Thwarting Terrorists

I don't understand how people like Marshall Wittman can be called Democrats. Oh, right, because I (an upper-middle-class homeowner with a husband and small child) am considered a member of the radical left wing. Didn't radical left wing used to mean "lives in commune and stockpiles weapons for use against 'the man'" or at least "sneaks onto military bases to camp out on missile silos"?

I want to tear my hair out about this Kevin Drum post. He quotes Marshall Wittman saying:

"One can question the legal rationale that was employed by President, but there is absolutely no evidence that he was attempting to do anything else but protect America. It might be satisfying for partisans to cast around comparisons to Nixon or Harding, but this was a program to thwart terrorists not for political aggrandizement."

Heh?

To Drum's credit, he doesn't agree with Wittman, he just states that most Americans probably will. Maybe that's true, although I don't believe the polls necessarily support that.

I read an interview with Noam Chomsky a few days ago, and was shocked to find there was very little he said that sounded completely insane. I haven't actually read a lot of Chomsky's political stuff, having shoved him into my lunatic box a long time ago, but I'm thinking I ought to revisit that.

"The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It's a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world's energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. And the same with other things. Take, say, nuclear terror. The American intelligence systems estimate that the likelihood of a "dirty bomb," a dirty nuclear bomb attack in the United States in the next ten years, is about 50 percent. Well, that's pretty high. Are they doing anything about it? Yeah. They're increasing the threat, by increasing nuclear proliferation, by compelling potential adversaries to take very dangerous measures to try to counter rising American threats."

Very few of the actions taken by this Administration in the War on Terror actually turn out to reduce the threat of terror. And most of the time, important analysts were well aware of that likely outcome before the actions were taken. The things that might actually reduce the threat of terror are NOT done, or done haphazardly. It makes much more sense that, in general, the Administration is using the idea of a War on Terror to justify things it wants to do for other reasons. I don't believe that everything the Administration does is driven by internal U.S. politics (although clearly that's the reason for an awful lot of its actions). But on what basis should I extend the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Bush over this wiretapping stuff, that he was using it "to thwart terrorists not for political aggrandizement"? We haven't got a whole lot of evidence one way or another, since they won't tell us anything about the program. But the evidence we do have is absolutely on the side of the President attempting to do something besides protect America.

If the program was clearly protecting America, would so many of those who knew about it have come forward to leak it? These are people who actually know the details of the program, and if anyone is in a position to decide if it is useful, they are. These are people who have dedicated their careers to serving this country, and we are expected to believe that they would put any program they believe to be crucial and important and lifesaving at risk by coming forward about it, just because they were concerned about its legality? If the NSA program seemed a little bit illegal but a lot necessary, I doubt that a dozen or more people familiar with it would all have come forward. If these guys saw how the program was thwarting terrorists daily, preventing massive terrorist attacks, or giving up great intelligence, I think most of them would have remained uncomfortable with breaking the law, but certain that what they did was for the greater good. But they are the ones who have been running the program for four years, and apparently they're not impressed with its results. Or else what they're doing seems so egregious that even if it's had some results, they can't live with themselves.

My point is: Which is more likely, that the dozen or so people who came forward about the NSA program were all traitors who wanted to help terrorists and defeat Bush's heroic efforts to protect America, or that, patriotic citizens all, they all came to the conclusion that the President was either a) trying to thwart terrorists in a completely useless and ALSO illegal way, or b) doing something besides thwarting terrorists?

Elizabeth Holtzman writes in The Nation about the history of FISA and Presidential warrantless wiretapping:

"FISA was enacted in 1978, against the backdrop of Watergate, to prevent the widespread abuses in domestic surveillance that were disclosed in Congressional hearings. Among his other abuses of power, President Nixon ordered the FBI to conduct warrantless wiretaps of seventeen journalists and White House staffers. Although Nixon claimed the wiretaps were done for national security purposes, they were undertaken for political purposes and were illegal. Just as Bush's warrantless wiretaps grew out of the 9/11 attacks, Nixon's illegal wiretaps grew out of the Vietnam War and the opposition to it. In fact, the first illegal Nixon wiretap was of a reporter who, in 1969, revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia, a program that President Nixon wanted to hide from the American people and Congress. Nixon's illegal wiretaps formed one of the many grounds for the articles of impeachment voted against him by a bipartisan majority of the House Judiciary Committee.

"Congress explicitly intended FISA to strike a balance between the legitimate requirements of national security on the one hand and the need both to protect against presidential abuses and to safeguard personal privacy on the other. From Watergate, Congress knew that a President was fully capable of wiretapping under a false claim of national security. That is why the law requires court review of national security wiretaps. Congress understood that because of the huge invasion of privacy involved in wiretaps, there should be checks in place on the executive branch to protect against overzealous and unnecessary wiretapping. At the same time, Congress created special procedures to facilitate obtaining these warrants when justified. Congress also recognized the need for emergency action: The President was given the power to start a wiretap without a warrant as long as court permission was obtained within three days."

C'mon, everybody. The President went around the law to do a thing that the law was absolutely clear he couldn't do. He won't tell us what he did, exactly, and he's a little cagey about why he had to do it that way, instead of within the law, or why he couldn't get the law changed. "Went around the law" is a polite way of saying "He broke the goddamn law!" He did not change the law. He broke it.

In the past, it's turned out that some Presidents who wiretapped without warrants were doing it for political reasons. People who work very closely with and for this President have no qualms about breaking the law for purely political reasons.

They out CIA agents to discredit critics.
They pay journalists to say nice things about them.
They lie, baldfaced, even when they haven't been forced into it.
They invent relationships between countries and terrorists in order to justify invasions.
They torture people.

They have lawyers who argue that crushing a child's testicles to get his parent to talk is something the President can legally order.

If you trust any president with this kind of power, you have a lot more faith in humanity than I do. But if you trust THIS president with the power, you are certifiably nuts.

But there is no evidence he was doing anything but trying to protect America.
Nope, Mr. Wittman, no evidence at all.