Contrary to talk radio, it's about no warrants.

Listening to talk radio ( Laura Ingraham ) tonight, the subject was Democrats (and perhaps Republicans) who are complaining about Bush's "authorization" of the NSA to do electronic surveillance without warrants. She actually argued, explicitly, that those complaining want to make any Americans who are communicating with overseas terrorists immune from wiretaps. She mocked an imaginary President Kerry saying "let's not eavesdrop on these folks until we finish this FISA [Foriegn Intelligence Surveillance Act] application".

Absolutely unbelievable! No one is complaining about the surveillance of Americans. No one. They are complaining about this administration ordering surveillance of Americans without a warrant. Which word of that sentence doesn't she understand? I suppose the ugly answer is that she knows perfectly well that is what the issue is, but is deliberately playing it for shock value.

This is made all the more painful by the fact that the Foriegn Intelligence Surveillance Act set up special secret courts to grant warrants, that these courts have denied 4 requests out of thousands since 1978, and that the act allows retroactive applications for warrants after the fact. The idea of the NSA or FBI being hampered in any way by complying with the law in these cases is simply absurd. The only reason the administration could possibly have for bypassing the legal process is that 1) they are surveilling US citizens in ways that the FISA courts would reject, or 2) they reject, on principle, the very idea of legal limits to executive authority. Either reason is frightening.

What's worse is that there are some "conservatives" who actually seem eager to throw away their own constitutional protections. (I use quotes because that isn't a very conservative position.) And for what? Security? What legitimate security reason would there be for bypassing the FISA courts? Any useful security purposes are fully served by the legal system. It is bad enough to throw away liberty for genuine security, but to throw away liberties for no more security than you can get with the liberties is just weird.

Which brings me to my final, rhetorical question, for which I don't even have a guess (and I think I usually understand conservative motivations pretty well). Why are some conservatives enamored with the idea of utterly unchecked executive power? Such a notion seems to run counter to most strains of even conservative thinking in this country. Why do there seem to be so many genial, clean-living lawyers in nice suits who spend entire careers crafting legal arguments for an imperial presidency (e.g. John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, etc.) when the very existence of the United States resulted from a rejection of the English monarchy?

How could it ever make sense for the U.S. to pay for stories?

In response to new reports about a $300M Pentagon Psy-Ops program to pay for (ostensibly true) pro-American stories in the foreign press, in Iraq and elsewhere without any disclaimers that the stories were paid.

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that a few positive stories about American activities in Iraq do indeed result in a small increase in the number of Iraqis who are slightly more favorably disposed to U.S. policies. Do you really expect the average person on the street, angry about their father-in-law who was killed in the invasion, and whose cousin was beaten in Abu Ghraib, and whose neighbor's sister's kid in Fallujah was burned to death by white phosphorous to really give a damn that the Americans opened a school, or got the water running again? Is that person really likely to say "Hey, these Americans are OK after all"?

Now lets look at the other side. Now that this story is out, and people all over the world have heard about it, aren't a vastly larger number of people going to begin to doubt any pro-U.S. stories they might see in their media? Doesn't this sap the credibility of journalism in precisely the places where the idea of an independent press is most vital for the development of democracy?

So what I ask is this. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? And now that the story is out, who the hell thinks it is a good idea to continue the program for another 2 years?!

Just asking.

Did we invade Iraq because of Sept. 11?

Sent to the Village Times Herald in Stony Brook, NY:

TO THE EDITOR:

In a letter on Dec. 8, Mr. John Brant quotes an article in American Legion Magazine by a medical officer serving in Iraq. “'I wish there was not a war and I wish our young people did not have to fight and die. But I cannot wish away evil men like bin Laden and al-Zarqawi ... and this war will not be over until they are dead. That is the ugly, awful, and brutal truth.'”

The ugly truth is that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the September 11 attacks, that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian (none were Iraqi), that al-Zarqawi is a Jordanian militant whose group didn't join al-Qaeda until 2004 (after the start of the Iraq war), and that neither bin Laden nor al-Zarqawi had any significant involvement with Saddam Hussein or Iraq prior to the invasion. If anything, bin Laden was a natural enemy of Saddam, since bin Laden is a religiously-motivated Islamist fundamentalist and Saddam was a pan-Arabist secular dictator who only used religious rhetoric when it was convenient.

Nobody I know was against the Iraq war because they thought bin Laden and Zarqawi were “wayward children who have gone astray” or “great men who are simply misunderstood.” I and others were against the invasion of Iraq because Iraq had nothing to do with September 11, because Iraq was a lesser threat to the U.S. than Iran and North Korea (even if Iraq had WMD), and because invading Iraq meant diverting vital resources from an effort to deal intelligently with global Islamist extremism. We also guessed correctly that an invasion would be handled poorly, result in thousands of American and tens of thousands Iraqi civilian deaths, turn the world against us, and end with Iraq as an Iran-influenced, semi-democratic Islamic state at best, or, more likely, end in disintegration and civil war.

The brutal truth is that Saddam Hussein, however evil, had nothing significant to do with September 11, and Bush administration officials (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, etc.) wanted to invade Iraq long before 2001. The awful truth is that for them, the September 11 attacks were an excuse, not a reason.

That some soldiers serving in Iraq believe that the decision to invade actually had anything to do with bin Laden does not make it true.

John Hover
East Setauket