December 21, 2005
Why
All the Secrecy?
By Ruben
Navarrette Jr.
SAN DIEGO
-- The people invading your privacy are from the government, and
they're here to help you.
They just
don't want you to know they're helping you. No one could ever
accuse the Bush administration of not knowing how to keep a secret.
Whether it is trying to keep under wraps the proceedings of deportation
hearings, or hiding the existence of CIA-run secret prisons on
foreign soil, keeping a lid on things is what this bunch does
best.
And don't
fall for the line about how this is necessary with the country
at war. Loose lips sink ships, and all that. Even before the war
on terror, the administration withheld the names of energy industry
executives who met with Vice President Cheney to create national
energy policy.
Why all
the secrecy? Maybe because Team Bush sees the nosy busy bodies
in the Fourth Estate as the enemy. Here's the latest thing the
in-the-dark American taxpayer isn't supposed to know the first
thing about: that President Bush -- a few months after the attacks
of Sept. 11, 2001 -- issued an executive order authorizing the
National Security Agency to spy on Americans and other individuals
inside the United States without having to convince a judge that
there is probable cause to issue a warrant authorizing the surveillance,
as required by law.
Not that
this process is much of an encumbrance. Under the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, the special court that hears such petitions
has, since 1978, rejected only five of 18,748 requests for wiretaps
and search warrants. The court even grants warrants retroactively.
The Bush
policy has allowed the NSA -- which is so secretive that, in government
circles, its nickname is No Such Agency -- to keep tabs on hundreds
of phone calls made and e-mails sent by individuals within the
United States to people in other countries.
After The
New York Times disclosed the program, Bush defended the practice.
He claimed he had the approval of lawyers. Of course, these were
his lawyers: White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Attorney
General John Ashcroft.
Can't you
just hear them say: ``It's a slam dunk, Mr. President.''
Where have
we heard that before? How did President Bush wind up with bad
intelligence on whether Saddam Hussein had WMDs? Some people say
it is because officials such as CIA Director George Tenet knew
that Bush wanted to believe there were weapons and were none too
eager to set him straight. What assurances do we have that Gonzales
and Ashcroft weren't just as afraid to burst Bush's bubble on
the legal question of whether he could circumvent the FISA law
and still claim to be adhering to it?
Administration
officials insist that this kind of surveillance is necessary to
track down terrorists and their U.S.-based co-conspirators. They
insist that the only correspondence affected by the change in
policy was that in which one of the parties was outside the country.
In cases where both parties were located in the United States,
the administration says it went through normal channels.
That worries
me. It sounds like the administration is assuming that Americans
care less about protecting the rights of foreigners than those
of the native-born. It's done this before; many of the post 9/11
``reforms'' adopted by the administration targeted the foreign-born.
Such as tracking the activities of foreign students at U.S. universities
or giving the Justice Department the power to revoke someone's
legal residency and deport him.
It's not
that the Bush White House is xenophobic (that's a different branch
of the Republican family tree). It's just that, in times of crisis,
governments tend to go after the foreign-born first. Whether you're
talking about the U.S. response to 9/11 or the British response
to the London subway bombings or the French response to the riots
outside Paris, cracking down on foreigners is like picking low-hanging
fruit.
And why
is that? Sorry. That's classified.
None of
this seemed to bother Bush as he fielded questions Monday at his
news conference. The president again defended the spy program.
He also talked about Iraq and how, with Saddam gone, Iraqis enjoy
a new set of constitutional protections and that the leaders of
the country ``derive their powers from the consent of the governed.''
You don't
say? Lucky Iraqis.
©
2005, The San Diego Union-Tribune
