Sunday, January 08, 2006
Editorial: Still exploiting 9/11 to justify secret spying
Vice President Cheney's shameless claims ignore the difficulty of monitoring elusive suspects.
From the RoundTable blog
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Vice President Dick Cheney's national security rationalizations and evasions have become shameless.
In a speech before the Heritage Foundation last week, he asserted that the secret domestic spying program authorized by President Bush could have prevented the 9/11 terror attacks.
Cheney and Bush continue to use the specter of 9/11 to justify any action they care to take -- from an unnecessary "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq to unconstitutional eavesdropping on American citizens.
But Cheney diminished his eroding credibility with the assertion that Bush's order allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without a warrant could have prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Cheney said that secretly monitoring the conversations of two of the 9/11 hijackers could have given the United States enough forewarning to stop the attacks.
First, the administration could have eavesdropped on conversations by the two suspects simply by obtaining a warrant from a special court staffed by judges with top-secret clearance.
The problem, as an article in The Washington Post pointed out, was that intelligence agencies "had compiled significant information about the duo but had bungled efforts to track them."
The government knew they were living in the United States but didn't know where -- making it pretty hard to eavesdrop on them, with or without a warrant.
In his speech, Cheney used another favorite tactic: suggesting that those who oppose illegal or unwise administration tactics don't comprehend the full nature of the threat the United States faces.
"As we get farther away from Sept. 11, 2001, some in Washington are yielding to the temptation to downplay the ongoing threat to our country, and to back away from the business at hand," Cheney said. "Either we are serious about fighting this war or we are not."
It is, of course, possible to both be serious about fighting terrorism and have reservations about signing over unlimited authority to an administration that has demonstrated no understanding of -- or apparent respect for -- constitutional restraints.
