How the NSA Controversy Could Make Partisanship Even Worse

At first, the story about the NSA's massive domestic surveillance program was actually working in President Obama's favor. A Pew poll showed that most Americans approved of the program, yet it continued to be the big Washington story -- meaning half-baked White House nontroversies like Benghazi or the IRS scandal had been knocked off the front page. The President was able make what would normally have been some controversial moves, mostly under the radar, as the media's attention was fixed on one shiny bauble. For the most part, Republicans -- who would normally have dived on any whiff of scandal -- took the administration's side on the issue. Despite the landmark nature of the revelations, it looked like it was going to be clear sailing.

But then a second poll came out -- this one showing Americans not supportive of PRISM. Then Gallup had similar findings. Now Reuters/Ipsos has a different take, nearly as problematic for the administration:

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Maybe We Aren't so Supportive of the Surveillance State

If the recent Pew poll on the NSA's PRISM program showed a disappointing support for an unprecedented level of domestic surveillance, a new CBS News poll offers cheering disagreement with it. Where the Pew survey found 53% found tracking phone data to investigate terrorism "acceptable," CBS's numbers are much more what you'd hope for from Americans.

In the wake of the recent disclosure of two classified U.S. surveillance programs, most Americans disapprove of the government collecting the phone numbers of ordinary Americans, but approve of its monitoring those suspected of terrorist activity, according to a new CBS News poll.

Seventy-five percent of Americans approve of federal agencies collecting the phone records of people the government suspects of terrorist activity, but a 58 percent majority disapproves of this type of data collection in the case of ordinary Americans.

Majorities of Republicans and independents oppose the government collecting phone records of ordinary Americans; Democrats are divided.

To too many of my fellow liberals, I say pull your heads out of your butts. The concern isn't over who is weilding the power, but that the power exists. If you trust the Obama administration to use this data wisely, that's one thing. But would you have the same trust in overly ambitious liars and cutthroat demagogues like you might find in a Ted Cruz administration or a Scott Walker administration? The potential for abuse is so great and so simple that this program simply should not exist. There's nothing but a thin shred of law -- and no oversight, you don't actually have to prove anything to the court -- that would stop a president from using his data-collection powers to blackmail political enemies or read the emails of of his election opponents' campaign teams.

Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, put it well; "It's the sort of power that if you give it to a corrupt government, you give them the ability to stay in power forever."

So get your hypocrisy under control, recognize that this is about the program, not the executive, and get your ass back over on the right side of history.

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Continuing the Surveillance State

A Pew poll out yesterday has some calling Democratic voters hypocrites on the subject of the surveillance state. In 2006, only 37% answered that NSA surveillance was "acceptable." Today, that number is 64%. The accusation is that Democrats were against it under Bush, but are now for it under Obama. And there's a measure of truth to the charge. When broken down as Democrat, Republican, and Independent, dem voters are the most accepting of NSA snooping under President Obama, by more than ten points. But Democrats can be excused for some of those numbers by the wording of the questions.

In 2006, respondents were asked, "The NSA has been investigating people suspected of terrorism by secretly listening in on phone calls and reading emails without court approval..." The 2013 question is, "NSA has been getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism..." The first asks if you approve of something that is a crime, while the second asks your opinion of something that's not a crime. Independents follow Democrats on this -- though not in the same numbers -- with 55% rejecting illegal wiretaps and 53% accepting the NSA's collection of metadata, where (we're assured) no one listened to the content of the calls. These are, in fact, two very different questions; it should come as no surprise that people gave two very different answers.

Unfortunately, that defense falls apart on another question: "Should the gov't be able to monitor emails if it might prevent future terrorist attacks?" In 2002, 51% of Democrats said no. Today, 53% say yes. Republicans also flip on support, so they're not getting off the hook. But the bright spot in this one is Independents. In 2002, indies were closely divided on email interception -- 45% pro, 49% anti. Today, they are overwhelmingly opposed -- 38% pro, 60% anti.

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Sex, Lies, and Pointless Wiretapping

Wall Street and the economy are in flames and the Republican party is smoldering. The party should burst into flames itself about some time in early November.

And one man, smelling strongly of gasoline and burnt matches, tries to blend into the wallpaper. President George W. Bush, widely considered a front-runner for the less than coveted title of "Worst President in History," pops his head up occasionally to make a brief statement, then disappears into the White House in hopes that everyone will forget he even exists. For Bush, the market failure is like a thunderstorm rolling through -- not anyone's fault and totally unavoidable. Both parties in Congress point fingers across the aisle, but no one points to Pennsylvania avenue, where a stupid, stupid man sits nearly forgotten. And he wants to keep it that way.

For the most part, he's been successful. The economy, the market, the election, the two wars he began without any plan to finish them, all keep President Zero off the front page. The lamest of lame ducks, Bush is merely a clockwatcher now, waiting to clear out his desk and start his foundation to promote his lousy ideas (no, he doesn't plan to go away).

But the ghosts of old lies and crimes poke at him, driving him out into sunlight. His neocon paranoia and his contempt for constitutional principles will continue to follow him around long after he leaves office and even into the grave. His shiny new neocon think tank for a New American Century will suffer from its association with its founder -- a man with such powerful organizational skills that he once lost a fair fight to a pretzel.





And so it is that President Bush gets a brief moment in the media spotlight, before it wanders off to more pressing issues, more flashy headlines, and less historically damned figures.

ABC News:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination.

"We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary."

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Really takes you back, doesn't it? If it weren't for the big stories of Wall Street and the election, this would be a week-long media feast. But scandal for the Bush administration is old news and Bush himself barely exists anymore for the press, so it'll go under pretty quickly -- just one more crime exposed in a long history of presidential criminality.

When the NSA's wiretapping program first came to light, there were a lot of people -- myself included -- who said this was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Not so, said Bush. That's crazy talk. The Bush administration was following legal principles and getting warrants for their wiretaps. "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order," he told us. "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so."

Yeah, that turned out to be a complete lie. The NSA's program was soon revealed to be (and was ultimately referred to as) a warrantless wiretapping program. Completely ignoring everything they'd said about it up to that point, the Bush administration asserted they had the right to do it. They didn't.

Once it was established that the wiretapping was going on, the constitution be damned, Bush told us that it would only be used to listen in on conversations between a domestic number and one overseas. The implication being that only calls with at least one foreign national would be monitored. In fact, Bush came right out and said it would only be used if you were actually talking to al Qaeda. "What I'm talking about is the intercept of certain communications emanating between somebody inside the United States and outside the United States; and one of the numbers would be reasonably suspected to be an al Qaeda link or affiliate," Bush told us. "In other words, we have ways to determine whether or not someone can be an al Qaeda affiliate or al Qaeda. And if they're making a phone call in the United States, it seems like to me we want to know why."

That too was a lie. ABC News again:

[An intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk,] says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said.

Yeah, probably not. But someone needs to find out from the president which of these parties could be "reasonably suspected to be an al Qaeda link or affiliate" -- the soldier in the field or their spouse at home? ABC quotes linguist Adrienne Kinne as saying the calls were "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism." How can this be? Could it be that -- once again -- George W. Bush is proved to be a lying sack?

NSA wiretapping was a big deal once -- arguably impeachable and inarguably a crime. So how is this keeping us safe -- a bunch of Navy techno-spies jacking off to dirty phone calls from Lance Corporals in Fallujah? It's like Bush is just doing this because he can. It's a tremendous waste of time and resources, it's unconstitutional, unethical, and more than probably immoral. But someone told him he couldn't do it and goddam it, no one tells Emperor Bush what to do. So, like a petulant and contrary child, he does it anyway. He'll show them. It serves no other purpose.

But, of course, this isn't news. John McCain's busy freaking out over something that happened forty years ago. Somehow, that's news. Maybe Barack Obama will trip and skin his knee -- then that'll be news.

But the Constitution in a slow, pointless burn will be a blip on the media's radar screens -- something to fill time between Sarah Palin's Newsweek cover and John McCain handing out torches and pitchforks to angry Republican mobs. It's Bush, so it's not important.

The Worst President in History will watch the media spotlight move on to the newest shiny bauble and breathe a sigh of relief. Here's hoping he doesn't realize he can get away with anything at this moment in history.

-Wisco

Joe Lieberman and the Office of George W. Bush's Trousers

I'm just so damned sick of Sen. Joe Lieberman. Since being reincarnated as the sole member of the 'Connecticut for Lieberman' party, he's been nothing but a lying sack. Of course, I'm being charitable. There's always the possibility that he's just insane. Either way, I've got two messages for the voters of Connecticut -- 'We told you so' and 'Thanks for nothing.'

Joe's latest line of BS came on an appearance on ABC's This Week where he called for more domestic wiretapping in the US.

Think Progress:

...Lieberman said, "I hope these terrorist attacks in London wake us up here in America to stop the petty partisan fighting going on about...electronic surveillance," in apparent reference to the Senate Judiciary Committee's subpoenas for documents related to Bush's NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

Lieberman claimed, "We're at a partisan gridlock over the question of whether the American government can listen into conversations or follow email trails of non-American citizens."... Liebermen went further in his calls for greater domestic spying. "The Brits have got something smart going. ... They have have cameras all over London. ... I think it's just common sense to do that here much more widely."

Of course, there's just so much wrong with what Lieberman's selling here and he knows it. But Joe's got himself firmly embedded in George W. Bush's pants and everything looks different from that perspective.

For example, Lieberman claims there's 'partisan gridlock' over whether the government can spy on non-citizens. But that's not the case at all. "President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States," the Washington Post reported in 2005, "Despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night." The NSA has been spying, without warrants, on citizens and that ain't so legal.

I guess, through the filter of George W. Bush's pants, concern for the law and the privacy of citizens is 'partisan.' You either let the White House break the freakin' law or you hate America.

Of course, Lieberman's televised BS toss was just an attempt to take the heat off the White House. Joe's hitched his wagon to the neocon star and, when that star sinks behind the horizon, Joe's done politically. There's no reason to call for the continuation of the NSA wiretap program -- mostly because, in addition to being completely illegal, it's been a complete failure.

NSA wiretapping has a spotless track record of zero arrests and zero convictions. At this point, it's pointless lawbreaking and a waste of time, tax money, and resources. All the terrorist plots that have been prevented in the US have been the result of informants, not spying. And even the UK's more muscular domestic surveillance didn't actually prevent a damned thing. The ineffectiveness of this latest terrorist plot is the result of the terrorists' failure. Spying, once again, didn't have anything to do with it.

It's only with the perspective that comes from deep within George W. Bush's pants that any of this seems like a good idea. Outside, here in reality, the whole thing is stupid.

In fact, this whole war is stupid and continuing it is even stupider. Yet people like Joe Lieberman often argue that we're already there, so we should see it through. It's a lousy argument.

Let's say that you decide that a house is being destroyed by termites and the only thing to do is tear it down. You start ripping off the roof and you find no sign of termite damage at all. You keep going for a while and it turns there aren't any termites. Do you stop tearing down the house and repair the damage you've caused or do you go ahead and tear down the house simply because it's something you've started and you have to 'see it through?'

Only if you're deep within George W. Bush's britches do you choose the latter. The first step in rectifying a mistake is to stop making it. Like the demolition of the house, George W. Bush's war has done more to wreck the middle east than the 'termites' have.

As this fight over the subpoenas builds, expect more statements and press releases from Joe Lieberman and the Office of George W. Bush's Trousers. Lieberman, like John McCain, claims to believe that Bush has done a lousy job of 'managing the war.' But if you pressed either for specifics, you'd find they really believe that George W. Bush can do no wrong. The criticisms are always vague -- mostly because the president is so unpopular -- but the defenses are always so specific. They criticize the machine, but believe that every cog, wheel, and lever is shiny and perfect. In the end, there's really nothing substantial they'd do differently.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; war; Iraq; Bush ;John McCain; spying; NSA; wiretaps; propaganda; Connecticut; I've forgotten what Joe Lieberman looks like when his head isn't sticking out of George W. Bush's pants