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Friday, May 12, 2006

IM-in-Chief, or, why we badly need a real press corps in the United States

No, that's not IM as in "instant messaging". It's IM as in Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, the abbreviation used for snitches that informed on their fellow citizens to the infamously thorough East German secret police, the Stasi.

For the Stasi, the menace were the Western imperialists and the fascist agents of West Germany. For the Bush Stasi, the enemy is The Terrorists. The basic story is the same: Bush doesn't deny widespread collection of information, invokes Sept. 11 by Edward Epstein and Zachary Coile San Francisco Chronicle 05/12/06.

President Bush, reacting to a fresh furor over the disclosure that federal investigators have collected millions of domestic telephone records, said Thursday that authorities aren't "mining or trolling through the personal lives" of ordinary Americans, but his comments failed to satisfy congressional critics from both parties who demanded answers about the program.

The firestorm over privacy rights versus the tools used in the fight against international terrorism has renewed debate about the administration's domestic spying and is all but certain to lead to further hearings in Congress.

The disclosure also complicates Bush's nomination of Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to head the CIA. Hayden, now deputy director of national intelligence, formerly headed the super-secret National Security Agency, the bureaucracy involved in the vast phone-calling database and in revelations in December of domestic eavesdropping on phone calls and e-mails.

"I happen to believe we are on our way to a major constitutional confrontation on Fourth Amendment guarantees on unreasonable search and seizure," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said.

It's nice of DiFi to speak up. But I heard her on the radio just a few days ago pooh-poohing the idea of the Democrats opposing the nomination of General Hayden to head the CIA, even though he was involved in designing and implementing the warrantless NSA spying program that he knew to be in direct violation of federal law. She said the President should have wide discretion to pick his own appointees.

DiFi is apparently willing to have that discretion extend to criminals, as well.

So unless she's willing to make fights over things actually related to the illegal warrentless spying program,her nice platitudes about "constitutional confrontation" are worse than useless. How can she be serious about pressing a "constitutional confrontation" when she's just been trying to discourage a confrontation over the nomination of ones of the keys elements in the criminal operation to be head of the CIA?

It's really, really sad to see how badly the Democrats spaced out over the years so that even a liberal Senator like Dianne Feinstein, in a safe seat from California, is unwilling to take a real stand over something this basic. We're not talking only about civil liberties or Consitituional checks and balances. This is about the rule of law. The President is claiming the power to ignore any law he chooses on his own authority.

That philosophy is truly not a democratic or Constitutional claim. It's the claim of elective dictatorship.

Glenn Greenwald uses this story to point to a real-time incidence of how dysfunctional our "press corps" has become. Republicans are spinning the results of a quickie poll supposed showing that 63% of the American public approve of the NSA spying program. Greenwald writes in Polling hysteria and the NSA program 05/12/06:

I have a hard time believing that less than 24 hours after this program was first revealed by USA Today, most Americans had informed themselves about what this program is, why it is a departure from past practices, and what are its potential dangers and excesses - let alone had an opportunity to hear from those who are opposed to the program explain why they are opposed to it.

The whole point of having political leaders and pundits is to articulate a point of view and provide support for that view in order to persuade Americans of its rightness. That process changes public opinion on every issue, all of the time, often dramatically. None of that has occurred here. Let's have a few days of debate over whether Americans actually want the Government to maintain a permanent data base of every call they make and receive - to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their doctors and lawyers, their psychiatrists and drug counselors. And let's have a debate about whether the law prohibits this program. And then let's see where public opinion is.

When the NSA eavesdropping scandal was first disclosed, Rasmussen Reports quickly issued a blatantly flawed poll purporting to show that "Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. " The question mentioned nothing about warrants. It mentioned nothing about FISA. And it specified that the Government would be eavesdropping only on conversations "between terrorism suspects."

To have a healthy democracy, we have to have a vigorous, critical press. Especially with television news, we no longer have that in the US. It's not good. Particularly with stories like this where we really need them to be on the ball.

posted at 11:45:00 AM by Bruce Miller

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