In his commentary for RCP, Michael Barone weighs in on the NSA domestic “spying” story. From “The New York Times’ Christmas Gift”:
[…] Let’s put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America’s enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say that the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America’s enemies but not to wiretap—or, more likely these days, electronically intercept—their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century.
To be sure, federal courts have ruled that the Fourth Amendment’s bar of “unreasonable” searches and seizures limits the president’s power to intercept communications without obtaining a warrant. But that doesn’t apply to foreign intercepts, as the Supreme Court made clear in a 1972 case, writing, “The instant case requires no judgment on the scope of the president’s surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country.” The federal courts of appeals for the 5th, 3rd, 9th and 4th Circuits, in cases decided in 1970, 1974, 1977 and 1980, took the same view. In 2002, the special federal court superintending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wrote, “The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. … We take for granted that the president does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the president’s constitutional power.”
Warrantless intercepts of the communications of foreign powers were undertaken as long ago as 1979, by the Carter administration.
[…]
“News stories” in the Times and other newspapers and many national newscasts have largely ignored this legal record. Instead, they are tinged with a note of hysteria and the suggestion that fundamental freedoms have been violated by the NSA intercepts.
Earlier this month, a Newsweek cover story depicted George W. Bush as living inside a bubble, isolated from knowledge of the real world. Many of the news stories about the NSA intercepts show that it is mainstream media that are living inside a bubble, carefully insulating themselves and their readers and viewers from knowledge of applicable law and recent historical precedent, determined to pursue an agenda of undermining the Bush administration regardless of any damage to national security.
And damage there almost certainly would be were the program to be ended, as many Democrats and many in the mainstream media would like. Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of NSA and now deputy national intelligence director, has come forward to say, “This program has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States.”
The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, should not be interpreted in a way that makes it “a suicide pact.” The notion that terrorists’ privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact. The Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in the United States should not be stretched into a ban on interceptions of communications from America’s enemies abroad.
The mainstream media, inside their left-wing bubble, evidently thinks that there is not much in the way of danger.
As I (and others) have been at pains to point out, the idea that the fourth amendment extends to foreign intelligence gathering via electronic surveillance is a most unreasonable measure for protecting a country—and any President who proceeded from such a narrow understanding of his own mandate to protect the homeland would be derelict in his most important duty. Even the broadest reading of the FISA protections, which were instituted as a way to prevent abuses by the FBI and domestic agencies (and not the NSA), provide ample room for an extension of foreign intelligence gathering into the domestic sphere by setting out guidelines for such contingencies in its definition of electronic surveillance:
the acquisition … of the contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person who is in the United States, if the contents are acquired by intentionally targeting that United States person, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes…”
Instant intel grabs where the US person isn’t intentionally targeted, or where the US person isn’t particularly known, or where the US person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy (like, for instance, being contacted by someone perceived as a member of a foreign power) are all exempt under FISA. So, too, is data-mining, which analyzes traffic patterns, and isn’t “spying” on an individual in any targeted way.
The entirety of this non-story, as Barone notes, is an attempt, on the part of the legacy media and certain liberal Democrats, to create a patina of illegality to further their preferred narrative of a super-secretive Bush administration using a ginned up “war” to grab executive powers and trample on the constitutional rights of ordinary Americans.
What is left unanswered, of course, is what the particular benefits of such a power grab would be to the Bushies. And most of those who make the charge, to their tactical credit, are content simply to let the implications linger in the air like a bad smell without getting into the kinds of specifics which might show the weakness of their position.
To my knowledge (and I haven’t been following the news closely in the last couple of days, so correct me if I’m wrong) not a single Democratic leader—for all their posturings of outrage and ostensible concern for civil liberties—has called on the President to put a halt to the NSA program.
The accusation is the thing. And this is a game that the Democrats and their media enablers continue to play. Thankfully, the President believes our enemy serious, believes we are indeed in a war, and will not blink in the face of constant attempts by his partisan political opponents to weaken his presidency—knowing, as he does, that such a capitulation would weaken our national security.
If Democratic leaders truly believe the NSA foreign intel gathering program illegal, they should call publically for its immediate end. Otherwise, they are nothing more than the worst kinds of political opportunists, and should be roundly called out for being such.
(h/t Terry Hastings)
But let’s not call them “unpatriotic”, not because they aren’t *objectively* unpatriotic, but because they don’t have the principles, intellectual consistency, or courage to publicly declare for and adhere to a foreign flag, country, or non-state actor.
However, since Bush Derangement Syndrome is not listed in the DSM-IV, it probably won’t qualify as a defense or a competency disqualifier after the indictments are handed down and the defendants appear before a judge. There’s a silver lining behind every dark cloud.
Thank G-d the grownups are still in charge.
Turing = things, as in Hey, is the Turing bot stuck? That’s the same word, almost, as last time.
What will be interesting will be if the same vigor is displayed towards discovering who leaked this information originally, as was displayed for who oute Plame.
Warrantless intercepts of the communications of foreign powers were undertaken as long ago as 1979, by the Carter administration.
Well, no. Warrantless intercepts of the communications of foreign powers were undertaken as long ago as 1941, by the Roosevelt administration. Probably you could find some instances earlier, but that’s when it really went into high gear.
Since then, of course, we’d invested literally hundreds of billions of dollars in creating infrastructure specifically for the warrantless interception of communications of foreign powers. We’ve created whole secret technologies and even branches of mathematics specifically for this task. We’ve sailed ships, launched satellites, built buildings, and occasionally killed people, specifically so that we could listen in on foreign communications without warrants. The NSA is the most well known agency responsible for this interception, but there are quite a few others.
I’m really not quite sure why anyone is even feigning surprise at this, or who they are actually trying to convince. There may be a small segment of the populace for whom “Vote for us: We have no idea how national defense actually works!” is a winning slogan, but I would have thought the Dems already had their votes sewn up by now.
This point is the heart of the matter to me. The legal foundation for the program are pretty clear, so if we accept nefarious intent on the part of Chimpy…what then?
This meme of Bush as putsch leader has become so interwoven with the rest of the antiwar drivel that it has become tiresome…no, not just tiresome…it’s now crossed over into the realm of the loonies. Apollo moon landings? Never happened. Jews control the banks? Everyone knows it. Alien bodies? Saw them on Fox. Bush financing his takeover of the USG with money from a secret pipeline from Afghanistan to Crawford and blackmail money from NSA intercepts? Sure.
If you don’t know the similarity between dinosaurs and serious lefties, it begins with an “e”.
Right. The liberal sensibility to constitutional principles. I know it well.
Before this thread goes flying off into a Clouded in a Time of Reason tangent, let’s take a quick refresher course—and examine 160+ references—in leftwing constitutional sensitivity.
Sorry for the double posting, but pathological lefwing dishonesty would seem to justify it.
Dave Griffith: Nice analysis, though I wonder about the presence (or lack thereof) of warrants in Stimpsons Black Chamber. That takes us back to the twenties.
TW: Methods- oh, come ON!
Hmmm.
What I really find curious is that the FISA court evidently interfered significantly with the NSA’s requests for warrants. Considering that FISA judge Robertson resigned recently could it be possible that one of problems in the FISA court was Robertson?
An interesting article is highlighted on DrudgeReport.com.
Frankly I think a lot more about this FISA court is going to come out and it’ll show that the liberal Democrat members of this court were severe obstacles.
I’m just waiting for Windy–oops, Cloudy–to show up with his $1.75 on the matter…
Jeff:
Problem #1: Again, you cite only to section 1801(f)(1) of FISA in defining prohibited “electronic surveillance. But the definition under subsection (f)(2) is:
And from the various descriptions of the NSA program in the NY Times and elsewhere, it’s clear that the agency is doing at least some electronic surveillance that is defined by subsection 2.
Jeff, you’re like the only person left saying that the program complied with FISA’s explicit terms—even the Administration doesn’t make that argument, and instead relies upon the AUMF and dubious claims of “inherent” Article II powers. So why keep peddling it?
Problem #2: The simple fact that the President suspects that a US citizen is an agent of Al Qaeda—and that spying on that person might produce “foreign intelligence”—does not eliminate that person’s statutory rights under FISA and Fourth Amendment rights under the Constitution. Your argument on this front requires you to acknowledge that the President has the unilateral authority to determine whether a US citizen is Al Qaeda, and having made that determination, to strip them of statutory and constitutional protections—i.e., subject them to secret surveillance without a criminal warrant or FISA court order. If you believe this, you believe in unchecked Executive authority. There is no middle ground.
Problem #3: I know you make the big bucks calling the Democrats out for being “political opportunists” and wanting to “weaken our national security,” but maybe the fact that none of them have yet called for a halt to the NSA program demonstrates just the opposite. Maybe they don’t want to rush to judgment before knowing more about how the program works, and, based on that information, whether the Administration’s legal justifications hold water. Maybe they actually believe the President when he says this program is important to national security. Maybe they reject the false choice presented by the President, and this site, that they can have either (1) a secret program based on a secret directive from a President who is claiming both nebulous war powers and that he is not subject to Congress’s laws, or (2) no domestic intelligence program whatsoever.
Problem #4: The way our system of government works does not require me to tell you what illicit motives, if any, Bush has, or what “particular benefits” would accrue to him through expanded spying powers in contravention of law. Naturally, you don’t think him or his advisors capable of the same crookery as Nixon et al.—although I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. But that’s beside the point. You’ve reversed the burden of proof. Our government does not operate on the basis of trust. We do not give the Executive unbounded authority simply because no one has offered a good explanation of why or how he could misuse it. We just don’t give it to him, period.
As I wrote on Althouse, the VWRC should take up a collection to subsidize the NYT. They need something to help them keep going, what with falling circulation, falling stock prices, newsroom layoffs, etc. etc.
It would appear that every time they get hysterical over something like this, Bush gains another three to five points in approval ratings. If we could get them to do one a week, by Easter GWB could be the first President since Washington to break ninety percent. They should be encouraged in this fine effort.
A couple of million is probably what they need to stave off bankruptcy, but even covering Pinch’s bar bill would be a help. Give ‘til it hurts, folks.
Regards,
Ric
tw: neither, reminding us of Helen MacInnes. Two plus two is neither five nor three.
I’m having a lot of trouble caring about this story. Like most people I don’t particularly see a problem with intercepting calls made by people with ties to al Qaeda. In the long run, our civil liberties are better off because of the measures. Allow a few more 9/11’s happen, and people will be ready to throw the Bill of Rights out entirely. Wake me up when Kos gets wiretapped for checking out Dude, Where’s My Country at the local library.
And the Left (aka the boy who cried “Hitler”!) have so erroded their own credibility the last few years with ceaseless charges against Bush ranging from mundane to outrageous that few of us are even given pause by the latest seemingly blockbuster revealations about the Administration. Ever since the 2000 election they’ve claimed that they’ve had the goods on Bush, and that his ultimate demise was imminent. Let’s review, in approximate chronological order, their various yet always misfired silver bullets:
2000 election fraud
pretzels
Enron
Jim Jeffords
WMD
Richard Clarke
That former economic adviser who turned on him
Looting in Iraq
Valerie Plame
Abu Ghraib
9/11 blamegaming
Wearing an earpiece at the debates
No plan for peace
Koran flushing
2004 election fraud
The Downing Street Memos
Guantanomo abuse
Our secret prison archipelago
Camp Cindy
post-Katrina genocide
Wiretapping
It already sounds like a bad Billy Joel song, but I bet I’ve only recalled about half of them. Really, unless the Dipshitocrats can find pictures of Bush raping Mother Theresa they need to just concentrate on winning the next election.
Oh, man, how could I forget Halliburton, Jeff Gannon, Armstrong Williams, Pentagon story planting, and contrails?
Oddly, my verification word for this comment is “believe”. Surely there must be something to it.
That’s a lot of maybe‘s, MF. Let me throw in a few more maybe‘s:
Maybe they actually believe the President when he says this program is important to national security but that the benefits of keeping the support of or, at the very least, not incurring the wrath of the Kos Kidz and the Sorosistas outweigh the costs to this country’s national security of a united front in the GWOT and their re-election chances. Maybe this is a political calculation that Joseph Lieberman refused to make and for which he is ostracized in national Democratic circles. Maybe what we’re really talking about here is the nattering whining of unserious pontificators who, if confronted with the same set of choices in fighting this war that Bush had, would wish Pampers made Feel-and-Learn’s in adult sizes because it sure would hurt their super-sized egos to be spotted by the press trying to sneak a bag of Depends through the FastCheck lane at Wal-Mart.
Or maybe Bush is Nixon. Having your Chief of Staff send some guys to bug your domestic political opponents is exactly the same as detailing the National Security Agency to conduct a narrowly crafted signal intelligence program using phone numbers and other communication identifiers picked up from the enemy on the battlefield to aid the identification of enemy contacts, movements and plans inside the homeland. At least that’s what I think the kewl kids at the NYT want me to believe. I’ll give it some thought.
And a few more silver bullets that were sure to bring down the Hitler-in-Chief:
Plastic turkey
Deibold/Ohio 2004
Al Qaqaa
August 2001 PDB
Rathergate
Fahrenheit 911
Yup, there’s some hi-larious shiite for ya’. It’s a Carol Burnett reunion show every day. Without the song-and-dance numbers, of course.
MF, how do you know it’s “wire communication(s)” that are being intercepted? How do you know the intercepts are performed in the US?
tongueboy,
Great. Thanks for a really thoughtful response.
My only point, if you care, was that it is just as reasonable to ascribe a decent motive for Democratic expressions of “concern” without calling to halt the program as it is to ascribe some sort of dishonest and illegitimate motive. But I guess demonization is the point of the partisan pissing contests that are blogs and their comment threads, left and right alike.
Also, you’ve got to realize that this program “concerns” plenty of people on the R-side of the aisle: Specter, Barr, Hagel come to mind, among others. So what are they? Determined to bring Bush down? Terrorist-coddlers? Or are they simply “concerned” that this President subscribes to a legal theory that, taken to its logical extreme, renders both Congress and the courts superfluous?
Earthling —
Well, I can’t say for sure that “wire communications” are being intercepted, and I’ve admitted as much in other threads. Here’s the definition:
But, common sense says that it would be a gaping hole in the program if calls to and from terrorist suspects made by cell were intercepted, but those made by wire were not. Plus, with the revelation that the NSA had access to these so-called “switches” from major common carriers in the U.S., you can be pretty sure it’s happening. And, I’ll reiterate another point I’ve made previously: the Administration would have said “The nature of the interceptions make FISA inapplicable” if that were indeed the case. The fact that they’ve never said that, and ended the whole FISA controversy (if not the constitutional one), says to me it’s just not the case.
As to your second point, this article in the NY Times suggests the monitoring is occurring in WV and WA. And, again, if they were monitoring from abroad, they easily could have said, “The nature of the interceptions make FISA inapplicable.” That they haven’t said so, in combination with what we know about the NSA operations, make it unlikely that the intercepts occur outside the US.
Of course, unlikely is not impossible.
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.
tw: Material
Oh, good call on al Qaaqa. I already listed “2004 election”, though. Since then. I thought of several more: the energy task force (related to Enron, but unique), Ground Zero air quality, TANG AWOL (you mentioned Rathergate, but there was more to it than that), Jack Abramoff, and the Bush DUI, which even predates his presidency. I don’t think the plastic turkey myth qualifies, as surely no one thought that would bring down Bush’s presidency. Right?
MF:
They may not have said such things because they may not be universally true. In other words, 99.99% of the calls may be made via cell, but that .01% would of course leave room for certain parties to scream that the administration was “lying” if they said FISA didn’t apply. Ditto the location part.
I strongly suspect that most of the calls are via cell. I also suspect that a great number of them are dead-ends, intelligence-wise, which is why warrants are not sought in those cases. Let’s say a previously unknown terrorist in the US gets a call from a known terrorist in Germany, then later uses his phone to order a pizza. The pizza order might be intercepted, cross-referenced in some fashion to ensure that it is indeed a pizza order and not code, and then crossed off the list. No point in getting a warrant, because there’s no reason to intercept future pizza orders.
My only point, if you care, was that it is just as reasonable to ascribe a decent motive for Democratic expressions of “concern†without calling to halt the program as it is to ascribe some sort of dishonest and illegitimate motive.
And my point was that it is emminently reasonable to ascribe politically opportunistic motives to these unserious assclowns given the lengthy track record they have laid down. My credulity has definite boundaries. As does my capacity for “thoughtful response” when unserious politicians assume that playing games with our national security has no cost.
Also, you’ve got to realize that this program “concerns†plenty of people on the R-side of the aisle: Specter, Barr, Hagel come to mind, among others.
Yes, I get the point: this is also about legislative/executive power struggles. And I might add: struggles ignited by a front-page spew of national security secrets *objectively* designed, to again borrow from Orwell, to cripple the GWOT in the great and holy cause of diminishing the Greatest Satan, Lord Bush in his time of triumph. At least the timing of this suggests such. I’ve heard neither gnashing of teeth or renting of clothes from the Plame Brigade on this one. Any thoughts, substantive or otherwise?
Earthling:
I really don’t disagree with anything you just wrote, except that I think most interception does take place in the US. Most calls probably are via cell, and I suspect that most interceptions are dead-ends, too.
However, even if I take your hypothetical as true—that only a hundredth of one percent were wire calls—that’s still a lot of FISA violations. I mean, if the reports are true that a million or more calls are being monitored each day, then we’re talking at least 10,000 calls intercepted in violation of FISA.
I don’t know anyone who’s arguing that it is clearly and unambiguously a bad idea for the NSA to do this sort of surveillance. There are many who are arguing that this program could very well pose a serious threat to civil liberties and privacy. But I suspect all but the most ardent libertarians and Bush contrarians would admit that some program along these lines, which operates at a certain worthwhile level of success, and with sufficient safeguards in place, might be useful in preventing terrorism.
The only issues are whether Bush has the unilateral authority to ignore the requirements of the FISA law; to authorize taps that [may have] violated criminal law; to do so secretly; whether, regardless of FISA, such taps violate the Fourth Amendment; and why Bush didn’t push for Congress to change the law if it was inadequate, instead of secretly sidestepping the law and Congress.
Look, Bush has asserted, and continues to assert, sweeping Executive authority that clearly implicates important issues of the separation of powers and Constitutional rights. The issue is less the details and efficacy of the NSA program—which we won’t know much about until the hearings, if ever—and more what the President’s invocation of this legal authority portends, and whether Congress gets a say in all this.
So we can squibble about the [somewhat unknown] details of the program all day long, and get nowhere. What is crystal clear is the President’s legal theory, which is dubious, and in my opinion, dangerous. So let’s talk about that.
I don’t think the plastic turkey myth qualifies, as surely no one thought that would bring down Bush’s presidency. Right?
Technically, no, but it certainly helps build the mythos of the bi-polar emperor-wannabe: grinchy (read: evil) with the real turkey but out-of-touch (read: moronic) with the troops (read: American people).
I’m not sure if My Pet Goat qualifies as only the hardest of the hardcore Bush-haters took up that banner. I don’t remember the footage being among the most memorable moments in Triumph of the Will 911. But I thought I’d throw it out there.
MF, you keep asserting two things and ignoring a third. 1) that the intercepts violate FISA; and 2) that the intercepts violate the Fourth Amendment. While ( 1 ) is arguable, it is more clear that intercepting international calls has been repeated deemed not a violation of the Fourth Amendment by several court opinions.
But 3) you keep ignoring the argument that AUMF trumps FISA restrictions. In the past, you’ve just handwaved past that.
One of the problems is expectations based on past experience.
If a 26-year-old social worker says you’ve mistreated your kids, you’re automatically a felon without benefit of any other process, and they’re cool with that.
A gangbanger can execute the death penalty on four people for the awful crime of dissing Tookie, and they’re warmly approving.
Saint Bill can collect the FBI and IRS files of people he doesn’t like and leave them lying around for the White House staff to peruse, no problemo.
And, of course, if you have oddball religious beliefs and don’t immediately respond to questions about them, or volunteer to have your kids taken away, they’re entitled in perfect justice to send people to burn you out and shoot you if you try to get away.
So no, I don’t take their protestations about civil liberties and/or violations of Constitutional rights very seriously.
Regards,
Ric
tongueboy —
A few points:
1) If this story was an attempt to bring down Bush, then why did the NY Times, which had it before the 2004 election, sit on it till now? That just doesn’t make sense, does it?
2) Politicians are politicians. They politicize. If you think that the Administration hasn’t politicized national security, you’re purposefully not looking. Unserious? Did you read Luttig’s Padilla decision? Have you read a well-documented overview of the Administration’s planning for the Iraq post-war? If not, go ahead, and then we can talk about national security unseriousness.
SPQR:
I don’t really address the AUMF argument because it is, without trying to sound trite, truly meritless.
Among the reasons:
1) Statutory construction: narrow statutes like FISA trump broad statutes like the AUMF.
2) There is no evidence in the Congressional record that Congress sought to displace FISA when it passed the AUMF. In fact, there is evidence that Congress specifically rejected the Adiminstration’s request for broader authority (to use force “within the U.S.”). This argument is augmented by the fact that the Administration sought and received changes to FISA when it pushed for the Patriot Act; if the AUMF displaced FISA, those changes would have been superfluous.
3) FISA has a specific provision to deal with its application in the immediate aftermath of a declaration of war. It allows for wireless taps for 15 days after such declaration; and the legislative history of FISA indicates that Congress believed that that would be enough time to deal with any proposed changes to FISA, on the President’s recommendation, in the event that a war made such changes necessary. So any argument that the AUMF overrode FISA just gets destroyed by the argument that FISA already had a specific provision to deal with an occurrence like the AUMF.
Look, to make the AUMF argument, you have to believe that in passing the AUMF, the members of Congress knew they were abrogating a finely crafted statute meant to protect US citizens from warrantless surveillance in violation of the Constitution, which is what FISA is. There isn’t one statement in the Congressional record that would support this position. Remember, this is about the rights of US citizens. If there weren’t US citizens involved, this program wouldn’t be an issue.
Above, “wireless taps” = warrantless taps. My b.
Well, it’s not a very good story, is it?
MF:
What I’m arguing around to is that if dead-end intercepts are dropped before 72 hours has passed, and FISA explicitly allows warrantless monitoring for 72 hours, where’s the violation? We don’t know for certain at this point that FISA warrants are not obtained for the more promising contacts.
Part of your argument seems to be that they aren’t denying this, that, and the other, but I can see why the administration would be reluctant to release even more classified information in order to correct bad assumptions based on a leak…
So much for the frequent claim that the FISA court would have approved the surveillance requests if only they were applied for.
MF, frankly I don’t find your handwaving on this issue very compelling at all. It is not at all as obvious as you make it out that AUMF did not included these powers. The applicability of such statutory interpretation principles to this realm is quite debatable and the AUMF has already been most broadly interpreted by the courts.
The UPI story is even sillier when you read the Seattle P-I story on point. To wit:
But the Presidential order at issue here dates back to 2002, “months” after 9/11, according to the original NYT story. So the 179 cases being cited here are really six cases, at most. And I’ll bet that one of the six was reversed by the FISCourt of review in the case oft-cited here already. So the amount of spin going into stories suggesting that this was a factor causing the POTUS to issue the new order is fairly staggering.
A little bell keeps jingling when I think about this “story”.
Do we jump to conclusions when we ascribe the stuck-pig squealing on the left to simple BDS?
After all, if bashing the Pres. is what they’re after, they’ve already got a shitload of already-manufactured (re made up) stuff on the shelf and ready to sling any time Tim Russert needs new material.
The little bell(s) are caused by two things you heard when their respective stories were breaking, but never thereafter.
1) Able Danger. Remember the rumor that popped up about Condi Rice and other prominent people being mentioned in AD reports?
2) Murtha. On day one (and only on day one) of the media circle-jerk following his call for withdrawl from Iraq, there was talk of his being under ethics investigation, and that he pulled his amazingly stupid stunt in order to immunize himself against that or other probes.
I’m probably just being paranoid, but it occurs to me that there is an ungodly amount of seditious conversation going on in this country right now. And if the names of some of those holding these conversations were to come to light as part of what is perceived as a legitimate, necessary intercept program, well, we might have to replace a significant part of the national democrat leadership, their staffs, and some of our leading lights in media and non-elected government. After we took the bodies down off the lamposts, that is.
Just a thought. These people seem awfully eager to trash this thing when they really don’t serve their main interest (slime the president) by doing so.
I’d give my right nut to see the stuff coming out of DNC over the last 5 years.
Keeping Nancy Pelosi out of Martha Stewart’s old cell doesn’t really serve the “greater” good.
One of the minor points, in this debate, is the waythe NSA has either been exaggerated or carica-tured, in the popular media. One can trace it back
to the film “Falcon and the Snowman” which Aldrich
Ames probably saw in Mexico City, or in Washington
DC, before he became a spy. If one recalls, Mr. Boyce, supposedly started his selling out to the
Soviets because, of the cables, he saw of US inteference in Australian politics, under the proto-Moonbat regime of Gough Whitlam (their version of McGovern. Then there was Robert
Redford’s “Sneakers” who seemed to key of the
great metaconspiracy of the 80s, the evil PROMIS
super firewall breaking snooping program, which
‘the good guys’ used to break into the RNC coffers and reward all the crazy causes, that
George Soros and Michael Moore would later discover. Fast forward to 1998’s “Enemy of the State” which portrayed the NSA as the tool of an unscrupulous, even murderous bureaucrat who used the agency’s capabilities to torment an upstanding citizen.(Footnote, if Osama, had seen this film, do they get DVDs in Kandahar, it would have made even more paranoid) This film is
credited (or blamed) for then Dir.General Hayden, now Deputy DNI, openness campaign,which discouraged aggresive surveilance. Watch for L&O, or some other investigative show, to put a murderous spin, probalby tying it to some poor Guantanamo detainee’s crusading attorney, next
psring or fall .On the more ridiculous front you
other end of the spectrum, you have the Vin Diesel vehicle, XXX, where they seemed to portray
a NSA as more active than Bauer’s CTU. This is the template on which the Democrats seek to foist
their own petard.
Karl, you are obviously deliberately missing the point that the article refutes the claim that the Bush administration had no reason to want to avoid FISA court review.
MF –
You seem to live your life in a space defined by the back of your head and the end of your nose.
How about if you give us some concrete examples of just where these intercepts are being randomly applied? That’s the crux of the matter, but you and those on the left seem to imply that Bush administration is doing these intercepts for domestic political gain. I think you have confused Bush with the Clinton’s and their 900+ illegally obtained FBI files.
I live on the Earth (not in my head), and if information found on a computer owned by an AQ big cheese leads to an American phone number, who in their right mind would NOT follow up on this information, warrant or not? What do you do when one, two, or three judges on an 11 member panel decide to stick it up your butt? Are you out of your fucking mind?
Once again – show us where these intercepts have been randomly applied to Joe Blow, and I will be on your side in an instant. Until you do, you are just another pseudo-intellectual poseur living in the a dream world of your own devising. Do you really think that Geena Davis or Martin Sheen would make great presidents? Or maybe Babs Streisand?
You seem to have missed the part where these morons have openly vowed to kill YOU and your family, and anyone else who will not kneel down and kiss their medieval asses. Maybe you don’t get it, but THESE GUYS ARE NOT FUCKING AROUND! They don’t have to defeat us militarily to destroy our way of life. You may think that America exists because God threw money and power at us, but that ain’t the way it happens. Our society and our economy are both very fragile and we need vigilance, not infantile egocentric “intellectualism”, to preserve it.
Grow up, my friend. We are in a serious war here, and pretending that this is Shangra-La is nothing more than an eighth grade fantasy.
You seem to be quite intelligent and well informed, but like most of those on the left, you appear to have no concept of human nature, and a total disregard for history. But that’s because you’re much smarter than the billions upon billions of people who have preceded you in this world, isn’t it?
God help us…
1) If this story was an attempt to bring down Bush, then why did the NY Times, which had it before the 2004 election, sit on it till now? That just doesn’t make sense, does it?
Yes, you are correct. Which is why I asserted no such thing. Instead, I asserted that this was an attempt “to cripple the GWOT in the great and holy cause of diminishing the Greatest Satan, Lord Bush in his time of triumph.”
2)Politicians are politicians. They politicize. If you think that the Administration hasn’t politicized national security, you’re purposefully not looking. Tu quo que? Surely, you are above all that. Unserious? Did you read Luttig’s Padilla decision? Yes. Have you read a well-documented overview of the Administration’s planning for the Iraq post-war? I’ve read the “Victory in Iraq” document. If not, go ahead, and then we can talk about national security unseriousness. Well, that’s fine, if you feel uncomfortable discussing the linked material or the eerie silence of the Plame Brigade.
http://www.bulldogreporter.com/dailydog/issues/1_1/dailydog_media_news/index.html#2807
Bush’s Media Game-Playing Continuesâ€â€President Now Strong-Arming U.S. Dailies to Refrain from Reporting News Considered to Be “Harmful†to War on Terror
President Bush and senior administration officials have met with top editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post in recent months to try to dissuade the papers from publishing what the administration considers to be articles harmful to its prosecution of the war on terror, Editor & Publisher reported today.
The administration’s efforts ultimately failed, although sensitive details likely were removed from the articles that eventually ran. The latest revelations show just how serious the Bush White House views the media’s reporting on its anti-terror tactics, and how it would prefer to conduct much of the war on terror in secret.
In his “Media Notes†column, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz wrote that Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. met with White House officials on multiple occasions to discuss the paper’s Nov. 2 article by Dana Priest disclosing the existence of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe where terrorism suspects are interrogated.
“When senior administration officials raised national security questions about details in Dana’s story during her reporting, at their request we met with them on more than one occasion,” Downie told Kurtz. “The meetings were off the record for the purpose of discussing national security issues in her story.”
Kurtz could not get Downie to confirm the meeting with Bush, but Kurtz’ sources told him that at least one of the meetings involved John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and CIA director Porter Goss.
Priest’s article set off widespread criticism of the CIA’s interrogation methods. Shortly after publication, the House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation into who leaked the information, while the CIA asked the Justice Department to review possible sources.
Earlier, on Dec. 19, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter reported that Bush had summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office on Dec. 6 to try to dissuade them from publishing their domestic spying story. The Times had already sat on the story for nearly a year, a delay the paper has yet to fully explain.
“The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny,” the Times reported in its Dec. 15 spying scoop.
But Alter concluded that because the Bush administration could not point to any specific details in the Times story that would compromise national security, the real reason “Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story” was “because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker.”
Perhaps becuase they thought they had him with al Qaaqa. The al Qaaqa story fit better with their favorite narrative at the time, that Bush was incompetent to prosecute the WOT any further. Perhaps they feared trying to raise the specter of impeachment before an election, as it can often shore up a candidate’s support. Perhaps–and this is admittedly a longshot–the Times was concerned about journalistic integrity right after Rathergate, and they wanted to make sure they had the story right.
Whichever it is, set aside for a moment the obvious bias of our press, so succinctly evidenced by the Gray Lady herself. Stories can come and go, and even biased outlets will often publish stories whether or not they help or hurt favored candidates. But for the last five years I’ve been getting emails from Democrats.com et al about how this or that scandal is going to bring down the Bush administration and turn us all inexorably towards the Great Socialist Utopia.
So my point, quite simply, is that with a record of 0-24 the left has lost any credibility in either predicting or precipitating Bush’s downfall. This story in particular is a loser because it directly concerns national security, which is the GOP’s strongest issue. Impeachment hearings over Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s civil liberties would be a disaster for the Dhimmicrats in ‘06, but please do try it.
Mr. Rivkin & Casey in a Times guest editorial:
“Even if Congress had intended to restrict the president’s ability to obtain intelligence in such circumstances, it could not have constitutionally done so. The Constitution designates the president as commander in chief, and Congress can no more direct his exercise of that authority than he can direct Congress in the execution of its constitutional duties. As the FISA court itself noted in 2002, the president has “inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance.”
In this instance, in addition to relying on his own inherent constitutional authority, the president can also draw upon the specific Congressional authorization “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks “in order to prevent any future attacks of international terrorism against the United States.” These words are sufficiently broad to encompass the gathering of intelligence about the enemy, its movements, its abilities and its plans, a core part of the use of force against Al Qaeda and its allies. The authorization does not say that the president can order the use of artillery, or air strikes, yet no one is arguing that therefore Mr. Bush is barred from doing so.”
Jeff, you’re right about politicians who leave their accusatory rhetorical flatulence hanging in the air…but lack the courage to propose any remedy, constructive or otherwise. But we’ve come to expect so little of them anyway.
What troubles me is that the Times, through this and many others stories, is providing the enemy with actionable intelligence. Further, this is done on the word of “current and former officials”. Who are these anonymous “heroes”, anyway? These are not just some anonymous citizen-bloggers, but public officials using their public positions & access to government files to make public statements to affect public opinion and public policy…yet done privately, at no risk to themselves.
Our Founders signed the Declaration pledging “their Lives, their Fortunes and their Sacred Honor”. They were signing their own death warrants if unsucessful. Even in success, they paid a heavy price for their principles. John Hancock wrote his name boldly so King George couldn’t miss it. But our “current and former officials” want all that glory…without missing a single pension payment!
It smacks of coup-ism and cowardice.
MF, you’re making a couple of running false or fallacious assumptions. You regularly ask “why doesn’t the Administration cite X”, but don’t explain why you think they necessarily would bring their whole game out in the open in the press. You’ve made it clear you don’t buy the 1801(f) argument — would you be more inclined to believe it if the Administration cited chapter and section? Frankly, you give me the impression that if Bush said the Earth rotated around the Sun you’d adopt geocentrism.
You then carry that on to make tha fallacious inference that they believe they don’t have any statutory authority under which they operate.
In fact, I don’t think the intercepts (that’s the term of art, by the way, an “interception” is what happens when Jake Plummer gets excited) are usually examined for content at all. I’ll have a post up Real Soon Now on my own blog about traffic analysis, but you <i>don’t in general intercept messages that say “Ahmed, this is Usama. Blow up Pentagon now, allahu akhbar.” You get messages that say “re your #344748, commander agrees” and that in turn is a request for more toilet paper of something.
I think what’s going on underneath this is probably social network analysis; they’re not looking at content, they’re looking for, eg, cell numbers that are the end point for lots of calls from lots of different places.
You know, MF, when you say it’s meritless and Cass Sunstein takes it seriously, I think I want to see you argue your side.
Oh good God, what happened to my HTML?
If anybody’s still reading this comment thread, I ask you a favor. Go back and read my various comments on these issues, from the initial response to Jeff’s post to my responses to individual commenters. I tried to make them as coherent and cogent as possible, to respond honestly to counter-points on their merits, to avoid ad hominem attacks, and to refrain from scoring partisan points.
And then read Lost Dog’s comment, above at 2:38 am, asking me if I’m “out of my fucking mind,” calling me “a pseudo-intellectual poseur,” and telling me to “grow up.” I especially like the Streisand reference. I actually thought she was all right in Meet the Fockers, though that movie, as a whole, left a lot to be desired.
Despite the ubiquitousness of all the typical right-wing invective and straw men in Lost Dog’s comment, s/he raises a couple of points I want to address, because they speak to the very heart of this issue and the Bush Presidency more generally. So at the risk of engaging in a “debate” with someone who doesn’t seem to be interested in one, here goes.
Lost Dog wrote:
Again, like Jeff in the initial post, you have reversed the burden of proof. The crux of the issue is precisely not whether the intercepts have been randomly (or improperly) applied. (Although I would submit that the various press acccounts spell out pretty clearly that there is a lot of data-mining going on, which is by definition random. But that’s beside the point.) In fact, the crux of the issue isn’t really about the surveillance qua surveillance at all. Rather, the crux of the issue is whether the legal theory advanced by the President in support of his secret directive to order secret surveillance of US citizens without court order is viable.
Again, the issue is not, and never was or will be, whether the President should spy on agents of Al Qaeda in the US. Of course he should, and must. The questions are (1) whether the President, by simply invoking amorphous and undefined “war powers” under Article II of the Constitution and an AUMF that did not include any words relating to domestic surveillance; (2) should be able to secretly authorize secret electronic surveillance of US citizens; (3) without reference or adherence to a statute, passed by Congress and inarguably within the enumerated legislative powers of Congress, that purports to be the “exclusive” means by which the Executive may conduct electronic surveilance; (4) without input or genuine oversight by Congress; (5) and without court orders as required by statute and [possibly or probably, depending on one’s reading of the relevant precedent] in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
I’m sorry I can’t whittle these issues down to a Lost Dog style “LIBERALS [HEART] BABS STREISAND”-type soundbite, but this is what we’re dealing with when we discuss the NSA story.
Lost Dog also says:
Aside from the unwarranted attributions to me of beliefs I don’t hold, I agree completely with Lost Dog here. That’s why I’m wasting my time on a right-wing website trying to engage you all in a substantive discussion of the what your policy preferences re this NSA program portend. You can demonize liberals all you want, but the fact remains that this program and the President’s assertion of war powers implicate hugely important Constitutional issues. And whichever way American society decides to go on these issues should be determined by an honest and open discussion of exactly what authority the President asserts, how that authority is juxtaposed with Congress’s authority, what the Courts say, and what the implications of the legal and logical justifications offered by the various players are. One of my major problems with this whole NSA program is that it was introduced secretly by the President. If we’re going to curtail our privacy rights—and yes, those do exist under statute and both state and federal constitutions—we had better do it on our own volition, in a public and democratic way. Not by secret Presidential fiat.
And please don’t lecture me on this or on the fragility of the American experiment, blockquoted above. I’d like to think I do have a keen understanding of history and law—I have studied both—and it’s no secret that Executives who claim wide wartime powers have been known to cause lots of problems. I also know that Americans, when they feel threatened, have historically been quick to look away when the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens are violated in the name of security, even when such violations are unnecessary and unjust.
And human nature? I do know that it’s human nature to be suspicious of government and to expect privacy in one’s private communications, and that it’s also human nature that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As I’ve emphasized previously, eve if we trust this President with wide-ranging authority to surveil US citizens without a court order, what’s to prevent a future President from abusing that power? (I still have yet to hear a convincing answer from anyone defending the NSA program on that front.)
Anyway, I look forward to Jeff posting more about this, and I look forward to trying to convince you all to re-think your hard-line positions on this issue.
its a cool
MF –
I appreciate your “nuance”, but once again I must ask you – “Are we at war or not?” Bush has done nothing that Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, or Clinton have not done (to name only the presidents of my lifetime). In peacetime, I would agree with you 0.
“In peacetime” is the real nub of this argument. If you do not believe that we are in a war for our survival, why don’t you just say so?
What is this bullshit about being worried that the “law” (as defined by power hungry morons like Harry Reid ans Nancy Pelosi) says we are not allowed to protect our citizens? Sorry, but I am just as worried about my rights as you, but I see absolutely NOTHING that even suggests abuse of the Fisa Laws.
There are 11 judges on that court and I have heard two numbers (79 and 179) of the modifications that the court has made to warrants. Are you trying to tell me that these 11 judges are above politics, unlike every other single person in the government orbit? Bullshit.
Wake up. This is a WAR that we are in, and until you show me concrete proof of an abuse of Presidential power, you are just another monkey wrench in the works. Abe Lincoln had a gubernatorial candidate thrown in jail for far less than Harry Reid and his despicable pals are trying to pull.
I appreciate your intelligence, but as far as your street smarts go, you can go diddle yourself. As far as I can see, you, and those like you are on the other side of this war for the survival of our way of life. Quit trying to pull boogers out of your nose.
No, not necessarily.
…”Today, the “power corrupts” syllogism has  like so many other things  been translated into a credo of personal morality. It insists that power makes you a bad person  i.e., self-aggrandizing, cruel, megalomaniacal, blind to all moral distinctions, and so on. And that just isn’t true. If it were, history would simply be the story of bad powerful men. And, while there most certainly were plenty of bad powerful men, there was also, for instance, George Washington. He might have become a king if he’d wanted, but he chose not to. He could have stayed president for life, but he chose not to. And, as NR’s Richard Brookhiser has chronicled, Washington remained a decent man, courteous to a fault in fact, as he grew in influence and power. Likewise, Abraham Lincoln  at whom certain libertarians love to throw the Acton quote  may have suspended habeas corpus, but the evidence seems fairly lacking that he was a corrupt man or that he grew more corrupt as he grew more powerful. Last I checked, Jimmy Carter didn’t become noticeably more praetorian for having had the arsenal of democracy at his disposal.
Obviously, power can blur judgments. But if absolute power corrupted absolutely, that would mean that all absolute monarchs and absolute rulers were equally  and absolutely  corrupt and therefore indistinguishable from one another. I’m no great student of such matters, but I can’t imagine it would be hard to disprove this. Couldn’t some kings be more corrupt than other kings even though they held roughly the same amount of power? […]
Hitler and Stalin, for example, were awful people before they came into power and  predictably  they were awful people after. Power didn’t corrupt them; it was merely a means by which they could more fully express their corruption.[…]
The lesson here is an important one. Indeed, it goes to the heart of conservatism and notions of liberal democracy alike. In a state of nature, or simply left to their own devices, many or most or even all men may in fact be infinitely corruptible by power. Americans often brag about the genius of our checks and balances, but the greatest check we have on tyranny is a culture which creates men who do not want to be tyrants in the first place. Every generation the West is invaded by barbarians, Hanna Arendt wrote, we call them children. And in America we teach our children from an early age  by using, among other things, the bastardized Acton quote  that abusing power is a great sin. This is why our businessmen, our police, and our politicians are, as a rule, less corrupt than, say, Russia’s or China’s  because they were raised that way. To believe that power will corrupt anybody and everybody equally is to believe that raising good citizens is a pointless task.”…–Jonah Goldberg
Nor do our executives have “absolute power”. They are term-limited, subject to impeachment, face re-election, can be removed by the cabinet if mentally incapcitated, are somewhat circumscribed by public opinion, subject to constitutional laws and court rulings–but not unconstitutional ones–(talk about “absolute power”; do you believe it is by definition impossible for the Supreme Court to issue an unconstitutional decision? I don’t.)And it is very unlikely the troops would obey if he decided to invade Canada for the hell of it.
its a cool thankx
They will stop at nothing to get their power back, even if it hurts our national security and military. Unbelievable.
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