« NSA Wiretaps | Main | Oops »
December 18, 2005
National Security vs. The Rule of Law?
Over at the Corner, Mark Levin shows remarkable contempt for the rule of law in his defense of the president's NSA wiretapping program:
Russert continually referred to domestic spying on U.S. citizens. Neither he nor we know what's involved here. Some of those monitored may be citizens, they may not be. Some may also be receiving communications from al Qaeda operatives abroad, in which case warrants aren't required and their citizenship is irrelevant. Some may be covered by the warrant requirements of FISA, some of the operations may not be. My guess, and that's all it is, is that the NSA ran into difficulties tracking individuals who were able to elude surveillance (and the FISA warrant requirement, if applicable) by moving from place to place and switching between and among various communication technologies. The secret FISA court, and many of its procedures, isnââ¬â¢t exactly secret to anyone, including the enemy. If so, or if I'm close, the claims that the president authorized domestic eavesdropping on U.S. citizens is the most hysterical and, frankly, reckless face to put on this. Moreover, the likelihood that top lawyers at the Justice Department (including career attorneys) and other agencies would have conspired to break the law, and kept it secret for years, for the purpose of intercepting communications among law-abiding U.S. citizens is truly far-fetched.I said yesterday that it would probably serve the president's political interests if he could release his executive order; however, doing so might endanger certain national-security operations. Russert and Levin demanded repeatedly that Condi Rice spell out the legal basis for the president's authority. I expect, sadly, that national security will give way, once again, to public disclosure, as the only way to get past this latest attempt at scandal.
It's frightening that a prominent pundit would argue that because we don't know what a program entails, we should trust the president and shut up about it. That is precisely the opposite of the principle built up over centuries of Anglo-Saxon law, that all exercises of executive power must be subject to outside scrutiny. The burden of proof is always on the administration to demonstrate that its actions were lawful. It's absurd to place the burden of proof on the administration's critics, who, obviously, don't have access to enough information to evaluate whether the program is legitimate or not.
It might be that, due to national security concerns, the details of this program cannot be made public. But that is precisely why Congress set up the FISA courts. And it's precisely because we'll never know all the details of these programs that we need to insist that the programs always (at a minimum) be scrutinized by FISA courts.
The idea that such disclosure would harm national security is nonsense. No one is demanding that the NSA publish a list of the people it is surveilling on its website. Rather, critics are demanding enough information to verify that the law has not been broken. One way this requirement could be satisfied would be to promise to begin submitting all such programs to FISA procedures. Another way would be to publish a very general breakdown of the targets--how many wiretaps total, how many are domestic, how many are U.S. citizens, how many are communicating with known Al Qaeda operatives, etc. It's hard to see how revealing that, say, 20 individuals per month are under surveillance would compromise national security.
It's also at least possible (although it seems extremely unlikely) that FISA procedures are not secure enough to guard the details of this operation. But if so, the White House needs to take that up with Congress, and get Congress to explicitly reform the system to make it more secure. The president doesn't get to unilaterally decide that national security requires him to start ignoring the law.
Posted by Tim Lee at December 18, 2005 3:40 PM
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