Bush Surveillance Policy Vindicated---Yet Again

The Bush administration has won yet another round in court on its foreign intelligence surveillance. You know what foreign intelligence surveillance is. That;s the anti-terrorist techniques that Democrats have endlessly characterized as “illegal,” “lawless,” and “shredding the Constitution.”

The FISA Court of Review, the court that Conyers, Levin, Schumer and the rest were all convinced would put leg irons on Bush if he would only volunteer to let them do it, has instead been consistently finding in favor of the executive’s power to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreign agents. The latest opinion states that the "directives at issue are lawful, and compliance with them obligatory." But you won’t hear much about that in the news.

Which I suppose means the Bush era is ending just the way it began, with Bush victories in rational tribunals barely reported.

In November 2000, during the Great Al Gore Election Robbery (foiled), the Bush team was winning every single legal challenge, in spite of being heard before Democratic judges (with the notable exception of cases before the 100% partisan Democrats on the Florida Supreme Court).

The Democrats sued over defective voting machines and lost. They sued over the butterfly ballots and lost. They sued that there was voter suppression—and got nowhere for an embarrassing lack of evidence. I don’t think many paid attention to all these courtroom skirmishes, because the nightly talking heads were so much more compelling. And, it was only legal geeks like me who were interested in all that legal mumbo-jumbo. Nor should we forget how the Leftist media--shedding barrels of ink for the cause--were desperate to force a victory for President Gore.

By the time the US Supreme Court got hold of Al Gore’s lawsuit, the pattern had been clear for weeks: the Gore camp, in its strategy to endlessly prolong the election recount until Bush simply gave up and let the losing man have the White House (as if), didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the U.S. Supremes ruling the way they did. Not, at least, if you had been following the pattern of frivolous legal challenges that led up to it.

Similarly with the recent hoopla over warrantless surveillance. There really was never anything controversial about the legalities of Bush’s intelligence gathering. The Democrats simply hated it, that’s all. They hated it because they hated Bush, and they hated his standing up to terrorism, the way they never would do. And because they had the powers of Congressional office, and the free bullhorn of the media, they were able to portray Bush's commonsense actions as deserving of scorn as those of the Third Reich.

And this legal decision is one more example of shame on Them and good for Bush.

Sharpton the Bounty Hunter

A recent Supreme Court opinion that put the kibosh on a “racial balancing” plan in the Seattle public school system says: (“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”); so, by way of a paraphrase, I now say that the way to protect freedom of speech is to stop punishing free speech.

I don’t care for Dog the Bounty Hunter--in fact, I have a visceral reaction to the sight of him. I’ve never watched his show, and if his ads come on I change the channel, to avoid being insulted by him and the whole premise of his show. If a guy who looked like Dog bought the house next door, we’d move. I don’t like his dirtbag haircut, his convict attitude, his trashy retinue, nor the thought of all the young males--whose self-expression is limited to parking their trucks across two spaces in crowded lots, and having bumper stickers that say “DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING? DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT”--undoubtedly considering him an outstanding role model.

That said, the man has a right to talk on the phone to his kid without losing his job. In fact, the man has the right to talk on the phone without having his private conversation published in the National Enquirer. ("Bounty hunter 'Dog' off air indefinitely for slur").

No one seems to know whether or not it was Dog’s own whelp, Tucker, who taped his own conversation with his dad, (which would be legal in most states), or whether or not the call was bugged by a third party, which would be illegal wiretapping.

As a matter of fact, taping Dog and Tucker would qualify as an act of domestic spying, illegal, immoral, outside the rule of law, and about ten other things that Chuck Schumer and Pat Leahy and the overheated civil-rights community have spent eight months repeating ad nauseum endlessly about NSA programs directed at terrorists, not that they're going to bring up now.

Nor will the ACLU go after the National Enquirer over this. Because we all know that what Dog did is much worse than anything any Mafia hitman, al-Qaeda members, or child pornographer ever did, all of whom have had civil libertarians battling for their rights to be heard--or rather, not to be heard.

Oh yes, oh yes, we're to understand, it’s a violation of bin Ladin's constitutional rights if we listen to him on his cave-phone directing suicide bombings. Meanwhile, while Dog may be an American citizen having a private phone conversation, and, incidentally, not breaking any laws--because he used the “N”-word, he has no civil rights anyone has to respect!

And then Dog had to go an make things worse, for himself, and for the all rest of us, by crawling on his belly to Al Sharpton with an apology. Dog, who is, after all, "the Bounty Hunter," may have done this more or less as a professional courtesy, recognizing in Rev. Al a fellow chaser-down and bringer-to-justice of bad men (in exchange for money). And like a bounty hunter, Sharpton enjoys operating outside the limits of the law. Dog just figured if he tried to hide, Sharpton would just bust down his door, crown him with his bullhorn, and drag him off to justice, anyway. And we all know that till Sharpton gets his justice, no one's going to get any peace.

And the thing of it is, Sharpton didn’t even know all of this had happened, when someone showed him this white trash dude publicly requesting America’s Racial Conscience to give him forgiveness. As Marc Freeman at American Thinker writes:

How amazing is that? The Reverend no longer need even demand action in order to find his race-baiting butt right in the thick of it. Unlike Imus, Chapman planned his own lynching party. That's right, Sharpton hadn't even heard the bugged tirade, much less demanded Chapman's head on the block. Pre-emptive self-abasement. (“Dog throws himself to the Sharptons”).

Still, Sharpton is nothing if not the humble servant of the Lord, ever ready to search out that one lost sheep, and responding to Dog's penitential request in this wise:

"As a minister I would be inclined to meet with you despite the racist and grotesque things I heard you say," Sharpton wrote in a letter released to the media. "If you wish to meet with me somewhere on the road that is fine, but be assured that I will not sanitize the kind of hate language that leads to the hate action that has left so many people vulnerable in America today." (“Sharpton Open to Meeting With 'Dog'”)

Well, don't strain yourself, pastor. Talk about your Good Shepherds! And you'd better think twice about telling this preacher your sins, if you don't want him to reply in a letter released to the media.

Nor does anyone, at A&E, Dog’s network, nor anywhere else as far as I can tell, allow that Dog’s remarks being made in a private conversation mitigates anything. Once again Sharpton gets to be the one who explains how we in America certainly will tolerate private free speech--within limits:

“While people have the freedom to express themselves in any matter in private, when those private conversations become public, it becomes our responsibility to state, as we always have, that we condemn the use of this word as racist and derogatory.”

So when the private becomes public, even when it becomes public by the malicious action of a third party, we can let the condemnation begin?

A sentiment which grates, actually, right against the social and legal trends in our country having to do with privacy these last few years, trends to increasingly treat privacy as an absolute--and by definition, absolutes don’t have exceptions.

That’s why sodomy passed beyond criminal sanctions, because the Supreme Court ruled that what one boy sticks up another boy’s rectum in the privacy of his bedroom is a private matter that, even if it were to become public, is off-limits to condemnation. That’s why an abortion at any stage, performed on a female, even a minor, of any age, is beyond public condemnation, or even public regulation.

That’s why law enforcement is regularly sanctioned by courts who exclude evidence obtained without the strictest regard for due process and consideration for the rights of even the most heinous defendants--even where it means setting the clearly guilty free. And of course, the sanctity of privacy and freedom of speech are why the ACLU and other groups can’t sleep nights for thinking that there is a terrorist somewhere overseas chatting about plans to kill Americans--while having his phone conversations tapped by the wicked NSA.

The use of the “N”-word has not become prohibited under federal law--yet, so Dog isn’t facing legal prosecution for what he said to his son on the phone. Instead, he’s only suffering social condemnation, which may be worse, (Dog survived prison, but this?). After all, social condemnation is enough to destroy a reputation and a career, maybe even a life, at least, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

But is our nation so far gone that the only act upon which we can achieve consensus is that this--yes, this here, this daring to utter this word, is the only surviving mortal sin?

NSA Surveillance Success

Both Power Line (“Connect the Dots” ), and the Wall Street Journal (“Listening In” ) noticed that it was NSA surveillance of foreign communications traffic that revealed who the German terrorists were leading to last week's arrests.

Citing a report about the arrest in Der Spiegel, John at Power Line points out how, in spite of most Democrats denouncing the NSA program as “unconstitutional,”

…it was the NSA program that brought the German terrorists to light:

The arrests were the culmination of an investigation that
began a year ago, when U.S. officials alerted German authorities to e-mails
intercepted from Pakistan.

If the Democrats get their way, the NSA will not be able to use this tactic unless it has enough knowledge, enough days in advance, to get an order from a FISA judge. You can be sure, however, that the liberals will never mention this incident when they denounce the program as an invasion of constitutional rights..

Democrats in Congress are planning to churn up as much opposition to this as they can in the coming week. Expect once more to hear lots of news references to “domestic spying.”

Media's Domestic Lying Program Still Going Strong

Lately I keep having a recurring dream in which I pick up my local newspaper and read a headline like: “Americans Fear Lack of Government Snooping on Terrorists Will Lead to Some of Us Getting Blown Up”. Then beneath this lengthy headline I am treated to an incisive and well-written analysis of how many Americans find “troubling” or “disturbing” that their government is carelessly neglecting, or even resisting, making an effort needed to hunt down, infiltrate, and intercept, some very determined bad guys who want us all dead.

The article goes on to describe how, in response to this trend of citizen anger, the government begins to wake up and get serious about hunting down the bad guys, aggressively, without putting theoretical worries about terrorists' civil rights above the rights and lives of our own citizens.

Then I always wake up laughing at such a ridiciuous a dream. Even if such a thing ever happened, (it just might after our next 9/11), the papers wouldn't report it.

What I find in the real, waking world are articles like today’s “Court ruling stirs fear of secret spying”, on the front page of the Detroit News.

The article, by the News's Muslim Affairs correspondent Gregg Krupa, reports dismayed reactions to yesterday’s ruling from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the one that reversed the awful decision of US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that ordered an injunction against the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). According to the article no one was happy about the ruling except some joker from the Department of Justice. No one from the News asked me if I liked it. I did like it. I liked it a lot.

Anyhow, instead of waking up to my dream article where everybody is worried that we aren't connecting the dots, I see just another story about how our civil rights are more threatened by Dick Cheney than by those guys with their suicide belts and their Korans. And the dots just go unconnected.

The people who control the American press, who are primarily liberals, and either ideologically committed to resisting anti-jihadist activities, or else just terrified of being called Islamophobic, are never going to report on this story fairly. They did not approve of the TSP from the outset, they consistently misreported the facts about it, and they always refer to the program, falsely, as a “domestic spying program.” And even though they knew Judge Taylor’s opinion was bad law, badly written, and certainly doomed to be overturned on appeal, (as it was yesterday), they felt they had to sign on to it as a blow for freedom and the First Amendment.

And now that it's been reversed by grown-up judges, the reporters have to defend it.

The truth is that the TSP, besides being a great idea, only ever monitored international communications, that is, communications to people outside the US, or calling or emailing into the US from foreign soil. There is nothing “domestic” about the program. Even all those critics unwittingly admitted as much when they kept insisting the TSP needed to be brought under the control of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: FISA deals exclusively with the gathering of foreign intelligence.

But has this ever stopped journalists from referring to the TSP as a “domestic spying program”? Or one that is targeted at “secret spying on citizens”? No, because such statements are inflammatory, and help create more enemies for George W. Bush.

Now Mr. Krupa shows he’s willing to get it all wrong, too, when he writes, (wrongly), that even the administration itself has come clean about all its unlawful domestic spying. Writes Krupa, “In several public statements, administration officials have said that the president has the right to order secret spying on citizens.”

Strangely, Mr. Krupa nowhere cites even one of the occasions of these alleged statements, nor who exactly was supposed to have made them.

I’ve followed this issue more closely that the average person, and I haven't heard about any such public statements by the administration--any statements that parrot, as Mr. Krupa parrots here, the left’s caricature of the TSP as the President having an unlimited “right to order secret spying on citizens.”

Rather, the administration’s statements on the TSP have been many, and are consistent.

For instance, on January 12, 2005 Alberto Gonzales said the following at a press conference:

"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. And this is a very important point -- people are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors. Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States.

"Another very important point to remember is that we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda."

Almost two year laters, on January 17th of this year, Gonzales’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee explained that the TSP was now being conducted under an authorization from the FISA court, re-iterating that the court order authorizes “the Government to target for collection international communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member of agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.”

Does that sound like an administration official claiming the "president has the right to order secret spying on citizens"?

The media’s repeated insinuation, including Mr. Krupa’s here, that the targets of the TSP surveillance are innocent US citizens, can only be intended to mislead the lazy readers, or the busy readers--that is, the average readers who make no effort to look beyond what they see in the paper--to believe that Gonzales, or other high administration officials, have on several occasions gone on record saying, “Shucks, now that you mention it, we are spying on innocent US citizens! And you know what else? We don’t care who knows it! Hissss!”

I can't believe any more that this kind of misleading writing is the result of journalistic accident or laziness. It is too much of a pattern. It is meant to disinform.

Another example is Mr. Krupa’s mischaracterization in today's article of why the plaintiffs lacked supporting evidence, in the form of information gathered by NSA surveillance, a lack of evidence which helped lead to dismissal of the ACLU case.

According to Mr. Krupa, “The administration's refusal to reveal information about the program was one reason the plaintiffs could not proceed, both judges said.”

Bunk. It isn’t true; not even close.

Neither judge said anything of the kind. What the judges stated, and explained in their opinions, was that any information obtained through TSP surveillance was privileged under the State Secrets Doctrine, which was invoked at the very beginning of the case by the NSA. The opinion makes clear that the ACLU and their co-plaintiffs did not even raise the issue of the NSA’s invocation of the State Secrets Doctrine in their appeal: even the ACLU wasn’t stupid enough to demand public release of secret NSA information on terrorists obtained through surveillance.

Yet Mr. Krupa writes as if to suggest that the Bush administration was asked for the information, and then stonewalled the court by “refusing” to turn it over.

This kind of thing is meant to create the impression that the ACLU case was dismissed unfairly as a result of the the White House's somehow cheating the plaintiffs and the judicial process by holding back information.

That, and Mr. Krupa, I'm afraid, is hoping to suggest a parallel with the collateral mythology of the President "defying" the US Congress in their endless demands for White House documents and testimony so Schumer and Conyers can "get to the bottom of" the Iraq war, or the firing of the US Attorneys, or the "illegal" domestic spying program of the NSA, etc,. etc., etc.

The First Amendment guarantee of a free press provides that newspapers have the right to engage in a certain amount of lying, especially if the lies are about public figures.

I'm not planning to sue anyone over it.

But I don't have to like it.

And I don't like it. I don't like it a lot.