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The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight
By Frank Rich
01/08/06 "New
York Times" -- -- Almost two weeks before The New
York Times published its scoop about our government's extralegal
wiretapping, the cable network Showtime blew the whole top-secret
shebang. In its mini-series "Sleeper Cell," about Islamic
fundamentalist terrorists in Los Angeles, the cell's ringleader
berates an underling for chatting about an impending operation
during a phone conversation with an uncle in Egypt. "We can only
pray that the N.S.A. is not listening," the leader yells at the
miscreant, who is then stoned for his blabbing.
If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that
the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess
what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a
hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his
warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts "our
citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to
wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has
learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't seen
"Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has
surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore
legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee
jurisprudence and torture.
That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is
a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed
by Dick Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a
right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by
saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with
this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully)
intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is about to
begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all
the chatter our government picked up during the president's
excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated
to mañana; the N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those
warnings until 9/12.
Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric
Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials
had served as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and
not just to The Times. Sooner or later we'll find out what the White
House is really so defensive about.
Perhaps it's the obvious: the errant spying ensnared Americans
talking to Americans, not just Americans talking to jihadists in
Afghanistan. In a raw interview transcript posted on MSNBC's Web
site last week - and quickly seized on by John Aravosis of
AmericaBlog - the NBC News foreign affairs correspondent Andrea
Mitchell asked Mr. Risen if he knew whether the CNN correspondent
Christiane Amanpour might have been wiretapped. (Mr. Risen said, "I
hadn't heard that.") Surely a pro like Ms. Mitchell wasn't
speculating idly. NBC News, which did not broadcast this exchange
and later edited it out of the Web transcript, said Friday it was
still pursuing the story.
If the Bush administration did indeed eavesdrop on American
journalists and political opponents (Ms. Amanpour's husband, Jamie
Rubin, was a foreign policy adviser to the Kerry campaign), it's
déjà Watergate all over again. But even now we can see that there's
another, simpler - and distinctly Bushian - motive at play here,
hiding in plain sight.
That motive is not, as many liberals would have it, a simple
ideological crusade to gut the Bill of Rights. Real conservatives,
after all, are opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally
Grover Norquist has criticized the N.S.A.'s overreaching. The
highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is instead to
preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political
victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump
principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth.
Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you
can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from
embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures.
That's why Paul Wolfowitz, in a 2004 remark for which he later
apologized, dismissed reporting on the raging insurgency in Iraq as
"rumors" he attributed to a Baghdad press corps too "afraid to
travel." That's also why the White House tried in May to blame
lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan on a single
erroneous Newsweek item about Koran desecration - as if 200-odd
words in an American magazine could take the fall for the indelible
photos from Abu Ghraib.
Such is the blame-shifting game Mr. Cheney was up to last week. By
dragging 9/11 into his defense of possibly unconstitutional bugging,
he was hoping to rewrite history to absolve the White House of its
bungling. And no wonder. He knows all too well that the timing of
Mr. Bush's signing of the secret executive order to initiate the
desperate tactic of warrant-free N.S.A. eavesdropping - early 2002,
according to Mr. Risen's new book, "State of War" - is nothing if
not a giant arrow pointing to one of the administration's most
catastrophic failures. It was only weeks earlier, in December 2001,
that we had our best crack at nailing Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora
and blew it What went down that fateful December is recalled in
particularly gripping fashion in a just published book,
"Jawbreaker," which, like Mr. Risen's book, is rising on the
best-seller list at an inopportune moment for this White House.
"Jawbreaker" is the self-told story of a veteran clandestine
officer, Gary Berntsen, who was the pivotal C.I.A.i ld commander in
the hunt for bin Laden. Mr. Berntsen is a fervent Bush loyalist, but
his honest account doesn't do the president any favors. "We needed
U.S. soldiers on the ground!" he writes, to "block a possible Al
Qaeda escape into Afghanistan!" But his request to Centcom for 800
Army Rangers to do the job went unheeded. We don't know whether the
Bush order relaxing legal controls on the N.S.A. was in part a Hail
Mary pass to help compensate for that disaster. Either way, all the
subsequent wiretaps in the world have not brought bin Laden back
dead or alive. Though the White House says that its warrantless
surveillance has saved lives by stopping other terrorists since
then, Mr. Bush has exaggerated victories against Al Qaeda as often
as he has the battle-readiness of Iraqi troops. After he claimed in
an October speech that America and its allies had foiled 10 Qaeda
plots since 9/11, USA Today reported that "at least" 6 of the 10 had
been preliminary ideas for attacks rather than actual planned
attacks.
The louder the reports of failures on this president's watch, the
louder he tries to drown them out by boasting that he has done
everything "within the law" to keep America safe and by implying
that his critics are unpatriotic, if not outright treasonous. Mr.
Bush certainly has good reason to pump up the volume now. In early
December the former 9/11 commissioners gave the federal government a
report card riddled with D's and F's on terrorism preparedness.
The front line of defense against terrorism is supposed to be the
three-year-old, $40-billion-a-year Homeland Security Department, but
news of its ineptitude, cronyism and no-bid contracts has only grown
since Katrina. The Washington Post reported that one Transportation
Security Administration contract worth up to $463 million had gone
to a brand-new company that (coincidentally, we're told) contributed
$122,000 to a powerful Republican congressman, Harold Rogers of
Kentucky. An independent audit by the department's own inspector
general, largely unnoticed during Christmas week, found everything
from FEMA to border control in some form of disarray.
Yet even as this damning report was released, the president forced
cronies into top jobs in immigration enforcement and state and local
preparedness with recess appointments that bypassed Congressional
approval. Last week the department had the brilliance to leave Las
Vegas off its 2006 list of 35 "high threat" urban areas - no doubt
because Mohammed Atta was so well behaved there when plotting the
9/11 attacks.
The warrantless eavesdropping is more of the same incompetence. Like
our physical abuse of detainees and our denial of their access to
due process, this flouting of the law may yet do as much damage to
fighting the war on terrorism as it does to civil liberties. As the
First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus wrote in The Huffington Post,
every defense lawyer representing a terrorism suspect charged in the
four years since Mr. Bush's N.S.A. decree can challenge the legality
of the prosecution's evidence. "The entire criminal process will be
brought to a standstill," Mr. Garbus explains, as the government
refuses to give the courts information on national security grounds,
inviting the dismissal of entire cases, and judges "up and down the
appellate ladder" issue conflicting rulings.
Far from "bringing justice to our enemies," as Mr. Bush is fond of
saying, he may once again be helping them escape the way he did at
Tora Bora. The president who once promised to bring a "culture of
responsibility" to Washington can and will blame The Times and the
rest of the press for his failures. But maybe, if only for variety's
sake, the moment has come to find a new scapegoat. I nominate
Showtime.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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