin heaped praise on the FISA bill and urged Democratic Senators to support it (Halperin's June 22 memo to Senators is here).

That Halperin, after signing the June 9 letter opposing the bill, then circulated to key Senators a June 22 letter supporting the bill means that Halperin fundamentally changed his position on this bill within a matter of days once it became clear Obama would support the bill. Indeed, Halperin confirmed -- in response to my asking him -- that he was in regular communication with Obama's office during this time, and was even passing back and forth with Obama's office various drafts of that Memo before Obama announced his support for the bill and before Obama's office then sent it to other Democratic Senators.

Halperin clearly decided to repudiate his own opposition to this bill in order to offer himself up to Obama as the public shill supporting the bill, so that Obama defenders could gain cover for themselves by saying things like "even life-long civil libertarian Mort Halperin says this is a good bill." As but one example, from my Democracy Now debate with Obama adviser Cass Sunstein:

GG: Number two, the idea that this bill is an improvement on civil liberties is equally insulting in terms of how false it is. This is a bill demanded by George Bush and Dick Cheney and opposed by civil libertarians across the board. ACLU is suing. The EFF is vigorously opposed. Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd, the civil libertarians in the Senate, are vehemently opposed to it; they say it’s an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment. The idea that George Bush and Dick Cheney would demand a bill that’s an improvement on civil liberties and judicial oversight is just absurd. . . .

CS: Well, I appreciate the passion behind that statement. I don’t see it that way. And Morton Halperin, who’s been one of the most aggressive advocates of privacy protections in the last decades, is an enthusiastic supporter of this bill on exactly the ground that I gave.

Everyone can, and should, listen to Halperin's attempted responses to these questions and decide for themselves if he has a convincing explanation for how and why he completely changed his position on this FISA bill once Obama's office told him that Obama wanted to support the bill, and whether Halperin's full-scale reversal was anything resembling a good faith expression of how he viewed these issues. Does anyone have a noble or even benign explanation for how Halperin went from strongly opposing the bill on June 9 to strongly favoring it on June 22 to the Senate and then on July 8 in The New York Times?

Three notes about the Radio Show:

(1) My discussion with Halperin lasts roughly 15 minutes, as it clearly became antagonistic and he was not particularly interested in answering these questions. The transcript is here.

(2) Halperin spoke quite low and muted, particularly as he became more agitated, and the sound quality when he speaks is therefore somewhat poor. Halperin's inflections add much meaning to what he says and it's perhaps best for those inclined to listen to do so along with the transcript.

We are still using an inferior recording system because there is one part of the far superior system that Salon has created that is not yet working the way it needs to in order for the real system to be used. We are very close to my being able to use that far superior system, and once I do, you will be certainly impressed -- probably shocked -- and perhaps even a little frightened at how high-quality the sound of these podcasts will be. Please bear with us a little longer as we work out the last remaining technical kink in that system.

(3) Friday's show will concern last week's Money Bomb and the short-term and mid-term plans for Accountability Now.

UPDATE: Several people have emailed to complain -- correctly -- that I was remiss in failing to note that Mort Halperin is the father of the incomparably execrable Mark Halperin, formerly of ABC News and now of Time. My apologies for the oversight. If there is any system more nepotistic and incestuous than our Beltway political and media institutions, I don't know what it is.