Snooper-In-Chief Bush

Fellow Americans, Do You Feel Safer Yet? -- by Marianne Means

The astonishing revelation that anonymous Bush administration spooks are regularly snooping through the telephone records of tens of millions of ordinary Americans with no known criminal or terrorist links is, to put it mildly, quite scary.

Polls immediately after the USA Today scoop last week indicated that roughly half of voters polled were not disturbed, accepting the official excuse that such tactics were legal and necessary to root out terrorists. But the other half felt violated -- if we are not breaking any law, our activities are none of the government's business.

President Bush jabbers on a great deal about the importance of freedom around the world. But what is freedom without privacy?

Bush tried to assure the country after the news of the covert program broke that "we're not mining or trolling." He was not, however, under oath at the time. The program has had no public debate, no judicial review and barely perceptible congressional oversight.

So how can we be sure what he means by "mining" and "trolling?" His definition is probably somewhat different from that of the innocent people who might be subjected to "mining" or "trolling." It all depends, as President Clinton once suggested, on what the legal meaning of "is" is.

The full story is coming out very slowly, as these things do. The administration is unhelpful, as usual. Secrecy is more important to Bush officials than common sense, or, heaven forbid, public accountability.

The looming Senate confirmation hearings of Gen. Michael Hayden to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency provide an inescapable opportunity to learn more about the scope and motivation of this policy.

Unlike Bush, Hayden will be under oath. He has insisted the program is lawful, narrowly focused and that "the appropriate members" of Congress have been briefed on all National Security Agency activities. However, major Senate figures have rushed forward to say that they had no understanding of what was going on, if indeed they were told anything relevant at all.

Initially, the White House declared the NSA only eavesdropped on thousands of phone calls between individuals and contacts in foreign countries without first obtaining court warrants.

But the new revelations indicate a deliberate amassing of billions of strictly domestic calls. It exposed yet another misleading claim by an administration already discredited by previous false or dubious statements aimed at furthering its political goals from phantom weapons of mass destruction to imagined nuclear clouds.

The unspoken monsters in the room are the questions about just what the Bush administration thinks it is doing. Experts say such a massive collection of phone, and perhaps Internet, data is overwhelming and almost impossible for an agency to digest without advance targeting of identifiable individuals.

That, the administration says, is not being done. No personal information, only the phone numbers. But everyone knows that if you have the numbers the rest is easy to discover in today's information-overloaded world.

ABC News is reporting that as part of a widespread leak investigation, the FBI is tracing calls of its reporters and those of other news organizations.

Does this ring a bell? This is the most political White House since Richard Nixon, who used the FBI and the CIA to mask purely political operations. Nixon's freelance unit of "plumbers" was on a mission to plug leaks.

Fast forward to the present situation. Are we expected to believe that collecting this phone-record information has no political dimension whatsoever?

Given this history, is it such a stretch to think the White House might find this information useful in helping Republican candidates hold on to national power in 2008?

You really think it would never occur to Bush or Karl Rove that private knowledge of which Democratic supporters were contributing to which candidates, or which campaign advisers were leaking to which reporters, would be an advantage in a tough campaign? Or that a little listen-in to their conversations might produce a few votes? We don't know that this thought ever crossed their minds, but there's so much we don't know about what they are thinking. So we just have to trust the integrity of the administration's public statements. Oh, goodie. Do you feel safer now?

The president's popularity has been sinking for many reasons, but partially because his obsession with secrecy has created doubts and questions that fester, unanswered. He has manipulated our fears to advance his own political agenda, and we are tired of such crass partisanship.

Everyone wants to stop terrorists and support legitimate federal efforts to do so. But this dangerous abuse of our privacy is not the American way. That's why we have courts and legal checks and balances within the government. We are not Iraq, or Russia, or China. We are free. Please tell George Bush.

(Marianne Means is a Washington, D.C., columnist with Hearst Newspapers. Email to: means@hearstdc.com.)