Scare Tactics Posted by Michael Signer

On the President's claim that disclosure of the NSA's domestic spying hurts national security, I couldn't agree more with Atrios:

No one has yet managed to explain how revealing that the administration illegally spies on American citizens without obtaining warrants, instead of legally spying on people after obtaining such warrants, damages national security.

I'm less disturbed by the blunt-object nature of the President's claim than by the notion that the tortured logic hasn't raised more ire, more outrage.  You CANNOT use fear this overtly as a tactic to suppress valid inquiry about governmental practices vis-a-vis the Bill of Rights. 

It's a while ago, I know (one of the Administration's peculiar strategies seems to be simply to let Father Time beat bad stories into submission), but here's what the President said in his news conference on December 17, 2005:

Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.   

The underlying logic is twisted.  Because in the next paragraph, here's how the President explained the rationale for the program:

As the 9/11 Commission pointed out, it was clear that terrorists inside the United States were communicating with terrorists abroad before the September the 11th attacks, and the commission criticized our nation's inability to uncover links between terrorists here at home and terrorists abroad. Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn't know they were here, until it was too late.

As the 9/11 Commission pointed out.  The premise of the program -- that domestic terrorists are communicating with co-conspirators overseas -- was already public knowledge.  And if you know about and accept the premise, then you know about and accept that the government is doing something about it -- as it turns out, reviewing great masses of data gathered by satellites surveying electronic communications. 

Whodathunk?

The logic becomes even more warped considering that the Administration has, by now, almost certainly used leaks for its own political benefit -- leaks involving national security (like the identify of CIA agents).  In his book Worse than Watergate, John Dean wrote:

The methodology - that of planting a nasty leak - is not new, but enlisting the news media as criminal co-conspirators is a breathtaking bit of bravado.  Like their stagecrafting and image control, they [the Bush White House] have pushed dirty tricks into a new dimension.

I know about the whole foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds thing. 

It's just that there's nothing foolish about this particular consistency.

Comments

[Jeff]

Orin Kerr gave a possible reason why the leak hurt national security.

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_01-2006_01_07.shtml#1136400573

3. Finally, and relatedly, the details of the program from Risen's book arguably explains the national security interest in keeping the domestic surveillance program a secret. It's not that terrorists may suddenly realize that they may be monitored; that argument never made much sense, as every member of Al-Qaeda must know that they may be monitored. Rather, I suspect the security issue is twofold. In the short term, terrorist groups now know that they can stand a significantly better chance of hiding their communications from the NSA by chosing communications systems that don't happen to route through the U.S. And in the long term, some countries may react to the disclosures of the program by redesigning their telecommunications networks so less traffic goes through the United States. The more people abroad know that the NSA can easily watch their communications routed through the U.S., the less people will be willing to route their communications through the U.S. Cf. Bruce Hayden's comment. No doubt it was a long-term priority of the NSA to ensure that lots of international communications traffic was routed through the U.S., where the NSA could have much better access to it. Indeed, Risen's book more or less says this. The disclosure of the program presumably helps frustrate that objective.

[J Thomas]

But it isn't really a question of whether it routes through the USA. NSA gets it regardless. It probably hurts US standing in the world that we're spying on the entire world whether they route through the USA or not.

Like, every british politician or bureaucrat who says anything on the phone that he could get blackmailed for, can expect to be blackmailed by the USA. Provided he's important enough to target, or provided he mentions the right keywords. Luckily so far we haven't had any who came clean and announced the blackmail attempt.

All it takes is a few technicians or managers in the british telecom system, and we get the whole thing.

And it doesn't help that when it got widely publicised we got upset only about spying on US citizens, and every published american said it was fine to spy on the entire rest of the world. We aren't particularly burdened with allies at the moment, but this couldn't have helped.

But here's the most important way it hurts national security. Since we're at war, the war effort requires that we rally behind the President and support everything he does, whether we know what he's doing or not. So anything that makes Bush look bad is bad for national security, at least until the War on Terror has been won.

That's the bottom line. Anything that makes Bush look bad is bad for national security. The implication is, "What's good for Bush is good for the USA.". I think this is incorrect. Instead we would do much better to impeach Bush and Cheney and then start to clean up their mess.

[Dan Kervick]

Jeff and J,

Given the administration statements of the past several days, I think there is a simpler and less technical explanation of how the leak is seen as damaging to national security, at least from the Bush administration perspective. To understand that reason you just have to think like a Bushie.

Bush and his top chiefs know that public knowledge of the program might lead to any or all of the following: public pressure to shut it down; increased congressional oversight of administration activities; new congressional legislation designed to curtail some of those activities; court cases which will eventually result in the Supreme Court telling the administration to shut the program down; investigation by the FISA court; greater FISA court scutiny and skepticism of other surveillance programs; interference by the states; and foot-dragging and resistence by other parts of the Washington bureaucracy. In a word, the more widespread the knowledge of the program, the harder it is to implement it successfully. While they have made it quite clear they intend to fight back against those countervailing pressures, there are limits to their ability to resist them all.

The people at the top of the Bush administration view themselves and their political appointees as a political insurgency that is out to save the country from its liberal enemies in the "permanent government", from the uniformed career military, from the courts, from the Congress, and from all the non-political divisions and bureaus of the executive branch. They see themselves as the political arm and vanguard of a broader, equally revolutionary cultural movement aimed at saving America from the liberal cultural elite. They also see themselves as revolutionary patriots seizing back "lost", constitutionally mandated executive branch powers from the other branches of government. Since those other branches control the making of laws and adjudication of cases under the law, the seizure must be extra-legal. They must just take the power, and then fight off efforts by the other branches to take it back, relying on both stealth, loyal support from the political appointees in the executive branch, tactical appeals to public support where necessary, and the creation of institutional facts on the ground that cannot be undone.

Funadamentally, the Bushies view their relationship with most of the rest of the US government, and with the supposedly dominant culture, as an adversarial one. They believe that they, not their adversaries, know where the true national security interests of the United States lie. And they therefore believe that anything that tends to impede their plans and programs by sparking institutional Washington resistence, or pushbacks from the liberal intelligencia and cultural elite, damages national security.

Since the administration has already made it clear that they believe the President's war-fighting powers, the powers inherent in his constitutional role as commander-in-chief, place insuperable constitutional obstacles in the way of any legislative and judicial branch efforts to constrain that role in any way, and even go so far as to trump some bill of rights protections such as those deriving from the Fourth Amendment protections, you can bet that the recent revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. Reporters should begin looking at all those other amendments, and ask themselves where a President who is convinced of the vast constitutional scope of his emergency war-fighting powers, might see fit to override them.

[MNPundit]

You CANNOT use fear this overtly as a tactic to suppress valid inquiry about governmental practices vis-a-vis the Bill of Rights.

Um, why not? Working fine so far.

[Jeff]

Well Democratic congressmwoman Jane Harman believes it may have compromised national security

[quote] HUME: On December 21st when this program first came to light, you issued a statement that said, and I quote, "I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities."

More recently, however, you have been critical of this program, saying -- or at least critical of the way that Congress has been briefed on it.

HARMAN: Right.

HUME: You were among those briefed, correct?

HARMAN: I was in the so-called gang of eight, which is the chairman and ranking member on the House and Senate side of the Intelligence Committees, and the leadership of the House and the Senate.

HUME: And outline, if you will, your concerns about those briefings.

HARMAN: All right. Well, first of all, the program we were briefed on in a very closed environment in the White House, with no staff present, on a basis that we could not discuss it with anyone, was basically a foreign collection program. I still support that program. And I think the leak of that program to the New York Times and maybe elsewhere compromises national security...

HUME: You say it's...

HARMAN: ... so I don't...

HUME: Right. I understand.

HARMAN: ... change that view for a second.

HUME: You say it's basically foreign. Were you not made aware individuals within the United States' conversations with the suspected terrorists overseas were part of the program?

HARMAN: It's a classified program, so I can't discuss what I was made aware of. But let me say...

HUME: Well, I know, but the...

HARMAN: No.

HUME: ... toothpaste is out of the tube...

HARMAN: ... it was made clear to me -- no...

HUME: ... when it's known that that's the case.

HARMAN: But it was made clear to me that conversations between Americans in America were not part of the program and require -- and I think they do -- a court warrant in order to eavesdrop on them.And that's been a point of confusion, because some of the press articles allege that this is a so-called, as you said, domestic surveillance program. That's not what I believe it is.[/quote]

[J Thomas]

Completely apart from what Harmon says he was secretly briefed on, we need a full investigation to find out what the administration was actually doing.

It would be silly to believe that what this administration told Congress has much relation to reality.

[Jeff]

I completely agree. My frustration though is that I see too many people on both sides that have already made up their minds regarding particular issues regarding this, before such a hearing has commenced. The "it didn't really harm national security" meme is such an example. Just because we can't think of how it could have doesn't mean it didn't. We would have to know far more about the program, which is classified, to really assess whether it did or not. And we have to realize that there may be a good reason why the administration hasn't given the evidence that it has, Because the reasons it harmed national security may be reasons that if released would themselves harm national security.

I find it interesting actually that the people who would be most knowledgable about this, the professional lawyers, are the ones who are the most hesitant to form conclusions.

So let's have the hearings. But let's hold off the pitchforks and torches until we get them.

[J Thomas]

Wait a minute. Let's look at a subset of the problem first. The information released doesn't look to americans like it helped terrorists in any way. Suppose that it did help terrorists. For that to happen, the terrorists would have to know something extra that the american public doesn't know, something that links up to the apparently-harmless facts revealed.

If the terrorists already know it, why not reveal *that* to the public so we can see how it hurt? The idea doesn't make sense.

But there's more than one way to hurt national security. It could hurt national security for our allies to see how totally we have them bugged. And then the argument about it, where we say of course we have the perfect right to do complete surveillance on everything that happens in britain, but we'd never do that to our own citizens.... Where we treat britan and canada and australia as not allies but something far less.... That's bound to hurt us. But then, whose fault is it that we put it that way in our public argument?

Since the national security argument appears to be bogus, and since this administration has shown no hesitation to lie to the public on other issues, it makes sense to ignore the claim until we see it verified or they fail to verify it, at which point it should just be treated as one more lie.

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