Gonzales said he reached an agreement with Sen. Arlen Specter , R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to answer questions about the legal basis for the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping on telephone conversations between suspected terrorists and people in the United States.
"We believe the legal authorities are there," Gonzales said at a news conference at the Justice Department. "The president acted consistent with his legal authority in a manner that he thought was necessary and appropriate to protect the country against this new kind of threat."
In other words, he's going to repeat by rote the justifications the Bush administration has created for this program, only using more obfuscation and mind-fogging detail, in an attempt to muddy the waters. Nonetheless, the very fact that he's testifying indicates that the administration understand the seriousness of the leak of program's existence; were they to regard it less seriously, certainly we wouldn't see any members of the administration before Congress. We'll learn nothing from Gonzalez, but the news is interesting for that fact alone.
For Democrats, public hearings aren't going to cut it. Former Senator and presidential candidate Al Gore is calling now for a special counsel to investigate the program:
Gore on Monday called for a special counsel to investigate whether Bush broke the law for authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop inside the United States on communications of people with suspected terrorism ties without court approval.
As you can imagine, Republicans and the Bush administration take a dim view of that idea:
White House spokesman Scott McClellan defended Bush's authorization as legal and aimed at detecting and preventing attacks.
"This is aimed at international communications involving someone who is associated with al Qaeda. This is about connecting the dots and preventing attacks from happening," McClellan said. "It is a vital tool in our efforts to preventing further attacks inside the United States."
A special counsel is one option. So is suing to stop the program.
Federal lawsuits were filed Tuesday seeking to halt President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, calling it an "illegal and unconstitutional program" of electronic eavesdropping on American citizens.The lawsuits accusing Bush of exceeding his constitutional powers were filed in federal court in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights and in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names Bush, the head of the National Security Agency, and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA's surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization. It asked a judge to stop Bush and government agencies from conducting warrantless surveillance of communications in the United States.
It's interesting to note a standing issue here. To sue in court you normally have to show that you suffered some sort of harm from the defendant's (here the President) actions. That means you and I can't just sue the President because we think the program is unconstitutional, even if it is. However the plaintiffs in these suits are alleging that due to their communications with others in the Middle East (whom I assume to non-terrorists or it would be a bad idea to sue) there is a high probability that their constitutional rights have been violated by the program. They don't know of course, and it will be interesting to see if they even make it far enough to find out.
Beyond the legal issues, the Bush administration may be in ever increasing political trouble over the program. President Bush has repeatedly claimed that the article is an important tool in the "war on terror"; see Gonzalez and Mclellan above to hear that reitered. But this article in today's NY Times puts that claim to the test, based on the inside information of those who've worked with the information collected by the NSA:
In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.
President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."
But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.
Some of the officials said the eavesdropping program might have helped uncover people with ties to Al Qaeda in Albany; Portland, Ore.; and Minneapolis. Some of the activities involved recruitment, training or fund-raising.
But, along with several British counterterrorism officials, some of the officials questioned assertions by the Bush administration that the program was the key to uncovering a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London in 2004. The F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials also expressed doubts about the importance of the program's role in another case named by administration officials as a success in the fight against terrorism, an aborted scheme to topple the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch.
I can't quote the entire article, but it's worth reading in full for more details on the program and what some of the participants and insiders have to say about it. To be fair, the NY Times does explain that part of the problem may be beauracratic rivalry between the NSA and the FBI, as well as completely different approaches to intelligence-gathering and investigation. Additionally, given the harsh criticism applied to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies after the 9/11 attacks, something clearly had to be done. But whether the program has been even worth the trouble of violating constitutional rights, let alone responsible for saving "thousands of lives" as Cheney claims (does he just make this stuff up on the spot?) is certainly questionable. As we've stated here at TWM time and time again, the real problem that most of us here on the left have with the program is not what they're actually doing up there at the NSA, but that Bush-only months after the 9/11 attacks, when Congress would have given him the authority to invade the moon if terrorists were there-decided unilaterally that he had the authority to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens, and sought no public input, no input from Congress, no input from the judiciary, or any other government entity or institution that could check the power of the administration or even offer advice on how the program should be implemented. That Bush thought he could do this on his own is galling enough, but it should be up to us to decide how much of our freedoms-in every respect, even the smallest ones-we are willing to give away in the "war on terror." Whatever technicalities you hear about the program, it's implementation, or the investigations, that central fact remains unchanged.
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