Decision ‘08

The New York Times Continues To Channel Mother Jones

It’s hard to tell the difference these days between the ‘paper of record’ and some low-budget, no-circulation leftie progressive rag. Today’s Gail Collins special is yet another (!!!) broadside at the administration’s eavesdropping program, and it’s every bit as dishonest as it claims the Administration is. Case in point:

Bush officials have said the surveillance is tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generate thousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to dead ends or to innocent Americans.

Strange, isn’t it, that the Times can’t even accurately report their own reporting?

The truth is that the data-mining or packet-sniffing operations, we have now been informed, were authorized under Michael Hayden precisely to winnow down the number of leads going to the FBI. The President’s program was of the more traditional sort, and was the narrow, focused program (intentionally?) mixed together with the Hayden program by Collins.

Collins also resorts to the by-now-cliched and oh-so-tired ‘but it’s illegal under FISA!’ argument, an argument that has apparently lost none of its luster for the left despite the fact that the President and his spokesmen all say the program wasn’t authorized under FISA, but rather under (a) the president’s inherent constitutional authority, and (b) the Authorization to Use Military Force.

In a typically classless move, the Times appropriates the ‘Greenwald Dewine Postulate’ without proper credit, as well:

In 2002, a Republican senator — Mike DeWine of Ohio — introduced a bill that would have …[lowered] the standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to “reasonable suspicion” for a “non-United States person.” But the Justice Department opposed it, saying the change raised “both significant legal and practical issues” and may have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans — and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable.

So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already secretly lowered the standard of proof — and dispensed with judges and warrants — for Americans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone to know.

Let’s consider a possible alternate wording of that last sentence, shall we?

Perhaps because Mr. Bush had initiated a program that was certified to be legal by the Attorney General and NSA lawyers that accomplished his goals under a legal regime other than FISA, with appropriate notification to the Gang of Eight.

Sure, it’s less sensational, but it’s far more accurate.

Sadder than all of this nonsense and distortion, however, is the fact that NYC, the home of the Twin Towers, has to be served by a paper that fails to see what that tragedy has wrought. First, we have this sentiment from Collins:

We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11…

Lay down the bloody banner of 9/11? Did Mr. Bush bring down those buildings, or al Qaeda? This program is aimed precisely at bringing down the bloody murderers of 9/11, and of all the other terror plots since then (Madrid, Bali, London, etc.). What a completely nonsensical and uncouth statement to make. Speaking of…

Mr. Gonzales…had the incredible bad taste to begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged to their deaths from the flaming twin towers…

Garbage…

Of course, the Attorney General began his justification of this program with a reference to the 9/11 tragedy…there is no other way to understand what is going on here…the Times seems to be under the misapprehension that 9/11 was no more than an accident, like a car failing to see a redlight, and not an act of war; that we can somehow just declare things are back to normal and the problem will go away; and yes, to use the Karl Rove analogy, that we can survive in a post-9/11 landscape with pre-9/11 methods of offense and defense.

None of this is true. You may consider it a scare tactic to bring up the specter of a nuclear-armed terrorist in opposing al Qaeda, Hamas, and Iran…that will be of no comfort if the unthinkable occurs…and of course, the NY Times, if it still survives, will be the first in line asking, ‘Why was this allowed to happen?’

I almost wish I had a subscription just so I could cancel it…

11 Responses to “The New York Times Continues To Channel Mother Jones”

1 peter Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Well, I can’t let this one go by without responding.

1) The first excerpt is taken out of context. Dick Cheney claims that “thousands of lives” were saved by surveillance. (There’s no public evidence to back this up. The logical question: if this is true, where are the indictments? If the government found someone through surveillance who was planning harm, don’t you think the Bush administration would point to that as proof of success?) However, as you can’t prove a negative, the Times quotes FBI sources to say that the leads produced by the surveillance were essentially useless. When the VP’s statements are contradicted by those on the ground, don’t you think that is noteworthy?

2) If Hayden started data-sniffing to winnow down leads — a counter-intuitive idea (how does monitoring billions of conversations help you narrow a search?) — it nonetheless does not contradict what the Times is saying, which is something else entirely.

3) The President can claim inherent authority and the AUMF, but these arguments are false ones. The Times debunks them elsewhere in the editorial, but you do not mention this.

4) The fact that Gonzales “certified it to be legal” is unimportant.

a) Apparently Ashcroft had problems with the surveillance, and quite possibly would not have certified it.
b) John Mitchell probably certified a number of illegal things which Nixon did.
c) Most importantly, it is not for the executive branch to certify its own actions. As the Times notes, when the Bush administration doesn’t like the rules, it simply changes them.

5) We all know what happened on 9/11. The fact is that 9/11 does not excuse or justify everything that followed it. There are serious constitutional problems with the NSA program and the administration’s arrogation of power from the other branches. What the Times rightly objects to is the administration’s use of 9/11 as a get-out-of-jail-free card every time it is caught doing something it ought not to be doing.

I’m off to the driving range and then to pick up my kid from religious school, so I’ll be offline for a while — not wimping out of a fight, just hitting golf balls –
2 Mark Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
peter, the NSA was (is) (has been) (will be) monitoring millions of calls already…the FBI said too many were junk…new parameters were introduced. Here’s Hayden:

Yeah, thanks. To kind of summarize, Katie, about the program — about the changes I did — I mean, that was essentially just downshifting. I mean, it was shifting the weight of the agency in the direction of targets that were suddenly more important. And the degree of reporting we were doing on those targets changed — again, all within my authorities. The relationship between what I did and what I briefed the entire House Select Committee on Intelligence on the 1st of October — the relationship between that and what the president was authorized was simply that it involved NSA and it involved the war on terrorism. But that’s the only connective tissue.

I don’t mention the Times’ debunking of the president’s authority because I don’t find it persuasive…you believe the Times more than the president’s lawyers, I don’t…the courts will decide.

What John Ashcroft or John Mitchell did is truly a red herring…not relevant.

We’re gonna play hardball with the terrorists as long as George W. Bush is president…I’m frankly not worried in the least about the NSA eavesdropping on terrorist communications…and I’m not worried if one of my phone calls accidentally gets caught in the program. Nor am I worried about any of my friends, relatives, casual acquaintances, or people I may have passed by in the parking lot of the mall.

We can pretend we live in a police state, or we can be realistic about this thing - we’re going to have hearings, there’s a lawsuit, we have elections upcoming…this is not a crisis.

Iran, that’s a crisis…

Hamas, that’s a crisis…

Iraq…al Qaeda…I worry about these things.

I won’t lose a wink of sleep over anything the NSA is doing…
3 Jacques Distler Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
peter, the NSA was (is) (has been) (will be) monitoring millions of calls already

No, Mark. The NSA is legally forbidden to monitor calls to/from the US, as they routinely monitor millions of foreign calls. This is a distinction that must not be lightly elided.

I’m frankly not worried in the least about the NSA eavesdropping on terrorist communications…and I’m not worried if one of my phone calls accidentally gets caught in the program. Nor am I worried about any of my friends, relatives, casual acquaintances, or people I may have passed by in the parking lot of the mall.

Well then, let’s just get rid of all those stupid legal restraints on the NSA, then. I mean, we gotta play hardball with those terrorists. And with child pornographers and drug dealers and deadbeat dads and …

Are you with General Hayden: “Probable Cause? That’s not in the 4th Amendment.”?
4 Mark Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Jacques, I hear what you’re saying, and believe it or not, I do have a strong libertarian streak…My point is that while this is a concern, it is being addressed in multiple forums (or will be shortly) - and it’s not the number one concern on my plate at the moment…of course, others will disagree, but I find the prospect of nuclear terrorism frightening enough that I’m willing to give a little libertarian ground to security…fully aware of the slippery slope and all.

I have faith that the upcoming congressional hearings and legal cases will make sure this effort is contained to the uses it should be used for…

Does that make me naive? Perhaps…but the consequences of being wrong on this one (terrorists with nukes, which I am more convinced by the day is a very real prospect in my own lifetime) are too ghastly to think about…
5 Mark Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
Oh, and yes, good point about the foreign versus one-end domestic…as you say, it’s an easy one to overlook, but an important distinction…
6 Jacques Distler Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Just to be clear, this scandal is not, primarily, about Civil Liberties (though that is an important aspect). It is about the Rule-of-Law and the President’s unprecedented claim that the Congress (unwittingly) granted him the authority to suspend any Laws necessary in the pursuit of the War-on-Terror.
7 Mark Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Well, it seems both aspects have come under fire (perhaps rightly so). I don’t want to get too far away from my original position (and I still stick to it) that I don’t know whether the administration’s position is legal. At the same time, with full acknowledgement that we are a nation of laws and not men, I DO feel that intent matters, and I am less troubled by presidential overreach in the persuit of national security than I am about Nixonian paranoid attacks on an ‘enemies list’.

Believe me, I don’t want to give the president a rubber stamp - that’s akin to naming him dictator - but, at the risk of repeating myself, I do hope that the courts and Congress can succeed in (1) putting up very clear lines that protect civil liberties and constrain the ability of the executive to escape oversight, but also (2) take into account the need to be as aggressive as possible in anti-terrorism efforts.
8 Mark Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
All of which is to give a little ground to the President’s opponents by admitting that, yes, far better had he worked with Congress…
9 Clint Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Jaques-

“…the President’s unprecedented claim that the Congress (unwittingly) granted him the authority to suspend any Laws necessary in the pursuit of the War-on-Terror.”

*sigh*

One more time. When the President argues that he has the legal power to authorize a commander on the ground to order an American soldier to shoot at and kill an enemy combatant — without reading him his Miranda rights, without trying to arrest him first, without a trial, and without endless habeus appeals to the Supreme Court, the President is not claiming that he has the right to ignore any law, nor even that he always has the right to authorize a soldier to kill anyone, he’s just pointing out the painfully obvious fact that shooting and killing enemy soldiers is a standard part of what it means to fight a war. So is intercepting the enemy’s communications.

Finally, as to “unprecedented” — that’s just silly. It’s hard to think of a single war-time President who has been more restrained in his claims of Presidential power than this one has been. If GWB were to round up all the arabs in America and stick them in camps, and to arrest the editorial boards of the New York Times and several other papers and magazines for their anti-war editorials, and to order the FBI to secretly tap the phones of anti-war activists and politicians in order to blackmail them, and to round up and jail the town council of Berkeley, CA to block them from voting on their resolution to condemn the War in Iraq — then he would be clearly following historical precedent. Listening in on phone calls between people in America and enemy soldiers who we know are planning attacks in America… “unprecedented” — give me a break.
10 peter Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
*sigh*

One more time. When the President authorizes a soldier to kill an enemy combatant, it is on foreign soil.

When a phone call is intercepted under the NSA program in question, at least one end of it is on US soil. This is not an insignificant distinction. On American soil, things like Miranda rights and the fourth amendment have meaning (or ought to, anyway).

Nobody is arguing that we shouldn’t listen to Al Qaeda’s conversations — only that the law should be followed in doing so. FISA was enacted in the aftermath of Watergate specifically to insure that when eavesdropping occurs, there are checks in place to make sure that the power to wiretap is not abused. Right or wrong, that’s the law. Bush didn’t like the law, so he ignored it.

Regarding precedent: I can think of lots of Presidents who were more restrained in their claims of executive power in times of war: Truman, Johnson, and Bush I, to name three. (To anticipate an argument: according to the general counsel where I work, the Youngstown Steel case is misinterpreted as an executive power case — in his view, it is primarily a labor relations issue and the executive power issue is secondary).

In any event, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and FDR’s internment of the Japanese are historical fact, and Bush’s excesses are not unprecedented. The first instance is, at best, controversial, and the second is universally condemned. Your implication is that these somehow justify what the current administration does, because at least they’re not throwing Americans in jail. Are you sure this is the argument you want to make?
11 dmac Says:
January 29th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
“Just to be clear, this scandal is not, primarily, about Civil Liberties…”

Please note: that’s not at all like the Dems are portraying it these days.