[Mb-civic] The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight By Frank Rich The New York Times

[Michael Butler]

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    The Wiretappers That Couldn't Shoot Straight
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 08 January 2005

    Almost two weeks before The New York Times published its scoop about our
government's extralegal wiretapping, the cable network Showtime blew the
whole top-secret shebang. In its mini-series "Sleeper Cell," about Islamic
fundamentalist terrorists in Los Angeles, the cell's ringleader berates an
underling for chatting about an impending operation during a phone
conversation with an uncle in Egypt. "We can only pray that the N.S.A. is
not listening," the leader yells at the miscreant, who is then stoned for
his blabbing.

    If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the
National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what?
Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President
Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper
is shameful and puts "our citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage
playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies,
as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't
seen "Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has
surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal
restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and
torture.

    That the White House's over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a
smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick
Cheney's disingenuousness. In last week's oration at a right-wing think
tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented
the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10
the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, "The match is
about to begin," and, "Tomorrow is zero hour." You know the rest. Like all
the chatter our government picked up during the president's excellent
brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the
N.S.A. didn't rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.

    Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric
Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials had served
as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and not just to The
Times. Sooner or later we'll find out what the White House is really so
defensive about.

    Perhaps it's the obvious: the errant spying ensnared Americans talking
to Americans, not just Americans talking to jihadists in Afghanistan. In a
raw interview transcript posted on MSNBC's Web site last week - and quickly
seized on by John Aravosis of AmericaBlog - the NBC News foreign affairs
correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Mr. Risen if he knew whether the CNN
correspondent Christiane Amanpour might have been wiretapped. (Mr. Risen
said, "I hadn't heard that.") Surely a pro like Ms. Mitchell wasn't
speculating idly. NBC News, which did not broadcast this exchange and later
edited it out of the Web transcript, said Friday it was still pursuing the
story.

    If the Bush administration did indeed eavesdrop on American journalists
and political opponents (Ms. Amanpour's husband, Jamie Rubin, was a foreign
policy adviser to the Kerry campaign), it's déjà Watergate all over again.
But even now we can see that there's another, simpler - and distinctly
Bushian - motive at play here, hiding in plain sight.

    That motive is not, as many liberals would have it, a simple ideological
crusade to gut the Bill of Rights. Real conservatives, after all, are
opposed to Big Brother; even the staunch Bush ally Grover Norquist has
criticized the N.S.A.'s overreaching. The highest priority for the Karl
Rove-driven presidency is instead to preserve its own power at all costs.
With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it
always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth.
Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be
sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations
about its incompetence and failures.

    That's why Paul Wolfowitz, in a 2004 remark for which he later
apologized, dismissed reporting on the raging insurgency in Iraq as "rumors"
he attributed to a Baghdad press corps too "afraid to travel." That's also
why the White House tried in May to blame lethal anti-American riots in
Afghanistan and Pakistan on a single erroneous Newsweek item about Koran
desecration - as if 200-odd words in an American magazine could take the
fall for the indelible photos from Abu Ghraib.

    Such is the blame-shifting game Mr. Cheney was up to last week. By
dragging 9/11 into his defense of possibly unconstitutional bugging, he was
hoping to rewrite history to absolve the White House of its bungling. And no
wonder. He knows all too well that the timing of Mr. Bush's signing of the
secret executive order to initiate the desperate tactic of warrant-free
N.S.A. eavesdropping - early 2002, according to Mr. Risen's new book, "State
of War" - is nothing if not a giant arrow pointing to one of the
administration's most catastrophic failures. It was only weeks earlier, in
December 2001, that we had our best crack at nailing Osama bin Laden in Tora
Bora and blew it What went down that fateful December is recalled in
particularly gripping fashion in a just published book, "Jawbreaker," which,
like Mr. Risen's book, is rising on the best-seller list at an inopportune
moment for this White House. "Jawbreaker" is the self-told story of a
veteran clandestine officer, Gary Berntsen, who was the pivotal C.I.A.i ld
commander in the hunt for bin Laden. Mr. Berntsen is a fervent Bush
loyalist, but his honest account doesn't do the president any favors. "We
needed U.S. soldiers on the ground!" he writes, to "block a possible Al
Qaeda escape into Afghanistan!" But his request to Centcom for 800 Army
Rangers to do the job went unheeded. We don't know whether the Bush order
relaxing legal controls on the N.S.A. was in part a Hail Mary pass to help
compensate for that disaster. Either way, all the subsequent wiretaps in the
world have not brought bin Laden back dead or alive. Though the White House
says that its warrantless surveillance has saved lives by stopping other
terrorists since then, Mr. Bush has exaggerated victories against Al Qaeda
as often as he has the battle-readiness of Iraqi troops. After he claimed in
an October speech that America and its allies had foiled 10 Qaeda plots
since 9/11, USA Today reported that "at least" 6 of the 10 had been
preliminary ideas for attacks rather than actual planned attacks.

    The louder the reports of failures on this president's watch, the louder
he tries to drown them out by boasting that he has done everything "within
the law" to keep America safe and by implying that his critics are
unpatriotic, if not outright treasonous. Mr. Bush certainly has good reason
to pump up the volume now. In early December the former 9/11 commissioners
gave the federal government a report card riddled with D's and F's on
terrorism preparedness.

    The front line of defense against terrorism is supposed to be the
three-year-old, $40-billion-a-year Homeland Security Department, but news of
its ineptitude, cronyism and no-bid contracts has only grown since Katrina.
The Washington Post reported that one Transportation Security Administration
contract worth up to $463 million had gone to a brand-new company that
(coincidentally, we're told) contributed $122,000 to a powerful Republican
congressman, Harold Rogers of Kentucky. An independent audit by the
department's own inspector general, largely unnoticed during Christmas week,
found everything from FEMA to border control in some form of disarray.

    Yet even as this damning report was released, the president forced
cronies into top jobs in immigration enforcement and state and local
preparedness with recess appointments that bypassed Congressional approval.
Last week the department had the brilliance to leave Las Vegas off its 2006
list of 35 "high threat" urban areas - no doubt because Mohammed Atta was so
well behaved there when plotting the 9/11 attacks.

    The warrantless eavesdropping is more of the same incompetence. Like our
physical abuse of detainees and our denial of their access to due process,
this flouting of the law may yet do as much damage to fighting the war on
terrorism as it does to civil liberties. As the First Amendment lawyer
Martin Garbus wrote in The Huffington Post, every defense lawyer
representing a terrorism suspect charged in the four years since Mr. Bush's
N.S.A. decree can challenge the legality of the prosecution's evidence. "The
entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill," Mr. Garbus
explains, as the government refuses to give the courts information on
national security grounds, inviting the dismissal of entire cases, and
judges "up and down the appellate ladder" issue conflicting rulings.

    Far from "bringing justice to our enemies," as Mr. Bush is fond of
saying, he may once again be helping them escape the way he did at Tora
Bora. The president who once promised to bring a "culture of responsibility"
to Washington can and will blame The Times and the rest of the press for his
failures. But maybe, if only for variety's sake, the moment has come to find
a new scapegoat. I nominate Showtime.