Tucker Carlson: It's All About Bush

Why do nearly all pundits think the entire universe began with George W. Bush’s election and now rotates around him? You see it on the all too often on the left, the tendency to think al Qaeda’s war against us began in 2001, that the problems with Saddam began in 2001, etc. But now Tucker Carlson, alleged conservative, seems to have fallen in with the same weak thinking. In discussing why he’s uncomfortable with the NSA story, Carlson says:

The real reason is that the White House decided it didn’t have to ask permission to wiretap. Bush’s lawyers concluded that as president of a country at war, he had the constitutional authority to take any steps necessary to protect the country, regardless of the law.

Bush’s lawyers have a point. There are circumstances when the country’s interests take priority over its laws. But by definition such circumstances are temporary. In the long term — for instance, in the four years since 9-11 — a president either has to obey the laws or change them. If Bush believes that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is incompatible with fighting the war on terror, he should ask Congress to scrap it.

Unfortunately that is not Bush’s way. Bush distrusts rhetoric. He hates to explain and persuade. He’d prefer to decide and delegate. So instead of taking the time to convince members of Congress — and for that matter the public — that the government needs to start spying on Americans, he went ahead and did it in secret.

First, when did Carlson become Kreskin? He’s mind-reading in that last paragraph. How does he know whether Bush “distrusts rhetoric?” How does he know that the whole wiretap story boils down to this single cause? He doesn’t. He’s just making stuff up. And leaving out a raft of relevant facts.

What Carlson leaves out is that Bush may distrust both Congress and the courts, and with good reason, when it comes to national security. Both are ill-equipped to deal with national security in any serious way. That’s why the Founders put responsibility for conducting warfare on the President and not the other two branches of government. We’ve seen just this week one of the FISC judges resign in a huff over the wiretap story. He was a Clinton appointee and had a long history of ruling against the Bush administration during this war. He seems to have been under the impression that judges have foreign policy responsibilities. We’ve had an entire war of leak after leak after leak of sensitive intelligence and operations data, not all of which is coming from the Plame Platoon at the CIA. Some of it is almost certainly coming from the Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. For evidence of that, I’ll refer you back to November 2003. Democrats on that committee circulated a memo at that time outlining a strategy of using their positions to politicize intelligence in ways that would damage the President and the war effort. You can go read highlights of the “Rockefeller Memo” here.

The NSA wiretaps predate the Rockefeller Memo, but they don’t predate the Democrats’ politicization of the war. That has been going on since 9-12. Their politicization of intelligence has been going on at least since the Church Committee gutted the CIA. They can’t be trusted. Nevertheless, the Bush administration did brief members of Congress a dozen times on the NSA wiretaps, and no one who was in the loop saw fit to make any serious noise about it until the NYT splashed the program all over the world. Which proves that getting too many people in the loop endangers the program, doesn’t it. Someone leaked. Someone who couldn’t be trusted with sensitive information gave it to the press for political purposes. Which party do you think the leaker belongs to? The Rockefeller Memo has quite a lot to say about that.

So given all of these facts and this history that Carlson leaves out, I can see at least one very good reason to have kept this program under wraps that has nothing to do with Bush’s “distrust” of rhetoric. The administration vetted the program internally and determined that it was within the President’s wartime powers—which are different from peacetime powers—to gather intelligence on the foreign power that had already attacked us from our own soil. They made this call based on established precedent and undoubtedly weighed the actions of previous Presidents who had also authorized warrantless searches in their thinking. Having established that the wiretapping for gathering intel on al Qaeda abroad and its US cells is legal and in fact vital, and knowing that the wider the loop of knowledge goes the more likely the program’s existence is to leak, the adminstration kept the program’s existence as secret as possible. That’s not illegal or even wrong. It’s responsible.

The administration wanted to keep the program as closely held as it could because it was a valuable tool in the war that loses its value when its existence becomes public knowledge. That’s why there was no public debate about it, and that’s why they didn’t trust all of Congress with knowledge of it. Imagine what Dennis Kucinich or Cynthia McKinney or Howard Dean would have done if they had been in the loop, and it’s easy to see why the adminstration kept it close. But obviously, now, not close enough. Someone in the small loop leaked. Which proves that the adminstration was right to keep the program under tight guard all along, no?