Friday, January 06, 2006
The NSA thing: a counterfactual question
The redoubtable Andrew McCarthy asks a very interesting counterfactual question about the NSA's dropping of eaves:
What if President Bush had actually gone to the court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?
Imagine if, instead of relying on his own constitutional authority, he had done the thing his detractors now insist he should have done. That is, what if he had actually gone to the FISA court and requested authorization to eavesdrop on Americans suspected of helping al Qaeda wage its terrorist war against the United States?
Now, let's suppose the same brave, anonymous "whistleblowers" — in the same sort of flagrant violation of federal law and of the oath of confidentiality they gave to be trusted with access to the nation's most sensitive information — had instead leaked that program. Let's suppose they had gone to James Risen of the New York Times and told him not about warrantless wiretapping but about a surge in eavesdropping under judicial imprimatur.
Would that FISA compliance have made it all okay? Do you really think there would have been no scandal?
Or, in this climate that it has so tirelessly labored to create, do you think the Times would simply have weaved a different scandal?
McCarthy's accompanying counterfactual "Times" news story would make Harry Turtledove proud.
10 Comments:
By 
honestpartisan, at
Thu Jan 05, 11:37:00 PM:
Who knows, given that Osama Bin Laden was originally inspired to go on his jihad by the presence of non-Muslim American soldiers on the soil of the Arabian Peninsula, we might have been spared that whole Al Qaeda thing.
By 
, at
Fri Jan 06, 04:22:00 AM:
Robert Godwin of OneCosmos
gives one of the very best explantions for the LEFT's non-rational belief systems
that guide their behaviors.
A TRUE MUST READ:
End-Time Panic and The Liberal Ghost Dance
The great psychoanalytic anthropologist Weston LaBarre wrote extensively of "crisis cults," which involve non-rational belief systems that cultures develop when under severe stress and faced with breakdown. Similar to the neurotic individual, at the core of every crisis cult is a welcome but false "noble lie" which "is defended with the same religious fanaticism as neurosis." As he writes, "Crisis cults are notable for their foolishness and unreality, because they tend to deny and misapprehend the real situation surrounding the society. But they all promise relief from unendurable current catastrophe." In fact, as irrational as they may appear on the surface, the crisis cult is "the would-be therapy of the traumatized culture." It doesn't do anything in the real world, but it comforts those who cling to the beliefs of the crisis cult.
In his book The Ghost Dance, LaBarre describes dozens of crisis cults. In fact, the book takes its title from one of the most famous crisis cults, the Ghost Dance of the late 19th century, when American Indians were facing the complete dissolution of their way of life--loss of their hunting territories, near extinction of the once vast buffalo herds, a series of disastrous military defeats, multiple droughts, and new and fatal diseases. The Ghost Dance was a fantasied solution to all their problems, involving the widespread idea that "a new skin would slide over the old earth, covering up the whites and all their works, and bringing upon it new trees and plants, great buffalo herds, the ghosts of the dead, and the great departed warriors and chiefs." This utopia would come about if only each person in all the tribes danced the elaborate Ghost Dance.
READ IT ALL AT:
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/
By Cassandra, at
Fri Jan 06, 05:21:00 AM:
Who knows, given that Osama Bin Laden was originally inspired to go on his jihad by the presence of non-Muslim American soldiers on the soil of the Arabian Peninsula...
Gee whiz. And let's not forget why our troops were there, shall we?
Fellow name of Saddam Hussein?
Invaded Iran in the 1980s? Used Tabun (a WMD) on them.
Invaded Kuwait in the 1990s? Used WMDs on his own people then?
1993: sent 17 people across the border into Kuwait to assassinate a sitting US President?
All through 1990's and into 2000
s: fired on US and Brit planes in the no-fly zone (they were there to keep him from killing the Kurds)
Was known for giving money and shelter to several terrorist groups who had killed Americans (Abu Nidal, Abdul Rahman Yasin, anyone?) but the DNC ridicules the idea that there could possibly be any link between him and current terrorism just because we don't have signed contracts to waive around, like they keep these things on file.
But hey... he was "contained"...except for those little "lapses".
By TigerHawk, at
Fri Jan 06, 06:17:00 AM:
Honest Partisan,
I hear you, but I don't think it would have worked out that way (and, yes, I have read Ghost Wars). While we might have made the decision not to push Saddam out of Kuwait, there is no question that we would have had to contain him, and that would have meant a much heavier footprint in Saudi Arabia over the years. Sure, OBL did offer to the House of Saud for his fighters to defend Arabia, but neither Saudi Arabia nor the West (including the United States) would have preferred that our oil be defended by 5,000 mujahadeen. Indeed, OBL's whole theory at the time was cracked. So I actually think that the weight of Western soldiers on Saudi soil would have been even greater than it was for most of the '90s. OBL would have been just as p.o.'ed, I think.
By Cassandra, at
Fri Jan 06, 09:22:00 AM:
That also glosses over some of the very nasty things Saddam did while in Kuwait.
He didn't treat the Kuwaitis any better than he did his own people.
Or isn't that a consideration? Apparently not. There is, actually, another very interesting national security wrinkle coming out of Saddam's brief occupation of Kuwait that I haven't had time to pursue and write about because it will undoubtedly embarrass TH.
Maybe I will, eventually.
By honestpartisan, at
Fri Jan 06, 10:12:00 AM:
That's actually a good point -- even if we contained Saddam by stationing troops in Saudi Arabia ("Operation Desert Shield") instead of going to war to push him out of Kuwait ("Operation Desert Storm"), Osama would have been aggrieved by the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia anyway, and at the time most of the controversy I remember was whether to go from Shield to Storm rather than whether to station troops at all. Just figured that as long as we're entertaining counter-factuals, might as well get a little facetious.
By TigerHawk, at
Fri Jan 06, 10:16:00 AM:
Hmmm. Cass, you have me very intrigued. I mean, given how hard it is to embarrass me (at least in my blog persona! :)).
By Cassandra, at
Fri Jan 06, 12:37:00 PM:
Well dang.
And here I have been trying my best for over a month now. Are you telling me I'm an abject failure?
I shall have to take up drinking.
By Georg Felis, at
Fri Jan 06, 03:58:00 PM:
Certainly OBL offered the Saudis his (over)-loyal troops in order to remove the Infidel Americans from the sacred soil of Disarraybia. The Saudis already knew that unlike OBL, the American soldiers will leave if they are told to get out, while OBL and his minions just tunnel in like a virus and attempt to change the existing political scene to one more of their liking.
Hm. Actually the Americans do that too, but we seldom (in the modern era) politically resort to murder, kidnapping, extortion, beheading, etc… More like Wal-Mart, Pepsi, The Gap…
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