NSA Spy Program

I just wanted to weigh in on the NSA spy program that President Bush authorized. I’ll be honest, I don’t know what the heck to think about this, the reporting in the mainstream media has been just terrible.

It seems clear that Article II in the Constitution has empowered the President to take such action to keep the citizens of this country safe in the time of war in his role as Commander-in-Chief. In addition, Congress, by overwhelmingly approving Joint Resolution 23, states:

“That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines, planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Even though JR 23 never called for Congressional oversight (the Joint Resolution authorizing military action in Iraq did) the Bush Administration met with the Congressional Leadership more than a dozen times. That’s more than once every other month. It appears to me (based on just reading the documents – I am not a Constitution Scholar), that in the legal sense the White House didn’t do anything wrong, but ethics of authorization of eavesdropping on suspected terrorists without obtaining a warrant might be another issue. Here is where the mainstream media has let this country down. When the New York Times first reported the story on December 16, conveniently the day of Iraqi Elections, it’s clear to me that they were more interested in creating a new headline with the sole intention of embarrassing the President.

In the late 70’s Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) so that the FBI, NSA or CIA can request warrants to guard against foreign agents. The New York Times reported that in 2004 over 1700 warrants were approved. Though the Times did report that in some cases, warrants for emergency wiretaps can be obtained in a matter of hours, they never did offer any average for how long the FISA warrant process can take or would emergency warrants were able to be obtained for intercepting email and other wireless communications. Outside of the fact that the White House didn’t feel that they were legally obligated to obtain warrants for foreign communications, the timeliness of the process is the major reason why the President authorized such actions.

When the White House issues a statement such as “....We need agility and speed. We need to be able to move quickly to detect and prevent attacks….” As they do at every press briefing since December 20 (and there have been 13 since December 16), it doesn’t take a genius to ask the most obvious followup question…..”Well, exactly how long does it take to get the average warrant from FISA?” Duh! To this day I don’t have that answer and why I can’t judge the ethics of this issue.

Now this maybe cynical to say about the mainstream media, but since they are not pursuing the issue I can only assume that it's not as easy as one would think, otherwise they would be hammering Bush on that every day.