January 1, 2006

Reaching For the Scars

"There you go again."

Coming back to the well of paranoia for the 537th sip, the New York Times now reports, with ominous, minor-key music in the background, that the Bush administration had to suspend some parts of the NSA intercept program for a few months due to concerns of legality raised by Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. This is presented by the Times as yet more evidence of the perfidy of Bush and his tyrannical, Dick-Durbinesque Gestapo.

According to the story,

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

That "top Justice Department official" was Comey, according to those officials -- who evidently were not even named at birth:

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.

But let's take a deep breath and ask what this really means. First, it's pretty clear that Comey is just not comfortable with 9/11 thinking. Reading his farewell address (he left in August 2005, probably because Alberto Gonzales, not James Comey, had been named attorney general to replace John Ashcroft), it's very clear that Comey is a "9/10 guy."

He describes the various duties of the Department of Justice, mentioning every sort of crime they investigate and task they're responsible for... but he only brings up terrorism twice: once en passant, the other time merely to commiserate with the victims of 9/11. He never says even a single word about the Justice Department's role in the actual war against terrorism. My sense is that he doesn't see it as a war but just one more law-enforcement operation, like investigating bank robbers and Social-Security defrauders.

Feeling the pain of victims is nice, and I'm glad there are nice people at Justice; but it has nothing to do with combatting terrorism... and that is what the NSA program is designed to do. I'm really not surprised that such a nice guy as Mr. Comey was uncomfortable with it.

But much more important is the part that the Times just glosses over in a glib three paragraphs. I suppose the writers might just have missed it... but considering that one of them is Eric Lichtblau, who has had his paw prints on nearly every anti-Bush story to burst out of the paper recently, I have a bit of a hard time believing the "coincidence" excuse. Again.

What was the president's response to the concerns of Comey? He sought the blessings of Comey's boss, Attorney General Ashcroft. And regardless of the outcome of that hospital conversation -- which even the Times admits its informants don't know -- Bush suspended the controversial parts of the NSA program for "several months" to reexamine it:

What is known is that in early 2004, about the time of the hospital visit, the White House suspended parts of the program for several months and moved ahead with more stringent requirements on the security agency on how the program was used, in part to guard against abuses....

The audit examined a selection of cases to see how the security agency was running the program. Among other things, it looked at how agency officials went about determining that they had probable cause to believe that people in the United States, including American citizens, had sufficient ties to Al Qaeda to justify eavesdropping on their phone calls and e-mail messages without a court warrant. That review is not known to have found any instances of abuses.

After noting this, Messrs. Lichtblau and Risen immediately return to the central theme of all of the stories about the NSA intercepts: that it was a "warrantless domestic eavesdropping program." (Say, Bush is just like Nixon, and the Iraq War is just like Vietnam! Do we detect a nostalgic pattern here?)

Initially, it was focused on communications into and out of Afghanistan, including calls between Afghanistan and the United States, people familiar with the operation said. But the program quickly expanded.

As in previous stories, the Times fails to disclose exactly how it "expanded"... to what? Intercepting purely domestic phone calls from one American citizen to another? From one citizen to the local Pizza Hut? White House plumbers planting hidden microphones in DNC headquarters? That appears to be the conclusion they want readers to draw, but they've never actually specified what they mean, beyond the already-reported fact that by tapping some terrorist's cell phone, the NSA occasionally picks up a conversation between two U.S. persons within the United States.

As yet, I do not recall "America's newspaper of record" coughing up a single physical person whose rights have been abused. One would expect that if this program were as indiscriminate as the Times would have us believe, they should be able to produce victims by the sackful.

Thus, yet again we're left with a vaguely disquieted feeling, some nervous anxiety, an increased fretting about Big Brother watching us -- but without the Times' fingerprints being found on any actual, specific claims of abuse that can be verified by anyone... even by Sen. Arlen Specter's upcoming inquisition. The New York Times may not be able to define "warrantless domestic eavesdropping," but they sure know it when they manufacture it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 1, 2006, at the time of 7:01 PM

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