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Spying, the Constitution — and the
'I-word'
MSNBC
By Howard Fineman
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 4:01 p.m. ET Dec. 21, 2005
WASHINGTON - In the first weeks and months after 9/11, I am told by a very
good source, there was a lot of wishing out loud in the White House Situation
Room about expanding the National Security Agency&'s ability to instantly
monitor phone calls and e-mails between American callers and possible terror
suspects abroad. "We talked a lot about how useful that would be," said this
source, who was "in the room" in the critical period after the attacks.
Well, as the world now knows, the NSA — at the prompting of Vice
President Cheney and on official (secret) orders from President Bush —
was doing just that. And yet, as I understand it, many of the people in the
White House&'s own Situation Room — including leaders of the national
security adviser&'s top staff and officials of the FBI — had no idea
that it was happening.
As best I can tell — and this really isn't my beat — the only
people who knew about the NSA's new (and now so controversial) warrant-less
eavesdropping program early on were Bush, Cheney, NSA chief Michael Hayden, his
top deputies, top leaders of the CIA, and lawyers at the Justice Department and
the White House counsel's office hurriedly called in to sprinkle holy water on
it.
Which presents the disturbing image of the White House as a series of
nesting dolls, with Cheney-Bush at the tiny secret center, sifting information
that most of the rest of the people around them didn't even know existed. And
that image, in turn, will dominate and define the year 2006 — and, I
predict, make it the angriest, most divisive season of political theater since
the days of Richard Nixon.
We are entering a dark time in which the central argument advanced by each
party is going to involve accusing the other party of committing what amounts
to treason. Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of destroying the
Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of destroying our security.
Some thoughts on where all of this is headed:
- The president says that his highest duty is to protect the American people
and our homeland. And it is true that, as commander-in-chief, he has sweeping
powers to, as his oath says, "faithfully execute the office" of president. But
the entity he swore to "preserve, protect and defend" isn't the homeland per se
— but the Constitution itself.
- The Patriot Act will be extended, but it's just the beginning, not the end,
of the never-ending argument between the Bill of Rights and national security.
The act primarily covers the activities of the FBI; the sheer volume of
intelligence-gathering across the government has yet to become apparent, and
voters will blanch when they see it all laid before them. The department most
likely to get in trouble on this: the Pentagon, which doesn't have a tradition
of limiting inquiries, and which, in the name of protecting domestic military
installations, will want to look at everyone.
- If you thought the Samuel Alito hearings were going to be contentious, wait
till you see them now. Sen. Arlen Specter, the prickly but brilliant chairman
of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said that the issue of warrant-less
spying by the NSA — and the larger question of the reach of the
president's wartime powers — is now fair game for the Alito hearings.
Alito is going to try to beg off but won't be allowed to. And members who might
have been afraid to vote against Alito on the abortion issue might now have
another, politically less risky, reason to do so.
- Arguably the most interesting — and influential — Republicans
in the Senate right now are the libertarians. They're suspicious of the Patriot
Act and, I am guessing, pivotal in any discussion of the NSA and others' spy
efforts. Most are Westerners (Craig, Hagel, Murkowski) and the other is Sen.
John Sununu. He is from New Hampshire, which, as anyone who has spent time
there understands, is the Wild West of the East Coast. All you have to do is
look at its license plate slogan: "Live Free or Die." It'll be interesting to
see how other nominal small-government conservatives — Sen. George Allen
of Virginia comes to mind — handle the issue.
- For months now, I have been getting e-mails demanding that my various
employers (Newsweek, NBC News and MSNBC.com) include in their poll
questionnaires the issue of whether Bush should be impeached. They used to
demand this on the strength of the WMD issue, on the theory that the president
had "lied us into war." Now the Bush foes will base their case on his having
signed off on the NSA's warrant-less wiretaps. He and Cheney will argue his
inherent powers and will cite Supreme Court cases and the resolution that
authorized him to make war on the Taliban and al-Qaida. They will respond by
calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than
John Dean to testify to the president's dictatorial perfidy. The "I-word" is
out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year —
much more.
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