The Most Important Question of All in Bush's Domestic Spying Scandal

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Mon, 19 Dec 2005 01:26:03 -0500

The Most Important Question of All in Bush's Domestic Spying

Scandal

 

 

 

 

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_david_si_051218_the_most_important_q.htm

 

 

 

 

The Most Important Question of All in Bush's Domestic Spying Scandal

by David Sirota

 

December 18, 2005

 

In the last 72 hours since the revelation that President Bush ordered

illegal domestic surveillance operations, we have seen how the

Republican spin machine has mastered the art of turning any and all

controversies into questions of national security. You know the drill:

those who are criticizing Bush's orders are billed as weak, soft on

national security, or against domestic efforts to stop terrorism.

Meanwhile, Bush is portrayed as the tough fighter of terrorism,

willing to make the tough choices to defend America's national

security. In short, his crimes are portrayed as badges of honor.

 

There's just one problem: this isn't a question of whether America

supports domestic surveillance operations against terrorists or not.

This is a question of whether America supports those operations

without requiring a warrant.

 

The truth is, domestic surveillance operations happen all the time.

They are such a part of our culture, they are a regular topic of

television shows and movies (think Serpico or Stakeout). But they are

also governed by the U.S. Constitution's 4th Amendment, which

explicitly protects citizens against " unreasonable search and

seizures " and requires the executive branch to obtain a warrant from

the objective judiciary branch in order to do surveillance operations.

 

So the question reporters should be asking the White House isn't why

the president thinks there should be domestic efforts to track and

stop terrorists. The vast majority of Americans think that. The

question reporters should be asking is " Why did the President order

domestic surveillance operations without obtaining

constitutionally-required warrants? " That is behavior that most

Americans who believe in the Constitution likely do not support at all.

 

Make no mistake about it - this is an especially poignant question

considering that, under the Patriot Act's weakened standards, the

government can now circumvent the traditional (and more rigorous)

judicial system and obtain a warrant directly from a Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Remember, this is a court

almost completely skewed in favor of the government. As Slate Magazine

correctly noted, getting a warrant from that judge requires " no need

for evidence or probable cause " and the judge has almost no authority

to reject the government's request for a warrant, unless the

government's request are extraordinarily outlandish. It is why, as

Josh Marshall reports, the government's own data shows that " in a

quarter century, the FISA Court has rejected four government

applications for warrants. " It is also why Members of Congress of both

parties have tried to repeal the Patriot Act sections that allow the

administration to use FISA warrants for domestic surveillance.

 

In his defense, the President has tried to deflect attention by

repeatedly saying he needed to order these operations to protect

Americans. Fine – but it still doesn't answer the real question. If

the surveillance operations he ordered were so crucial and so

important to protecting our country, how come he didn't get a warrant?

Surely something so critical to our security would have easily

elicited a warrant from a FISA court already inclined to issue

warrants in the first place, right?

 

And that gets us right back to the most important question: why would

the President deliberately circumvent a court that was already wholly

inclined to grant him domestic surveillance warrants? The answer is

obvious, though as yet largely unstated in the mainstream media:

because the President was likely ordering surveillance operations that

were so outrageous, so unrelated to the War on Terror, and, to put it

in Constitutional terms, so " unreasonable " that even a FISA court

would not have granted them.

 

This is no conspiracy theory - all the signs point right to this

conclusion. In fact, it would be a conspiracy theory to say otherwise,

because it would be ignoring the cold, hard facts that we already know.

 

Two years ago, the New York Times reported that the administration is

using the FBI to " collect extensive information on the tactics,

training and organization of antiwar demonstrators. " Then, just a few

months ago, the Times reported that the FBI " has collected at least

3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a

handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups. " And just this

past week, NBC News obtained a 400-page Pentagon document outlining

the Bush administration's surveillance of anti-war peace groups. The

report noted that the administration had monitored 1,500 different

events (aka. anti-war protests) in just a 10-month period.

 

These are exactly the kind of surveillance operations even a

government-tilted FISA court would reject, and it raises yet more

questions: Are these anti-war peace groups the targets of Bush's

warrantless, illegal surveillance operations? Who else has the

President been targeting? Has it been his partisan political enemies a

la Richard Nixon? Or has he been invading the privacy of unsuspecting

citizens in broad sweeps with no probable cause at all?

 

The answers to these questions will get us away from the silly and

partisan " strong on national security " vs. " weak on national security "

and get us to the real questions at hand. This controversy has to do

with whether America believes in the Constitution's separation of

powers between an executive and a judicial branch – the separation

that quite literally differentiates our form of government from any

old dictatorship, where when the monarch snaps his fingers, the secret

police immediately target the unsuspecting citizen. That's about as

un-American as you get – and that's why we need to know whether those

who hold high office in this country think they can turn our democracy

into their autocracy.