Gonzales' Plan: 'Hey, Look Over There!'
TIME Magazine's Mike Allen gives us a heads up today on how Alberto Gonzales plans to defend the Administration's warrantless surveillance program at tomorrow's Senate hearings:
In other words, Gonzales plans to confuse everyone by focusing on totally irrelevant facts.
As Gonzales knows, Monday's hearings are supposed to focus on the legality of the NSA spying program. This is a purely legal question, not a policy one. The accuracy of various press reports about the details of the NSA program--while interesting and relevant to any assessment of the policy merits of the program--are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether the President exceeded his constitutional authority when he ordered the NSA to disregard FISA. As Gonzales knows, there is only one fact about the program that is relevant to this legal question: Is the surveillance at issue within the scope of FISA? Gonzales unequivocally answered this question in the affirmative within days after the program's existence was first reported:
So Gonzales has already conceded the only relevant fact. The remaining legal analysis rests entirely on statutes, case law, and the Constitution, none of which are secret. In other words, it doesn't matter whether or to what extent press reports about the program are accurate. All those details are entirely beside the point.
Moreover, I don't even see how this straw man argument helps the administration. By emphasizing that the program is "narrowly focused" and "not a dragnet," the Administration only begs the question of why it felt compelled to circumvent FISA in the first place. If this were indeed some massive data-mining project in which computers, not people, intercepted and analyzed millions of communications looking for certain patterns, I think many people would be more sympathetic to the Administration's (irrelevant) practical arguments for circumventing the law. Getting warrants for every such search would indeed be burdensome. And many people would agree that having one's communications passively scanned by a disinterested computer system is less threatening than the thought of NSA agents actively listening in on your conversations.
This whole line of reasoning is just another example of the Administration advancing inconsistent talking points. On the one hand, they claim that complying with FISA is too time-consuming and burdensome. On the other, they assure us that this is a "narrowly focused" program. This factual inconsistency would bother me more if it weren't so entirely irrelevant. Big or little, focused or sweeping, either way it's illegal. The president cannot simply disregard a law because he considers it to be a hindrance
I sincerely hope the Senators on the Judiciary Committee don't allow Gonzales to distract them with irrelevancies. This is as important a hearing as there can be in a constitutional democracy. Gonzales is coming before the Senate to defend the indefensible, to make a legal case that is thoroughly devoid of merit. If the Senators cannot trip Gonzales up in this context, they're hopeless.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales plans
to use a Congressional hearing on Monday to
lash out at "misinformed, confused" news
accounts about President George W. Bush's
warrantless eavesdropping program, and to
declare it "is not a dragnet," according to
administration documents provided to TIME.
"I cannot and will not address operational
aspects of the program or other purported
activities described in press reports," he
plans to say in testimony prepared for the
Senate Judiciary Committee. "These press
accounts are in almost every case, in one
way or another, misinformed, confused, or
wrong."
In other words, Gonzales plans to confuse everyone by focusing on totally irrelevant facts.
As Gonzales knows, Monday's hearings are supposed to focus on the legality of the NSA spying program. This is a purely legal question, not a policy one. The accuracy of various press reports about the details of the NSA program--while interesting and relevant to any assessment of the policy merits of the program--are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether the President exceeded his constitutional authority when he ordered the NSA to disregard FISA. As Gonzales knows, there is only one fact about the program that is relevant to this legal question: Is the surveillance at issue within the scope of FISA? Gonzales unequivocally answered this question in the affirmative within days after the program's existence was first reported:
The President confirmed the existence of a
highly classified program on Saturday. . . .
The President has authorized a program to
engage in electronic surveillance of a
particular kind, and this would be the
intercepts of contents of communications
where one of the -- one party to the
communication is outside the United States. . . .
Now, in terms of legal authorities, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act provides --
requires a court order before engaging in
this kind of surveillance that I've just
discussed and the President announced on
Saturday.
So Gonzales has already conceded the only relevant fact. The remaining legal analysis rests entirely on statutes, case law, and the Constitution, none of which are secret. In other words, it doesn't matter whether or to what extent press reports about the program are accurate. All those details are entirely beside the point.
Moreover, I don't even see how this straw man argument helps the administration. By emphasizing that the program is "narrowly focused" and "not a dragnet," the Administration only begs the question of why it felt compelled to circumvent FISA in the first place. If this were indeed some massive data-mining project in which computers, not people, intercepted and analyzed millions of communications looking for certain patterns, I think many people would be more sympathetic to the Administration's (irrelevant) practical arguments for circumventing the law. Getting warrants for every such search would indeed be burdensome. And many people would agree that having one's communications passively scanned by a disinterested computer system is less threatening than the thought of NSA agents actively listening in on your conversations.
This whole line of reasoning is just another example of the Administration advancing inconsistent talking points. On the one hand, they claim that complying with FISA is too time-consuming and burdensome. On the other, they assure us that this is a "narrowly focused" program. This factual inconsistency would bother me more if it weren't so entirely irrelevant. Big or little, focused or sweeping, either way it's illegal. The president cannot simply disregard a law because he considers it to be a hindrance
I sincerely hope the Senators on the Judiciary Committee don't allow Gonzales to distract them with irrelevancies. This is as important a hearing as there can be in a constitutional democracy. Gonzales is coming before the Senate to defend the indefensible, to make a legal case that is thoroughly devoid of merit. If the Senators cannot trip Gonzales up in this context, they're hopeless.
posted by A.L. at 11:09 PM
3 Comments:
i'm struggling to find a way senate dems can botch this one. it's clear bush broke the law. it's clear that Gonzalez intentionally lied to congress during his confirmmation hearings.
however, given the breathe-taking icompetencecongressional dems have shown in the past, my hopes are not high.
What is now clear is that in the face of as close to an absolute abuse of power we're likely to see in this country, the Bush Admin is a supremely accomplish lie machine. Getting the facts out to the public and getting the public to act on those facts is a better shot than relying on Congress. So, time to come up with a plan that the bloggers can participate in to do what Congress cannot be relied upon to do. No last minute skirmishes, a real honest to God plan of action.
Plame may have done some work out of NSA during her domestic work for CIA(yes, its really in their charter at Congress)under the five year law investigating some domestic political outfits, later it blows up in Pentagon's face, but, then again, that may have been the plan....
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