12-20-05, 9:01 am
During his recent media blitz meant to convince us that government spying on us is in our best interest, President Bush has made some pretty outrageous claims.
This past week, Bush admitted to giving a 2002 order to the National Security Agency (NSA), a super-secret, subsidiary of the Pentagon believed to be even larger than the CIA, to spy on Americans by wiretapping international phone calls and reading e-mails without warrants. NSA isn’t saying how many people it is spying on, but admits the number may be in the thousands.
Bush described his order to invade your privacy without showing probable cause as 'Constitutional' and the fact that it was leaked (by someone in his administration) to the press which then published the information as damaging and as putting 'our nation at risk.'
In other words, Bush thinks that secretly trashing the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights will protect our freedom. Does this make sense?
It didn't make sense to the nearly dozen current and former administration officials who discussed the spying program under conditions of anonymity with reporters.
White House officials defended the practice saying that two suspected plots may have been foiled because of the secret spy program. (They didn't say whether or not other sources of intelligence contributed to foiling those plots, though that is likely.)
By Bush logic, however, the government would be within its rights to conduct mass roundups, random home invasions by the FBI or the military, random stops on the streets, and background checks as such preemptive measures would yield even more suspects.
MSNBC reported that a 400-page document leaked to them listed hundreds of antiwar demonstrations, peace activity planning meetings, and other events completely unrelated to terrorism.
Both the collection of this information and its maintenance in this database shows that the Pentagon has targeted groups for surveillance that oppose the Bush's political agenda, not just actual terrorist threats.
When questioned about their domestic spying program and the database, the Pentagon told the media that much of the database had been compiled from reports by 'people worried about certain things that happen along, or they see something funny.'
From this mostly incoherent explanation (quoted in an Agence France Presse story), it seems as though the Pentagon wants us to believe that its surveillance on political activities in the US results from information received from your nosy neighbors.
Are they openly admitting that the methods they use to collect data on what they say are 'threats' are based on neighborhood gossip? If so, it would mirror other incompetent efforts by Bush administration agencies, such as FEMA. But then again, can we take them at their word?
The Pentagon also wouldn't say if this database listing activities of Bush administration critics was part of a program known as the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) reporting system developed by former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as one of the intelligence 'reforms' established after 9/11.
Perhaps the refusal to confirm this suggests that the Pentagon may be embarrassed that their high-tech intelligence reforms are little more than tattle tales.
Public disclosure of these Bush administration spy programs were made just as a vote on the expansion of the USA PATRIOT Act came before the Senate. While critics of the Bush administration had long suspected that the administration could not be trusted to protect civil rights and liberties, these revelations seemed to prove their suspicions warranted.
Despite the fact that the administration's domestic spy programs were not ordered under PATRIOT Act provisions, the administration's rationalization for their existence makes support for the PATRIOT Act difficult.
If the administration was willing to eliminate freedom in the name of 'protecting' it, many Senators who voted successfully to block expansion of the PATRIOT Act reasoned, the administration certainly could not be trusted to handle more controversial sections of the PATRIOT Act that give the federal government far-reaching powers.
The ACLU, a long-time critic of the PATRIOT Act put it in a nutshell: the Bush/Republican 'version of the bill would have allowed the government to continue seizing law-abiding Americans' most sensitive personal records without requiring a link between the records sought and a suspected foreign terrorist.'
Democracy and freedom are based on mistrusting the ruling powers. The framers of the Constitution, in an explicit rejection of British tyranny, created a system of checks and balances to prevent abuse of power and the elimination of freedoms and rights.
Asking us to trust the NSA, the Pentagon, federal law enforcement agencies, and other branches of the government not only requires a massive leap of faith, but it is simply an outrageous request that undermines the very process of our legal system and our notions of freedom.
If the Bush administration refuses to work within the system of checks and balances demanded by the Constitution, then it should not be allowed to operate at all. Congress, for its part, has to actually do its job as a check on the abuse of power by the White House.
In a speech over the weekend, Bush lamented public disclosure of his spying policy. He said that 'as a result our enemies have learned information they should not have.' If they followed this story, our 'enemies' – real and imagined – probably learned that the Bush administration uses terror threats – real and imagined – to impose dangerous and undemocratic policies on us. They learned that in the hands of Bush and the Republicans, democracy is being undermined and chipped away.
One might imagine that the Osama bin Laden's of the world feel like they have a stronger affinity with Bush then ever before.
--Reach Joel Wendland at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.
